Review: William Tyler Time Indefinite
8.0
The Nashville guitarist’s latest album is an act of reckoning: Collaging together found sounds and field recordings with his own fingerpicking, it feels like an elegy for a nation in free fall.
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.
Past releases such as 2021’s Lost Futures and 2019’s Goes West dealt in existential despair and winking critiques of manifest destiny—qualities that Tyler balanced with an obvious love for the cultural history of his country. Time Indefinite replaces this ambivalence with an unforeseen response: acceptance. In conversation with The Guardian last month, Tyler described coming to terms with various forms of grief—for people he lost, and also for what he terms “macro-tragic” universal changes. The album’s title, a reference to Ross McElwee’s probing and profound 1993 documentary of the same name, points toward a fear of death, exploded into the grander question of how much time humanity has left. Time Indefinite is the product of adjusting to a period marked by apparent doom, and realizing that potential still exists in the years ahead.
The record’s open-endedness comes through in the three-dimensionality of the sound, its simultaneous forward locomotion and its stacks of speech, melody, and feedback. Tyler and producer Jake Davis fit chintzy orchestra swells, programmed percussion, and a fuzzy choral rendition of the Christian traditional “My Jesus, as Thou Wilt” under the same roof. Time Indefinite benefits from its disjunction. Various parts feel as though they have been recorded and mastered with starkly different settings. Smartphone demos bump up against a jumble of analog technologies; inputs buzz in and out from what seem like sundry consumer electronics. The dynamic range feels enormous—sounds dissipate in the background while others, notably Tyler’s guitar, take over, as though he’s dueting with his radio at home. The wispy atmosphere of “The Hardest Land to Harvest” and the midpoint of closer “Held,” with its gentle electric guitar, set up a gorgeous, fingerpicked finale. After nine tracks of sound collage, Time Indefinite’s most striking moment comes from a gesture of comfort, even resourcefulness: The low-tech act of a person playing a vulnerable acoustic.
Tyler continues to commune with America’s soul on Time Indefinite, not by examining the nation’s tendency toward territorial expansion, but by reflecting how real lives, including his own, flare up and fizzle out within the empire. The disc’s most transportive song, “Electric Lake,” thrums with speech, treated with what sounds like heavy delay, its idiosyncrasy and repetition suggesting something personal, rather than a skeptical twist on imperial folklore. This record isn’t about the frontier, but rather the lack of one. Time Indefinite asks us to reconsider the world as it exists, which inevitably means cultivating the land inside of ourselves.