A reel-to-reel in Mississippi, AM radio in Tennessee, and a new record, Time Indefinite, tuned to the quiet hiss between stations.

Time Indefinite is William Tyler’s first solo album in five years, recorded mostly in Nashville during the early months of the pandemic after he left Los Angeles. Working with longtime collaborator Jake Davis and, later, producer Alex Somers, Tyler pieced it together from cassette loops, field recordings, and rough sketches made in isolation.

Release notes outline the process: It started with lo-fi phone and tape deck recordings and grew into a full-length that leans into hiss, wobble, and imperfection. The 10-track, 54-minute record includes material shaped using a reel-to-reel machine he found while helping clean out his grandparents’ old house in Jackson, Mississippi. Coming out on Friday via Psychic Hotline, Time Indefinite also reflects Tyler’s ongoing exchanges with Kieran Hebden (Four Tet) — they released a 12-inch together last year — and draws inspiration from Ross McElwee’s 1993 documentary of the same name, which threads through the album’s emotional architecture. In March, ISC hosted a public listening session and conversation about Time Indefinite at our HQ. The event featured a playback of the album on our Audio Note system.

Tyler spoke to me via Zoom in early April. The interview below has been edited for length and clarity.

“I identify as much as a sound artist as a guitarist. I started recording hours of weird audio on a Zoom recorder, picking out glitchy sections or interesting phrases.”

William Tyler

Randall Roberts: So congratulations on this record. Is this a stressful time for you, right before an album's release?

William Tyler: It is a little bit right now, just because I’m trying to figure out how to play the new material live solo. I have a really close collaborator, Jake Davis, who co-produced the record, and we just did Big Ears in Knoxville as a trio. We had a cellist, and Jake handled a lot of the electronics and backing tracks—but mostly playing in real-time. It’s going to be a little hard to pull off solo. But I also don’t want it to be just new stuff. Obviously, I knew this record was different enough that hopefully it changes the conversation a little bit, puts me in spaces with different kinds of artists and different kinds of listeners.

At the same time, I don’t want to alienate people who are more traditionally guitar-music fans. That would be the main source of stress right now. I’m easing back into touring, being cautious about what I commit to, which is probably good from a personal standpoint and strategically. I don’t really see myself getting back to cramming three guitars and my pedals in the car and driving around the country, which, up until lockdown, I was doing pretty much all the time. It’s a different world now in a lot of ways—personally, globally, and in Europe.

I was wondering about about touring Europe right now.

Well, I am going there in June. Europe’s been a little tricky for me. My association with Nashville—with Lambchop, Silver Jews, all that stuff—immediately puts me in an indie-rock, indie-folk, Americana world. Over there, the audience for that is very different from experimental music. Those worlds don’t overlap very much. A few people have pulled it off well, like Marissa Anderson, but things aren’t as genre-fluid there as in the States. They also don’t have the same relationship to guitar music—except in places like the U.K. and Ireland, obviously, or Spain and Portugal, where you don’t really have to explain guitar culture. Elsewhere, it’s kind of a novelty.

Obviously, electronic music is way more of a thing over there. I think a lot about the new spiritual jazz and ambient scenes, and the circles of people I’m friends with in L.A., like In Sheep’s Clothing. Figuring out that world over there—I’m still kind of on the fringes. I just turned 45, and I’m probably going to keep doing this as long as I can. But I don’t know what that looks like in a year, let alone ten.

Well, in the immortal words of Will Oldham, think: What would Michael Hurley do?

Yeah. I used to say something similar about Michael Chapman, who I got to know a bit. I only met Hurley in passing; he had no idea who I was. But I’ve been following Chapman for a long time, thinking about how he did it. Chapman and Hurley—they’re the same generation. You survive by drifting around, finding host bodies, and just surviving. I moved back in with my parents when I was 42, so I’m no stranger to that life.

