William Tyler’s Excellent New LP Isn’t What You Might Expect » PopMatters
William Tyler’s Time Indefinite is an experimental ambient record from a guy who isn’t known for making experimental ambient albums.
Time Indefinite William Tyler Psychic Hotline 25 April 2025
Guitarist William Tyler’s albums are typically made for sipping a backyard beer or for soberly looking out the window as your van drives down a faceless, nameless highway. Take “Highway Anxiety” on his album Modern Country: A reverb-tinted guitar spends about seven minutes rolling out a slow-developing pick pattern that eventually slides into a smooth synth fade. It sounds like the title. Take any song from the excellent album Impossible Truth: Sinews of guitar breezes in and out of the mix as it builds into a cyclone of melody with a fringe of chaos.
It’s country instrumentation with a jazz mindset. It’s a song cycle that could soundtrack the motorcycle ride and the long slide into the ditch. In short, William Tyler makes country-tinged records for thinking fellers. Tyler’s new album Time Indefinite is not at all what we have come to expect. It’s an experimental ambient record from a guy who isn’t known for making experimental ambient records.
“This is a mental illness record,” Tyler states in the press release. “It’s music about losing your mind but not wanting to, about trying to come back.” I think it’s a safe bet to say that most of us struggled with mental stability during the unprecedented year of 2020. Unknown futures, the confusing present, unexpected panic attacks. Tyler was in the same boat as all of us, and his journey to Time Indefinite started with that instability in the foreground.
The opening track, “Cabin Six”, is an eight-minute-long journey into just about every emotion but the good ones. The blast of what sounds like a cranked-up industrial fan recorded on high gain starts the record, then a high-pitched squeal announces itself and is quickly followed by what sounds like a William Basinski Disintegration Tapes track. The guitar presents itself finally, but in a stripped-down, downcast, and minimal way.
Eventually, even this is overtaken by a yearning, dark drone that slowly morphs out of time and stutters to an abrupt, quiet end. It’s the feeling of a mental journey we all try our best to avoid, but a journey many of us know. Most of the record revolves around this feeling. Guitar-led songs like “Concern”, and “Anima Hotel” show a little brightness in the room’s corners, but it never lasts long. There is always noise creeping around the corner in this album, as in real life.
Yet, Time Indefinite is about coming to peace with the past. Tyler’s journey to the record coincided with sorting through his late grandfather’s belongings. In this process, he found a tape machine. He used it to create some of the loops found on this record, and the feeling created in these loops is overwhelmingly one of longing for something that is never coming back.
Take “Star of Hope” for example, an absolutely mangled raw rework of “Auld Lang Syne”, played at a creeping pace. What’s that song about, again? It’s about reminiscing on old friends and memories. What brings you back from the abyss? Friends and good memories, right? Even if the memory is a bit mangled. We won’t be sipping backyard beers to this album, but we might need this journey even more.