Guitarist William Tyler, who played in Lambchop for 12 years and Silver Jews for eight, has been picking professionally since he was 19, but his new studio album, Time Indefinite, cushions his longtime instrument with disorienting ambience and crunchy, expired cassette tones. While milling around his late grandfather’s office in Jackson, Mississippi, Tyler found an old tape deck and began building loops with it. Time Indefinite falls somewhere between John Fahey and Terry Riley, with the instrumental code-breaks of a figure like Jim O’Rourke and the purposeless play of John Cage sprinkled in the guitar strata. The music is as sylvan as it is ominous, as Tyler unearths manipulated arrangements that flutter between bright and terrifying. A hiss of cosmos becomes his toolkit, as he replicates the non-linear path of healing in guitar volleys, piecemeal synth patches, and strangled found-sounds.
“Cabin Six,” which sprawls through twinkles of synth, is generally haunting, full of pastiche segues and vestiges of slinky, Proustian moans. It’s hauntological but not totally cut-and-paste. Think: the Caretaker but without the Big Band splashes. “Cabin Six” works like a sample but without a soup of noise cluttering the soundscape. Hearing the faint bursts of piano, Tyler’s modus comes across in service of Derrida’s philosophy on deconstruction—the language of Time Indefinite is always challenging a musical binary. The guitar that repeats on “Howling at the Second Moon” squawks consistently while gusts of wind accompany the chords like an ambient or string arrangement. But the track stretches its legs against a backline electronic melody, as if the two separate songs are co-existing on the same axis. “Anima Hotel” sounds similarly incongruous at the beginning, until Tyler’s strumming merges with the rest of the song’s climate. At once, the ethereal din begins to shudder. All that’s left is a near-cathartic buzz of biting drone.
But the washes of electronica help pull back the curtain on William Tyler’s movements. “Held” begins in an escalation of synth that feels bombastic enough to suspend the entire song, only to recoil into a guitar score charting these loping, plucks burnished like hairpins hitting bare concrete. And the crackling, alien scrapes of “A Dream, A Flood” dispatch vignettes of robotic wattage in an uncharacteristically chaotic frontier. It’s disarming, as if Tyler has set the POV to the mechanical, disembodied guts of a grinding engine. But his penchant for Americana is not abandoned fully on Time Indefinite. “Concern” is impossibly pretty like a wind chime, with a pastoral of Tyler’s six-string plugged into a gleam of cybernated swirls. A regalia of choral aria, “Concern” is an apparition. And “Electric Lake,” littered with high-frequency chatter, is white noise that never quite crashes out.
“Star of Hope” is Time Indefinite’s greatest transmission—a 5-minute stretch of nirvana born out of Tyler’s “macro-tragic” montages of grief. Milky samples of choir-singing are chopped up beneath his strumming, emulating what it must sound like when the noise of the living is cut silent by the closing of a casket lid. Gone are the space-rock fusions of Secret Stratosphere and the fatalistic, micro-orchestras of Impossible Truth. Time Indefinite aches with uncertainty and a flavor unbound to just one page of the American folk songbook. Hymns fall apart note by note; instrumental breaks feel deliberately sun-faded; heirlooms sound inaudible. William Tyler has never sounded so boldly adrift.
Matt Mitchell is Paste’s music editor, reporting from their home in Northeast Ohio.
