William Tyler

Today, the Nashville-based guitarist/composer William Tyler announces Time Indefinite, his new album out April 25th via Psychic Hotline, and releases the first three pieces of music on the album, a suite of sorts: “Cabin Six,” “Concern,” and “Star of Hope.” All three pieces are accompanied by short films compiled entirely from Tyler’s old family home movies. On the brilliant, bracing, and inexorably beautiful Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in six years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar serves as a starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities and reach of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, Time Indefinite is not a great guitar record. It is a stunning record—a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time, really—by a great guitarist.

From the start, Tyler’s music has pulled from the past, drawing old notions and conventions into the revealing light of now. In November 2020, on a family trip to Jackson, MS to clean out his late grandfather’s office, Tyler spotted an old tape machine, still sealed among the flotsam. He took it back to Nashville, to longtime friend and producer Jake Davis, and they began using it to create tape loops that conjured the vertiginous feeling of that unknown moment.

Time Indefinite begins with one of three lead singles, “Cabin Six,”  a sampled shard from that antique, as harsh as Merzbow processing the sound of a washing machine. It is a lurid, worrying signal flare: I am here, and things are hard, but I am trying. The piece unfurls like a haunted house still inhabited by real, living people, trying to make do when the world around them seems to be saying don’t. Not 10 minutes later, at the start of “Concern,” Tyler slips into a melody as gorgeous as anything he’s ever found, strings and steel rising like the sun beneath his simple folk waltz. It is a hand on a shoulder, a radiant bit of music that answers: I am here, and things are hard, but we are trying. The third single released today, “Star of Hope,” was born out of an acapella hymn Tyler heard on AM radio: “I’m always fascinated by the often random origin  stories of ‘sacred melodies’- ie the melody of the star spangled banner being an old English drinking song,” he says.

In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrest still unimagined, Tyler left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life after his parents left Mississippi. Most of his gear (and, for what it’s worth, all of his records) stayed in California, awaiting what he presumed would be a rather rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as Tyler dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording little ideas and themes with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices. 

Tyler was in early talks to make a record with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and some of these bits felt like test cases for what they might do together. As that collaboration crept in other directions into what would become the staggering, lauded Darkness, Darkness / No Services,  Tyler magpied other sounds. He soon asked Davis to help stitch them together and perhaps clean up those imperfections. ) Davis and Tyler opted to go the other way: embrace the hiss and wobble and, in the end, unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest. 

Too, Tyler’s albums have been nests of non-musical references and influences, as he has pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the landscapes and legends of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite conjures the deeply personal films of Ross McElwee, whose film of the same name provided inspiration. In the mid-’80s, McElwee began to make a movie about Sherman’s march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts surrender to the worst things we can imagine. It is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make, whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can hear Tyler, like McElwee, wrestle with incoming demons out loud—addiction, middle age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are united at least in having them. Time Indefinite is the soundtrack that Tyler creates.