Today our exciting journey kicks into high gear, as the staff votes are tallied and we present the first of seven genre lists, leading up to this year’s overall top twenty! The ambient category is our most competitive, as we receive an average of five ambient albums every day, which is only the tip of the ambient iceberg! To make this year-end chart, one really has to stand out, which seems…
Over more than 15 years of solo releases, William Tyler has never stood still, and the 30 seconds of harsh noise followed by woozy, indistinct tones that introduce the opening track, “Cabin,” mark the entry into a new world of sound on Time Indefinite. This record is a triumph, both reflecting and offering a respite from these weird and often harsh times.
According to the liner notes, part of the inspiration for this album was the rediscovery of tapes from an old machine owned by Tyler’s grandfather, from which loops were extracted that provide textures and backing tracks. When plucked acoustic guitar surfaces on tracks such as “Concern,” “Howling at the Second Moon,” and “Anima Hotel,” the impression is at first a return to more traditional song structures, but the loops gradually recenter the pieces, which resolve into eerie, decaying echo, drones, and/or choruses of unintelligible voices.
The effect is somewhat similar to that achieved on Daniel Bachman’s recent releases in terms of blending acoustic and treated sounds and the pervasive sense of melancholy and to Scott Tuma’s sense of childlike wonder and near abandonment of rhythm. Like their compositions, Tyler’s here are carefully structured, with a languid sense of forward movement. The contrast of what sounds like a toy xylophone with scraping percussive noises propels “A Dream, A Flood” toward its momentarily rough conclusion while “Electric Lake,” appropriately, shimmers and pulses. The penultimate track, “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” seems to waft through car windows from miles away, and “Held” brings things to a serene conclusion, with an especially lovely moment when crystalline acoustic guitar returns.
The relative brevity of the tracks, which average around six minutes, keeps things focused, and the whole album seems to slip by much more quickly than the 50-minute running time. Responses to Tyler’s previous release, Stratosphere (Merge, 2023), were mixed (more accurately, pretty much everyone liked it but me), but Time Indefinite is so deeply engaging and flat-out beautiful that pretty much anyone with even a mildly adventurous taste in music will be playing it all summer.
So I listened to the new record Time Indefinite by William Tyler. Tyler is a guitarist-for-hire who's worked with Bill Callahan, Bonnie Prince Billy, Silver Jews, and the like and I knew he put out solo albums here and there but I really had a preconception about what that would be like. I imagined a beautifully crafted record with mellow vibes and flawless playing and frankly I pass on any more of that coming into the world.
So this experience did prompt me to rewind the catalog and check out the previous records, which did bring me to the mellow vibes and flawless playing and earthtone goodness I'd expected all along, and I could, as I said, take or leave that.
But what brought that on was the absolutely astounding ride that Time Indefinite is. A sonic journey that undoes the silly cliches of white-guy psychedelia used above. Of course there's still Tyler's gorgeous guitar playing, but it only shows up when it has to in the service of something so much more sonic, weirdly beautiful, spacious without being "space music" or just spacey, quite grounded actually, and healing.
An 1100-word description on Bandcamp doesn’t leave much to add about this sublime album, so we will try to say different things in more succinct fashion. Time Indefinite may be a guitar album, but it’s not just a guitar album; the sonic additions and idiosyncrasies make it something more. This is apparent from the very first note, a shuffling static drone that catches the listener off guard and…
