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Jul 10, 2025 Web Exclusive By Scotty Dransfield

William Tyler’s Time Indefinite opens not with a melody, but with a challenge. The first few minutes of “Cabin Six” are a burst of sonic nausea—static, tape hiss, and queasy horn samples that feel yanked straight from the Overlook Hotel. It’s an opening shot that puts you off-balance immediately, like stepping into a dream already in progress. And that dream only deepens across these nine tracks, as Tyler—long revered for his expressive, widescreen guitar work—trades pickwork for psychic landscapes.

This is Tyler’s first solo album in five years, and while the guitar still plays a role, it’s rarely center stage. Instead, Time Indefinite is built from field recordings, ambient tape loops, creaky samples, synth drift, and damaged textures. These songs are not built to impress so much as immerse—they’re less folk compositions than mood rituals, unfolding with the slow, inevitable pace of inner weather.

There are still moments of beauty here. “Concern” opens like a gentle reprieve, a looped acoustic motif gradually overtaken by warped harmonies and degraded drones. “Howling at the Second Moon” is perhaps the album’s most straightforwardly gorgeous piece, a dreamy, baritone-acoustic reverie that reminds you this is, after all, a William Tyler album. But these brief oases only underscore the desolation elsewhere—like the unnerving childlike piano that opens “A Dream, A Flood,” or the distorted broadcast fragments in “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” where ghostly echoes of America flicker across the static like lost TV signals in a dying prairie town.

The album reaches full transcendence on closer “Held,” where the fog finally lifts. After a mist of synth clouds and sustained tones, a pristine acoustic guitar line breaks through like sunlight. Pedal steel and strings rise in harmony, evoking nothing short of grace. For once, the background noise doesn’t threaten—it supports. It feels like clarity, hard-won and momentary.

Throughout Time Indefinite, Tyler lets simple melodic phrases repeat and evolve, layering sounds like watercolor until you lose track of what’s organic and what’s processed. The effect is hypnotic. This is one of the most truly psychedelic albums in recent memory—not in genre, but in the way it simulates the experience of altered consciousness: the loops, the distortions, the way beauty and dread live side by side.

Time Indefinite is not a guitar record. It’s a record by a guitarist—one who has fully absorbed his tools and is now reaching for something rawer, more damaged, more honest. It’s a haunted album, but a human one too. William Tyler doesn’t just soundtrack the anxiety of our time—he maps it, walks through it, and finds something like peace on the other side. (www.williamtyler.net)

Author rating: 8/10