It’s funny you bring up Will Oldham because I think he’s a great role model. He’s a singular artist, smart about how he does things, serious about being a family person—not burning himself out. Kieran Hebden from Four Tet, whom I’ve also worked with, has a similar approach. He’s like, “If I don’t feel like doing something, I don’t care about the money.” But if he needs the money, there’s always a gig.

This album has a whole different feel than your previous albums. Were you worried about your audience—expectations and alienating that audience you've grown?

Not really. I don’t think artists should ever make material they wouldn’t listen to themselves. Once I started this new music, I realized I was making a record, not just messing around with ideas. I thought, “This feels more inclusive,” because it’s open and a bit unclassifiable. Using a crass branding analogy—which certainly, we’re all brand ambassadors—I thought this might grow my audience, or at least shift it. Living in L.A. for five years, around music and art circles there, this shift was probably inevitable.

Why do you say that?

I’d reached limits as a guitar player—or the limits I felt within myself. Six years ago, I put out a record called Goes West. That was the most commercially polished version of that kind of guitar music, very much driven by acoustic guitar and influenced by Windham Hill and ECM. I’m proud of it, but when lockdown happened, I wasn’t feeling celebratory, so the music changed.

Something like "A Dream, A Flood," that piece—in earlier incarnations you would have added a guitar line into a piece like that.

Exactly. That’s a perfect example. It started as an improvisation. At Jake’s studio, he had me running through a certain reverb or delay unit, and I just started looping stuff on one chord and making noises. Pretty much everything you hear is one track of drone improvisation. In the past, I probably would’ve turned it into a structured song, but this time I thought, “It’s beautiful—it’s cool as it is.”

In the release notes, you mention traveling to Jackson and finding a tape machine. You've probably told this story dozens of times by now…

No, but it’s worth telling.

What kind of tape machine was it? Can you set the scene a little bit?

I’ll have to get back to you on the exact model—it’s been at Jake’s house for almost five years. It was late fall 2020, before the election. My grandparents’ house in Jackson, where my mom grew up, was central. That house appears frequently in my dreams—it had lots of hidden spaces. After my grandparents passed away, my uncle kept it as it was in the ’80s and ’90s. It felt like a haunted museum, very William Eggleston. After he died, it sat empty for years until my mom and aunt eventually sold it. They moved leftover items to a warehouse downtown. When they needed to rent that space out, I went to see if anything was worth keeping. Among some art and personal items was this tape machine—in its original box—a quarter-inch reel-to-reel.

Oh wow, like an actual reel-to-reel?

Yeah, pretty mint condition. Jake and I had started working together, cautiously seeing each other during lockdown. So, I brought it back from Jackson and asked Jake, “Can we see if this works?” He had old reel tapes lying around. We started making actual loops—cutting and splicing with a razor blade and tape, the old-school way. Those low-fidelity, warbly drone sounds on the record are actual tape loops from that machine.

Can you talk a little bit about the found sounds and field recordings?

That’s something I’ve always been obsessed with.

Me too.

Right? Lockdown gave me a lot of static time, literally and figuratively. Though still technically living in L.A., I’d driven back to Nashville. So, I had plenty of time to dig through childhood cassettes and videotapes—my family documented everything. One thing I missed about the South was weird radio—especially Christian radio.

Oh my God, I did the same thing during lockdown.

Right? Those sermon stations have a unique regional quality. I identify as much as a sound artist as a guitarist. I started recording hours of weird audio on a Zoom recorder, picking out glitchy sections or interesting phrases. Jake was doing something similar. Parallel to that—and in the spirit of this album—my manager Ben Swank at Third Man Records has identical esoteric interests. When I described what I was working on, he was surprised I’d never read Mark Fisher or the hauntology stuff. So, I ended up reading Lost Futures.

I don't know anything about Mark Fisher.

