William Tyler is a Nashville guitarist and composer. He spent years woodshedding and touring with Nashville groups like Lambchop and Silver Jews before breaking away to focus on his own version of instrumental guitar music. No other solo American guitarist this century has impacted that fecund scene quite like William Tyler.
After crucial stints in Silver Jews and Lambchop, this adopted son of Nashville emerged at the dawn of the last decade with a string of inquisitive albums that paired the measure of his country rearing and classical enthusiasm with his ardor for post-modern experimentation, field recordings and static drifts folded beneath exquisite melodies. Tyler dug Chet Atkins and Gavin Bryars, electroacoustic abstraction and endless boogie.
His productive little enclave of instrumental music has increasingly followed such catholic tastes, not only ushering new sounds and textures into the form but also critical new voices and perspectives. And on the brilliant, bracing, and inexorably beautiful Time Indefinite, Tyler’s first solo album in five years, he steps at last into the widening gyre he helped create. The guitar serves as a starting point for an album that will make you reconsider not only Tyler but also the possibilities and reach of an entire field. A vortex of noise and harmony, ghosts and dreams, anguish and hope, Time Indefinite is not a great guitar record. It is a stunning record—a masterpiece of our collectively anxious time, really—by a great guitarist.
Alex Rex is the ‘ghost-rock’ project of Alex Neilson (Trembling Bells, Bonnie “Prince” Billy, Shirley Collins, Current 93 et al). Inspired by Greek Tragedy, Barbara Streisand and Alex’s own internal critic, Alex Rex perform songs of love, loss and loathing that make the detestable whistleable.
Jack Mellin is one of Glasgow’s most dexterous and multifaceted guitarists, whether playing shimmering love songs with his indie rock group The Mary Column, the absurdist hardcore band L, experimenting with free-form noise and texture in duo Tocsin Baluster or labyrinthine finger-picking loopyness under is given name: Jack Mellin always makes beautiful music!
