Love Quote by Trevor Dunn

Dunn is doing that very musician thing: naming the sacred texts, then immediately refusing to let them become a cage. By dropping Breton titles (the Surrealist Manifestos, Communicating Vessels, Mad Love) alongside “some of his poetry,” he signals bona fides and lineage without performing bookishness for its own sake. It’s a quick inventory of influence, then a pivot to something more lived-in: “a much broader assimilation.”

The intent is partly defensive, in a smart way. “Bringing a literary element into the music” is the kind of phrase that can make experimental musicians sound like they’re stapling theory to a riff. Dunn swats that away. He’s not importing literature as decoration or concept-album garnish; he’s absorbing a method. Breton isn’t a set of references to sprinkle into liner notes, but an attitude toward logic, desire, and disruption that can reshape how a piece is structured, how tension is released, how a band tolerates ambiguity.

The subtext: influence isn’t a direct sample, it’s metabolism. Dunn’s “I guess” reads like an anti-authoritarian shrug, consistent with a scene that distrusts credentialing while still craving roots. Contextually, it fits a late-20th/early-21st-century avant ecosystem where jazz, metal, and contemporary composition cross-pollinate, and “literary” often means either pretension or profundity depending on delivery. Dunn chooses a third lane: not quotation, but contamination. That’s why the line works: it frames art-making as porous, not curated, and it quietly argues that the most serious influences are the ones you stop being able to point at.