Sadly, Mark Fisher took his own life, and his writing is frankly very depressing. He’s kind of like Adam Curtis without the sense of humor. He wrote a lot about postmodern culture in England—about recontextualizing stuff that felt kitsch: government instructional films, old radio, and a lot of the kind of stuff I’ve been incorporating somewhat ironically, somewhat unironically, into electronic music. There are specific artists he talked about quite a bit, like Burial, Boards of Canada, Philip Jeck, The KLF. And I didn’t really know much about any of this—I mean, I knew some of the music, but I didn’t understand the philosophy behind it. To be fair, that was Mark Fisher’s thesis; I don’t think the artists themselves necessarily would describe their work that way. But I realized that the South is also so much about nostalgia, in obviously both good and bad ways.

There’s that Faulkner quote: “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” In Mississippi and the Deep South, you really feel that. There are so many emotional layers to it. So I started thinking, “Is there a southern version of hauntology?” And there really isn’t, because there aren’t a lot of southern experimental sound artists. There are definitely a few—ironically, I got to be friends with claire rousay around the same time. During the pandemic, we became kind of pen pals. She moved to L.A. right as I moved back east. But, you know, she was based in San Antonio and grew up in Texas, and I thought what she was doing was probably the closest equivalent we had to southern hauntology. I obviously owe her a significant artistic debt on this record. So, that’s basically it. That’s a long-winded way of explaining the process.

That's fascinating. The stuff that I was recording was in Southern California—I was making cassette mixtapes with radio snippets during the pandemic. There was a lot of fire-and-brimstone stuff about COVID, and Trump was still in office, so there were Chinese-language stations where the only words you could understand were "Trump, Trump." It’s all so ephemeral that if you don’t catch it, it’s gone forever.

Exactly. And I’ve become really passionate about documenting AM radio stations, because they truly are like dying languages. You know, when 1260 AM in L.A. switched formats from oldies—from K-SURF—to K-Mozart, back to classical music, that was around when I moved back there in 2021. I became obsessed with it, because classical music on AM radio just doesn’t exist anymore. That might’ve been the last one, actually. Then last year, they switched to country oldies, and everyone in my circle out there was devastated. K-Mozart made the stress of traffic manageable. I even asked my friends, like Claire and Sarah Davachi, if anyone had hours of it recorded on a Zoom or something. Most people didn’t. But I’m still looking for it, because the whole point of AM radio is that lo-fi, warm, buried-underground sound.

I was back in L.A. a couple weeks ago and listened a lot to KUSC, which is a great station, but it’s FM, and doesn’t have that lo-fi texture. I could name similar examples of AM stations here in Middle Tennessee that disappeared in the last 15 years. One was a fantastic “Music of Your Life” station—Greatest Generation standards. There’s still one left, about 30 miles away, and I’ve been recording as much as I can because eventually it’ll go away. Often, the people who own these stations are older, and sadly when they pass away, the transmitter just goes silent. There’s not even a website. Licenses exist for AM radio, obviously, but nobody wants to buy them—at least, not at the prices they’re asking.

I actually looked into buying one here in Nashville. It had been owned by Nashville Public Radio for years and used to simulcast BBC World Service nearly 24/7, which was great for late-night, early-morning listening—so spooky. But a few years ago, they sold the license to somebody who isn’t really using it. I tracked down the current owners, a family from Indiana who buy up radio stations. They’re not running terrible right-wing talk stuff, but I managed to set up a meeting—I’m enough of a hustler, enough of a con artist, to survive as an artist, I guess. So I met with this woman at some ritzy suburban office. Their main station is a pretty commercial oldies station. She asked me what my business plan was, and I said I wanted to mix golden oldies, jazz, and classical on AM radio. She said, “Who’s your demographic?” and I joked that it was people my age who secretly feel 90 even though we’re in our 40s. Obviously, I didn’t say that out loud. Within five minutes, she figured out I had no money and started taking phone calls during our meeting. Whatever.

