One could argue that all musical forms are essentially incomplete until the listener joins the party, but ambient music seems more needily co-dependent than most. Given that a typical sound bed is a blank canvas of amniotic electronica, much depends on the interpretation of whatever is laid over it: the drip and the drift; the scrape and the scratch; the arbitrary beauty of found sounds and field recordings. The meaning can be as banal or as profound as desired. Is that distant clanging the bells of mortal dread tolling for us all; or simply next door’s bin lid clattering on to the pavement?
Since releasing his excellent debut album, Behind the Spirit, in 2010, the American musician William Tyler has become well regarded as an experimental guitarist working in the country and folk fields. Of late, however, that description barely hints at the music he makes. On his sixth solo album, Tyler is primarily a gatherer and manipulator of sound.
Time Indefinite is comprised of snatches of mobile-phone demos, analogue tape loops, hisses, bangs and static, the apparently random retuning of an AM radio dial. Imagine Ry Cooder’s soundtrack to Paris, Texas fed through a sonic mincer; or the second side of Bowie’s Heroes sent to Guantanamo Bay. There are urgent alarm calls, chopped-up song snippets, harsh blares, ghostly voices. Ticklish half-melodies emerge and then sink back into the murk. The combined effect is of a disturbed ambient force field. It could be a significant fault line in a life of a person and/or a nation. Or just so much vapour.
‘Cabin Six’ begins with the synthetic rasp of train noise before spiralling into a tunnel of echoing disquiet.
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