The world feels exceptionally heavy these past several weeks. At times, it becomes absurdly surreal that everyday life drags on with little to no acknowledgement of just how chaotic and frightening things have become for so many people. So when William Tyler took the stage at the ICA in London last week and talked openly about the zeitgeist of violence and uncertainty, from Israel’s genocide against Palestinians to the Trump administration’s fascist abuses of power, music felt refreshingly holy.
Yorkshire singer-songwriter Natalie Wildgoose, as the opener, brought a quiet reverence with songs from her recent EP, “Come Into the Garden”. Wildgoose also sold songbooks of her work, allowing the audience to enter her world of stark, windswept moors.
“Time Indefinite”, William Tyler’s latest solo album, was met with incredible critical acclaim. The searing soundscape of pastoral America elicits a trance, one you might have felt drifting off at church as a kid or leaned up against a train window. The hum in the back of your skull builds from the very first track, a distorted, thundering steam engine.
There we were, a legion of Americana fans, close enough to the stage, but this gig seemed to coincide with the annual London convention for ambient alt-country enthusiasts over six feet tall, so you can imagine it was a rough going trying to get a glimpse of Tyler on his guitar. No matter, this was a blessing. “Time Indefinite” live was not a spectacle to stare at, but a medium of introspection. Drifting away amidst the cosmic country instrumentals was irresistible.
The album was born from a period of existentialism, both in Tyler’s personal life and the world stage. “Disembodied religion is what I’m all about now,” he explained after ‘Star of Hope’, “I started to feel okay with things not being linear”. In some ways, “Time Indefinite” is an “elegy”, as he put it, to a fading version of the American West, inspired in part by Marc Reisner’s “Cadillac Desert” on land development and increasing water scarcity. Written in the 80s, the words became even more pertinent. “Reason”, Reisner wrote, “is the first casualty in a drought”.
In an era of book bans, the encroachment of AI, the endless news cycle of tragedies, time itself is warped in our heads. “Reality has never been louder”, Tyler observed on stage. Yet for the length of a concert, time went on forever, the past and the future flooding into view. With some of his past work and later a cover of the 16th-century folk ballad ‘Flowers of the Forest’, Tyler created a triptych: what we are, what we used to be, and what we might become.