So, was it six figures? How much was the station?

It was a couple hundred thousand dollars. I knew a few people pretty high up at Nashville Public Radio, and even they wouldn’t have that kind of money now, especially after recent budget cuts.

Seems to me you could build a business plan out of that, though—a couple hundred thousand dollars in Nashville.

Honestly, Randall, it was one of the only times—I mean, one of maybe two or three times—I ever called Ben Swank. He’s been managing me six or seven years and is very close with Jack White, both personally and professionally. I was like, “Ben, run this idea past Jack. How cool would it be for Third Man to own an AM radio station?” It fits their brand perfectly, to use that word again. To Jack’s credit, he does really cool shit with his money. I think he was on tour at the time. It honestly felt like something that could have happened, or at least I could have gone back to the sellers and been like, “I’m friends with Jack White.” You don’t get to play that card often.

The thing that depresses me—and I’m sure you feel this too, given our shared interests—is this idea that we supposedly live in a time of infinite choice and possibility, according to consumer capitalism. But it’s actually reducing choices, especially in media formats. AM radio and low-power radio is one of the few issues that people on the far left and far right agree on, because they’re community resources. I have a good friend in the Bay Area who’s spent her life working with rural radio, and we talk about this all the time. When stations like this disappear, what’s lost can’t really be replaced. None of those right-wing AM talk shows—Rush Limbaugh’s successors—make money. They lose money. The only reason they’re still on air is because groups like the Koch brothers underwrite them as propaganda. They don’t sell ads—they sell supplements. Sorry, this is very rambling. You can probably tell I actually care about this stuff.

I do want to talk about some of the stuff you’ve been listening to. Are your records back in Nashville yet, or are they still in Los Angeles?

Yeah, I think I’m officially back in Nashville now. I have an apartment here that I’d rented out while I was gone, but last fall we shipped back everything I’d stored—my records and all my ephemera. They’re officially back in Middle Tennessee.

Did being without them while you were making this record change how you approached it at all?

It was totally wild—and obviously, it’s a luxury problem. Most people I knew during lockdown were in their habitat with their stuff. It really reminded me of that Twilight Zone episode with Burgess Meredith, “Time Enough at Last,” where all he wants is time to read, and then there’s an apocalyptic event. Everyone disappears, he goes to the library—and steps on his glasses, so now he can’t read anything. I’m being facetious, but that’s what it felt like. I finally had time to go through all my vinyl, read all my books—and they were all in storage in L.A. while I was in Nashville.

It definitely changed the way I listened to stuff. It made me more aware of cassette tapes (things I had a player for), CDs I could dig out, and a lot of radio—especially internet radio like NTS. I’m sure that influenced the record, because what I was consuming more than anything else was just sound. It was this philosophy of sound as an end in itself, which has a rich tradition in experimental and noise music, but I leaned into it—not out of necessity, exactly, but out of ease. I don’t stream music unless it’s a cool internet radio station, so I wasn’t doubling down on Spotify. I also wasn’t really listening to podcasts—I’ve gotten more into those in the last couple of years—but there’s something about digital culture that feels so unfulfilling and lonely. Especially on your phone.

They always say you’re supposed to keep your orientation by looking up—at the trees, at your surroundings—not at the ground. Scrolling on your phone is this passive surrender pose. It feels like a metaphor for what digital life has done to us psychologically.

What are you listening to these days? Are you obsessed with anything? I hate it when people ask me that, because my mind always goes blank.

Yeah, I know. I’m really into certain labels—like Efficient Space, the Australian label. They do cool compilations, reissuing old Australian punk and post-punk, and weird, private-press American vernacular stuff. Pretty much anything they put out, I’ll buy.

Oh, yes. Searchlight Moonbeam.

Exactly. Searchlight Moonbeam, Sky Girl—those comps are incredible. And then there’s a cassette label out of London called Death Is Not The End. They’re very much into archival sound. It’s almost like a punk-rock Folkways. I pretty much buy anything they put out.

