The disturbing ambient music of William Tyler

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 onto 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.

‘Still Dancing’ would have been a hit in 1985. In 2025, it’s enough to keep Idol on the road and out of trouble

Time Indefinite is comprised of snatches of mobile-phone demos, analog 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 forcefield. It could be a significant fault line in a life of a person and/or a nation. Or just so much vapor.

“Cabin Six” begins with the synthetic rasp of train noise before spiraling into a tunnel of echoing disquiet. “Electric Lake” builds to a flurry of industrial noise, like workmen mending a railway track at 3 a.m., before ending like a guttering candle, whispering in the wind. On “Son of Hope,” stirring choral voices drift out of the radio, singing the hymn “My Jesus as Thou Wilt” as the world around seems to shatter. It’s beautiful and oddly moving.

Nothing else here quite captures that feeling, but Tyler comes closest in the moments where he allows his guitar-playing to take prominence. On “Anima Hotel” the notes, heavily reverbed and spooling over a low drone, evoke a slow-motion firework display. The motif on the moving “Concern” is pretty as a picture, its simplicity accentuated by the lo-fi twang of a mobile-phone recording. “Howling at the Second Moon” is an almost conventional essay in acoustic guitar-picking. The singsong musicality of the closing “Held” hints at redemption.

One might wish that Tyler had fleshed out the more distinct ideas here into something more accessible, but the ragged nature of Time Indefinite is essentially its point. The least engaging parts are itinerant, passing through without leaving a trace. The best sound like an elegy to an America which has crossed the Rubicon of its own soul.

There’s little experimental ambience on Billy Idol’s first album of new material in 11 years. Although the opening title track begins with a bit of spacey synth noodling, any oddness is firmly of the ersatz variety.

Idol started out as a cartoon punk and became a cartoon rock star via songs such as “Hot in the City,” “Rebel Yell,” “White Wedding,” “Eyes Without a Face” and “Sweet Sixteen.” A bleached blond Elvis whose coat of arms was a comical sneer and a clenched fist, Idol broke America until it broke him. After the hits came heroin addiction, a near-death motorcycle crash and, perhaps most tragic of all, an Oliver Stone cameo. Not many careers recover from that kind of triple-whammy calamity, but Idol kept plugging away and is now old enough to claim protected species status.

You can’t really accuse a cartoon of caricature, so we can hardly complain that Dream Into It leans heavily into mythologizing Idol as a grizzled survivor who is old enough to know better but might still do it anyway.

Not entirely convincingly reviving the trashy hardish-rock of his four-decades-gone heyday, “Too Much Fun” turns out to be a false promise, but at only nine tracks, Dream Into It doesn’t quite outstay its welcome. “77” is a dewy-eyed reconstruction of the Punk Wars: “King’s Road every weekend/ They hate us, and they don’t know why.” It features Avril Lavigne (born in 1984), who alongside Joan Jett and Alison Mosshart is one of three generations of punk-adjacent guest stars.

Only “Still Dancing” truly evokes the glory days, with its punchy chorus and never-say-die sentiments. It would have been a top ten hit in 1985. In 2025, it’s enough to keep Idol on the road and out of trouble.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s June 2025 World edition.