William Tyler details first solo album in six years, Time Indefinite

All three pieces are accompanied by short films compiled entirely from William Tyler’s old family home movies. In November 2020, on a family trip to Jackson, MS to clean out his late grandfather’s office, Tyler spotted an old tape machine, still sealed among the flotsam. He took it back to Nashville, to longtime friend and producer Jake Davis, and they began using it to create tape loops that conjured the vertiginous feeling of that unknown moment.

In early 2020, as the world teetered at the edge of unrest still unimagined, Tyler left Los Angeles for Nashville, where he’d lived most of his life after his parents left Mississippi. Most of his gear stayed in California, awaiting what he presumed would be a rather rapid return. It, of course, wasn’t. So as he dealt with the depression, nerves, and questions of those endlessly tense times, he began recording little ideas and themes with his phone and a cassette deck, resigning himself to the distortion inherent in those devices.

William Tyler was in early talks to make a record with Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden, and some of these bits felt like test cases for what they might do together. As that collaboration crept in other directions into what would become the staggering, lauded Darkness, Darkness / No Services, Tyler magpied other sounds. He soon asked Davis to help stitch them together, and in the end, they unintentionally made a record that reflected those times and these—uneasy, damaged, honest.

Tracklist:

1. Cabin Six
2. Concern
3. Star of Hope
4. Howling at the Second Moon
5. A Dream, A Flood
6. Anima Hotel
7. Electric Lake
8. The Hardest Land to Harvest
9. Held