I also feel like I’m friends with a lot of people making interesting music, or if I’m not directly friends, then friends-of-friends. Wendy Eisenberg, Marisa Anderson, and claire rousay —stuff coming out of L.A., like on Leaving Records. International Anthem, obviously. Everything they do is cool.

There's nothing wrong with listening to people you're actually friends with. You're friends with them because they make good music.

Right, there’s a connection. I’m lucky to have friends in music who honestly know way more about it than I do. Kieran Hebden is a perfect example. Our friendship started as internet friends during lockdown, initially talking about working together, but quickly became a shared conversation about music. He’s really good about journaling and sharing on Instagram. He has this thing where he purposefully listens to a vinyl record all the way through—both sides—every day. Intentional listening. That’s really cool, I think.

Yeah, I do the same. I have a listening room—one luxury of being in Columbia, Missouri, is space. It’s where I work.

That’s a blessing. I’ll leave WFMU’s or NTS’s feed on in the background. In Nashville, there’s actually a great low-power FM station run by all the renegades who used to run Vanderbilt’s college radio when it was a free-format station. They’ve moved to this other station now, and it runs the gamut from black metal to western swing. I’ll leave that on, or something similar. Also, the Criterion Channel now has a 24/7 streaming feature where they just show movies continuously—you never know what’s coming on. I’ll sometimes leave that running visually, while I listen to music. It’s active-passive listening, if that makes any sense.

It does. Excellent. William, it's great to talk to you again. Congratulations.

Likewise—great to connect over this specific thing. I did want to say something about Ross McElwee, because you were about to ask me a question about him.

Yes, please.

It’s apropos—we started out talking about [Columbia, Missouri’s] True/False Film Fest. I spent a long time not knowing what to call this record. Sometimes I have a title before the record even happens, like with Modern Country and Impossible Truth. But this one was tough. There were a couple titles I wanted to use that were already taken. When I decided on Time Indefinite, it was deliberate. Impossible Truth is a very obscure Albert Brooks skit reference—if you catch that, you’re as obsessed with Albert Brooks as I am. Not many people are. Time Indefinite is a pretty well-known documentary, though most people know Ross McElwee from Sherman’s March.

To me, Time Indefinite is much more powerful than Sherman’s March. All of his films are great, but Time Indefinite captures the filmmaker as essayist—like Agnes Varda, Chantal Akerman, Jonas Mekas. Ross is our Southern version of those figures. The film reflects emotionally what this album is about—personal transformation, death, birth, new connections, and the cosmic uncertainty of everything. That’s emotionally what the tone of the record is: not exactly a bad dream, certainly not a good dream, but somewhere in that space of emotional ambiguity where a lot of the best stuff lies.

I wasn’t originally a Lynch fanatic like I was with Kubrick. I obviously knew his stuff, but when I revisited all his films sequentially after he passed away, everything about Zen meditation, transcendental meditation, and the dream world resonated deeply. Lynch nails that aspect as well as anyone—Tarkovsky, Herzog—maybe better, because he’s even stranger. The fact that The Straight Story is a G-rated Disney movie but still one of his weirdest sums up perfectly the tonality of the art I’m interested in now.

It's funny—that's the first movie I watched after he died: The Straight Story.

Really? That’s interesting. I re-watched The Elephant Man—my favorite. They were doing a retrospective here at the local arthouse theater, and I’d never seen Wild at Heart.

That’s a crazy movie.

It’s crazy—but what’s craziest about it is how Lynch deliberately makes things stranger by directing his actors to overact, break the fourth wall, or delay their responses. It feels like homemade cable-access weirdness. He does all this intentionally, and I don’t think anyone else at his level would’ve been allowed that freedom. Like Kubrick, aside from Dune, all his films made money, so the studios let him do whatever he wanted, even if they didn’t understand it.