Album Review: Devin Friesen, Kyle Bobby Dunn, and James Goddard - A Chance Happening

Well this is a delightful surprise.

After the landmark triple album (and one of my favorites from 2014) Kyle Bobby Dunn and The Infinite Sadness, I did not know when I would be hearing any more music from the gawd himself.

The press release for A Chance Happening explains how this effort came to be a little better than I could, so I’ll just copy and paste that here:

Last year, James Goddard booked a show for Devin Frisen at Montreal's Brasserie Beaubien. The show was incredibly under-attended — in fact, Kyle Bobby Dunn was the only non-performer to show up. Somewhat ironically, he ended up performing anyway as the trio ended up jamming.

"There was a piano in the bar," Friesen recalls. "Right next to the stage, even. Kind of a honky-tonk thing? I'd asked Kyle if he'd like to play it during my set, and he sat down for the last couple of pieces. Afterwards, the three of us decided to play together."

Friesen recorded the set on a TCM150 portable tape recorder, then assembled them into the three ambient pieces found on the new tape A Chance Happening. The result is a layered improv piece with an assortment of kitchen sounds and inspired drone arrangements. 

Released via Friesen’s Shaking Box label, A Chance Happening is billed as three pieces, though it’s really two—“Steamroller Deux” and “Top Ten,” with a short interlude between the two. It’s a jarring, mysterious, honest, haunting, beautiful, and comforting. It’s a reminder of what I love and why I continue to listen to experimental and ambient music.

The fascinating thing about A Chance Happening is how it is compositions were created by manipulating the original recordings after the fact—Friesen went through the trouble of mixing and mastering what he recorded during the trio’s improvisational “jam session,” and then proceeded to build new sounds of out of those recordings by playing the tapes back at various speeds, creating an all together otherworldly (and once in a life time) sound.

“Steamroller Deux” begins with chatter about making employees somewhere do the “YMCA” as a teambuilding exercise, with James Taylor singing, “Steamroller” before the tape cuts out, and starts over with James Goddard on saxophone, Friesen on guitar, and eventually, you can hear Dunn on piano. The recording quality is obviously, and intentionally, poor, giving it a faded, distant, and confused sound. The three instruments muddle together very quickly even before the true manipulation of the tape has started, and about four minutes in, everything begins to slow down to a nightmarish, murky clang, before drifting into a slow motion codeine drip.

In contrast, “Top Ten” is a little less intimidating. The out of tune piano, saxophone, and guitar drones come together within the first two minutes, building an introspective, somber atmosphere—not unlike Dunn’s own ambient compositions, or the evocative and palpable sadness of the work of the Tape Loop Orchestra.

The sounds are then stretched and pulled through time, dragging out each note to create long, cascading waves of plaintive sounds, before gradually, and temporarily, working its way into a more ominous territory.

A Chance Happening in the end, serves two purposes—the first being an innovative way to remember an impromptu evening of making music for the three artists involved; the second, and more important (since it involves the listener) is to not so much put us in the room with them, as live albums often try to do; but in this case, it works to create a mental image, but through all of the manipulations and effects, it becomes unclear—like a dream we are on the cusp of remembering, or a fragment of a memory from our childhood.

A Chance Happening is out now as a digital download with a limited edition cassette release coming soon from Shaking Box.