After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, William Tyler emerged

with a string of inquisitive albums that paired his country rearing and

classical enthusiasm with his ardor for experimentation and field

recordings. His productive enclave of instrumental music has not only

ushered in new sounds, but also critical new voices. No other solo

American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite

like him. And on the brilliant, bracing Time Indefinite, Tyler's first solo

album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped

create. The guitar is the starting point for an album that will make you

reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities of an entire field. A

vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, it

is not just a great guitar record. It is a stunning record by a great

guitarist, a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time.

In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrests still

unimagined, Tyler left LA for Nashville, where he'd lived most of his life.

Most of his gear and all of his records stayed, awaiting a presumed

rapid return. It, of course, wasn't. So as Tyler dealt with the depression,

nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began

recording ideas with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to

the distortion inherent in those devices. Tyler was talking with Kieran

Hebden about making a record together, and some of these bits felt like

test cases. As that collaboration crept in other directions Tyler magpied

other sounds. He asked longtime friend, producer Jake Davis, to help

stitch them together, opting to embrace the hiss and wobble and to

unintentionally make a record that reflected those times and

these-uneasy, damaged, honest.

A seesaw of struggle and survival defines these songs, a map of

anguish and belief and the trails that link them. "This is a mental illness

record," Tyler will tell you without shame, as open in life and speech as

he is on tape. "It's music about losing your mind but not wanting to,

about trying to come back." He doesn't need to tell you that; you can

feel it, possibly recognize it from your own experience.

Tyler's albums have been nests of non-musical influences, as he has

pivoted between spirituality and philosophy and summoned the

landscapes of the greater American imagination. Time Indefinite is no

different, especially in the way it conjures the deeply personal films of

Ross McElwee. In the mid-'80s, he began to make a movie about

Sherman's march through the South, but it spiraled into a tangled

history about family, loss, and what we do when our best instincts

surrender to the worst things we can imagine. The record is a nod to this

idea, of time's relentless push and our place in, beneath, and beside it. It

is no great revelation that the lives we lead shape the work we make,

whether or not we intend that to be the case. In these songs, you can

hear Tyler wrestle with incoming demons out loud-addiction, middle

age, loneliness, neurosis. All of our struggles are different, but we are

united in having them. This is the soundtrack that Tyler's create.