On his new record, Time Indefinite, Nashville guitarist William Tyler digs deep and provides listeners with a haunted scrapbook of broken Americana. His six-string is still the anchor, but now it floats in a murky sea of damaged electronics, reel-to-reel ghosts, and dark ambiance.
Tyler, long a disciple of cosmic folk and Appalachian elegy, has left the open frontier behind. Instead, he rifles through the junk drawer of the American psyche, finding flickering old hymns, barely-there synth lines, and tape hiss so loud it feels like memory screaming. The result is uncanny: part Caretaker’s hauntology, part John Fahey, with a touch of Jim O’Rourke’s mysticism.
Opener “Cabin Six” blasts with decay with its chopped piano and distant whirring. “Howling at the Second Moon” whizzes with overlapping realities: wind, melody, something like grief. And “Concern,” with its cathedral shimmer and gentle strumming, hits like the sunrise after a long psychotic break.
But this is no funeral dirge. It’s more like post-traumatic transcendence. Tyler’s found sound experiments—spawned from a tape machine discovered in his grandfather’s Jackson, Mississippi office—are gateways that lead to unexpected places. Time Indefinite constantly toggles between clarity and static, past and unreality.
The centerpiece, “Star of Hope,” is devastating. Choir fragments coil beneath guitar like the last gust before silence, evoking Tyler’s so-called “macro-tragic” grief: the loss of people, the loss of time, the slow implosion of a country. Yet, through all the warped frequencies and fuzzed-out sorrow, tiny flickers of human presence refuse to vanish.
By the time the final track “Held” lets out its last sigh—an acoustic lullaby wrapped in drone—you realize Time Indefinite isn’t really about nostalgia or national myth. It’s about surviving the times we’re living in. Tyler doesn’t offer answers, just a soundtrack for the fraught era we’re hobbling through.
Check out Time Indefinite by William Tyler on Bandcamp here.
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