#william tyler

[doomandgloomfromthetomb]

Silver Jews - The Bluebird, Bloomington, Indiana, April 15, 2006

Build a stage for autumn's bitch! Thanks to Mike for giving me the heads up on a freshly uploaded pro-shot video of the Silver Jews' entire set at Bloomington, IN's Bluebird during the band's inaugural tour. It is a thing of beauty, with Berman nervously and beautifully serenading a crowd that apparently includes many of his in-laws. The band, featuring William Tyler and Cassie Berman (both pictured above), plus Peyton Pinkerton and Tony Crow, sounds absolutely great, too.

Of course, whenever I get back into getting back into Berman, it's always amazing how many incredible lines jump out at you. While watching this performance, a haunting verse from "Pet Politics" from The Natural Bridge really hit hard:

Adam was not the first man 'though the Bible tells us so There was one created before him, whose name we do not know He also lived in the garden But he had no mouth or eyes One day Adam came to kill him And he died beneath these skies

I'm not sure I can put it into words, but that tells me something about the current moment right now, something about how we deny and destroy and repress what we can't understand. Maybe that's just the story of mankind, I don't know.

"I'm renewing my vow to bear down on the truth even if there is none for the hundredth time," Berman wrote back in the 1990s. And even if he's not around to bear down on the truth today, his songs are still doing it for him.

[iamthecrime]

[iloveshortsongs]

First Cow in the Territory - William Tyler (2019)

[dustedmagazine]

William Tyler — Time Indefinite (Psychic Hotline)

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.

Jim Marks

[phonographica]

William Tyler - Goes West (2019)

[musicmags]

[nonesuchrecords]

Composer/guitarist Yasmin Williams's Nonesuch debut album, Acadia, is due October 4. You can hear the tracks "Virga" and "Dawning" and pre-order the album here. Acadia, her most sonically expansive album to date, is nine original, mostly instrumental tracks written and produced by Williams, with her on various guitars, banjo, calabash drum, tap shoes, and kora. She is joined by an eclectic cast of collaborators—including Immanuel Wilkins on saxophone, Dom Flemons on rhythm bones, Aoife O’Donovan on vocals, William Tyler on guitar—creating a folk music that reflects the wide range of musical influences that have inspired her throughout her life.

Williams tours North America with Brittany Howard and Michael Kiwanuka this fall and plays London's Pitchfork Music Festival. 

[iamlisteningto]

Kieran Hebden & William Tyler’s “Darkness, Darkness” / “No Services”