I’ve abandoned a number of written pieces recently, which is really unlike me but seems to be part of a growing trend of uncertainty I feel over continuing to put my thoughts on music to words. The other day I was in the shower and I got to thinking about it in the context of seasons of life, how things that once occupy us slowly dissolve away to be replaced by the next epoch. Activities and desires that were once dominant and central in the swirling mass of life and creativity turned imperceptibly to the outer spiral arms with gentle spinning force.

Ambient and Drone just seem to be increasingly diminishing part of my life as the years go by it’s sad to say, and it’s not that I don’t enjoy listening to it anymore only that, as I’ve grown, the need for me from an emotional development and regulation perspective has reduced. Necessity for its calm, and projections of my emotive struggles on to it, are slowly moving on, and all of this feels so much more difficult than it used to.

The other night I couldn’t sleep, and went looking back through the collection for something to listen to that might help, and scrolled past Music For Medication. Kyle’s stuff has always been good bedtime listening, and it’d been a while since I’d heard it, so I put it on. And something about these rarified guitar drones took me back in time, back to moments where this seemed to matter, spoke something to me.

If you’ve ever heard Kyle’s music before then there’s nothing here that you haven’t realistically heard before, though this I believe is his first true album and has a little less polish to it than his later works would reach, and perhaps a bit more…robustness to the sound? It doesn’t feel afraid to push its textures on the likes of elongate oscillating “Bonavista”, growing into increasingly shimmery evocations. Nor does its earlier counterpart “Brad Sikora”, where the idiosyncratic drones are pushed further back for the more impassioned piano to dominate the foreground clearly.

“Southeast Calgary” hums in these light, floaty sustains that seem to stretch out endlessly, deeper layers slowly rotating to the top to fill its brightness with the accompanying warmth. These are heights that more genteel opener “For Summer Lakes” never quite manages to breach, though with less density than later “Lawnmowing” achieves in its darker, sawtooth pulsations droning irrepressibly over the neighbourhood. All of its strength ultimately dissolves away come closer “I Think (You’re Great)”, the record collapsing into quiet retreat on the back of a few contented chords that again mirror the impassioned opener, its energies again crystallised down into something more managed.

Maybe this creative carousel is cyclical and the need will rise again unbidden, or perhaps all of this was just a moment in time now approaching its tail end. Or even that this is all melodrama and hyperbole, who knows the vagaries of expression. But contained within Kyle’s Music for Medication is a slice of the interior of that moment remembered and I can feel part of it again.