William Tyler: Time Indefinite Album Review

American instrumental guitarists often conjure sprawling frontiers, but those visions can confine them. William Tyler, among the tradition’s preeminent 21st century practitioners, has a diverse catalog—he’s released a rolicking, jammy rock LP; backed his trusted Martin acoustic with delicate brass; and let out billows of vaporous feedback on his solo recordings. Yet his relentlessly tuneful approach, which seeks serene resolution, and his geographical inspirations—whether muggy Tennessee or the sun-dried Southwest—mean his music is always a hair’s breadth from sentimentalizing American dreams that he wants to interrogate. With the nation in free fall and everyone’s horizons narrowing, Tyler has tempered his optimism: The 45-year-old’s latest, the haunting Time Indefinite, includes a dimmed palette and a downcast scope. The shift makes for his most ambitious full-length yet.

Time Indefinite is still steeped in the American mythos, but this time the focus is on small remnants of life, not sweeping evocations of wide expanses. Tyler incorporates found sound, notably from a reel-to-reel he discovered while combing through his late grandfather’s belongings in Jackson, Mississippi. The machine’s damaged whirring and Tyler’s waltzing, Victrola-ready melodies recall British ambient icon the Caretaker, known for digging up pre-World War II big-band recordings and layering them into faded, postmodern palimpsests. But Time Indefinite reaches for an atmosphere that’s a bit closer to home. It often feels like a television tuned to a religious station on Christmas, glowing and murmuring with speech and song after everyone has drifted off to sleep.

The LP’s 48 minutes are filled with tiny snatches of AM-style theme music, inaudible intonations, God-fearing hymns, and mechanical racket, and swathed in ghostly, deteriorating production that suggests these warped snippets have lasted into a post-cataclysmic future. Voices echo on several inclusions, the garbled speech of the long dead. The wind whistles on “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” as though through a barren, apocalyptic landscape. Tyler plays archaeologist of the modern era, imagining how elements of today’s society could one day become relics.

Surprisingly, his preoccupation with impermanence and mortality isn’t exactly somber—often, it spotlights a hard-won sense of hope. Tyler uses major-key guitar melodies judiciously, instead of sprinkling them throughout, which makes their shapes more memorable: After the blown-out tape distortion of opener “Cabin Six,” his six-string enters at the start of “Concern” like morning sun through a window. Acoustic strumming blends with gaping maws of synthesizer on “Anima Hotel”; the central guitar figure on “Howling at the Second Moon” grows into an unexpected string accompaniment. Tyler’s discography has been so consonant, and Time Indefinite could only seem grating in comparison. In fact, it’s a narrative, transformative work whose deserts of noise set its staggering peaks in relief.