Latest news with #PsychicHotline
Wall Street Journal
29-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Wall Street Journal
‘Time Indefinite' by William Tyler Review: Beauty in Fragments
Musicians who build a world around a single instrument and then inhabit it will eventually try to escape it. Nashville guitarist William Tyler has been putting out records under his own name since 2010. His music has varied from one release to the next—genre-mashing folk practitioners like John Fahey and Robbie Basho are clear influences, but he also draws from atmospheric psychedelia. But regardless of style, his music has always placed the guitar squarely at the center of his work. It's his primary tool, and his lyrical, efficient approach to the six-string has defined his music so far. Over the past couple of years, that has started to change. In 2023, he announced a collaboration with electronic producer Kieran Hebden, aka Four Tet, and their early single featured syncopated percussion, explosive distortion and samples. 'Time Indefinite' (Psychic Hotline), Mr. Tyler's seventh studio LP, out now, goes even further out: It's like nothing else he's done, and it may be his best album. The easiest way to think of 'Time Indefinite' is as a collage—it's not always easy to know how the individual elements are made or what the process for assembling them might have been. It's a collection about beauty disrupted, about things breaking apart and being reassembled in new shapes. Throughout the LP, gorgeous fragments of melody are presented and developed before being dissolved in an acid bath of static. Tones are warbly and pitches are unsteady; portions of the set were recorded using technology that the digital world has passed by, including cassettes and even VHS tapes. And yet, for all its experimental underpinnings, 'Time Indefinite' is accessible, musically and especially emotionally. The most jarring moment comes on the first track, 'Cabin Six.' We hear a loop of noise that sounds like an earthquake—played loudly on a full-range system, its low-end throb might shake the books off your shelves. Even before you learn what Mr. Tyler was going through personally when putting the album together—more on that later—'Time Indefinite' seems to narrate the flow of thoughts from a troubled mind, and the first passage of 'Cabin Six' suggests that something is deeply wrong. But the track grows quieter as it progresses across its eight minutes—shimmering drones, recordings of trains rumbling through the night, tendrils of slide guitar drenched in reverb that seem to sway in the air like paper ribbons in the breeze. It's lovely stuff that hints at the expanse of moods and textures to come.
Axios
21-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Axios
Durham musician Phil Cook's new album is for the birds
A wood thrush sings in E-flat — a fact the prolific Durham musician Phil Cook discovered while interpreting the sounds of the Orange County woods on his piano. Why it matters: Cook's latest album, " Appalachian Borealis" — 11 stripped-down piano works, many featuring recordings from the fields and woods of North Carolina's Piedmont — holds a mirror to the quiet moments spent with nature and to what life felt like for Cook while quarantined at home during the COVID-19 pandemic. It's out Friday on Psychic Hotline, a new record label founded by the Durham band Sylvan Esso. Cook will also host a listening party and Q&A at the Pinhook in Durham on Sunday. What they're saying: "The best release I had every day was taking my boys into the woods," Cook told Axios of the early days of the pandemic. "That's stayed with me since. That's my calm place. It's like, I'm in that sanctuary, and I start to really hear all those sounds." Then one morning, Cook recalled, while waking up with his bedroom open, he became nearly overwhelmed by the symphony of bird sounds coming from a nearby willow tree at dawn. He put his phone on the ledge and recorded the noise. "That day I came into the studio here, and I sat down on my piano and for some reason, I just put the bird recording on in my headphones ... and I just did improv," he said. Between the lines: Cook wrote three songs that session, including what would become "Dawn Birds" on the album. The process was a return to simplicity for Cook and an embrace of the piano, an instrument he spent most of his childhood learning but re-dedicated himself to in recent years. He was inspired by the Durham pianist and gospel musician Chuckey Robinson to stop using the damper pedal on the piano and really lean into playing without any effects. The result, Cook said, is that he gained more "muscular control" of the piano. "I hold what I want to hold, and I play what I want to play," he said. State of play: As the project came together, Cook reached out to Justin Vernon, the creative force behind Bon Iver, and asked if he could produce the album. Flashback: Cook and Vernon go way back — attending high school together in Wisconsin and then later moving to Raleigh to perform in the short-lived band DeYarmond Edison. "I ruminated on asking on him to be the producer, but it was really clear in my mind just because we grew up together, and he knows my voice in the piano as well as anyone on the planet," Cook said. "And he could hold me accountable to myself in the ways I really wanted and I needed." Vernon, who will release his own new work next month, was responsible for whittling down nearly 100 recordings Cook made at his studio in Wisconsin into the 11 final tracks that appear on the album. What's next: Starting next month, Cook will begin taking this music on the road, his first tour in around five years and the first for which he'll travel solo. He anticipates the songs will evolve every night as he plays around with their structure. He won't be taking any instruments with him, instead meeting a new piano every night of the tour. (He says it takes an hour before every show to become acclimated with a new piano.) So far, no North Carolina show has been scheduled, but Cook says he has something special planned. "I'm not quite sure where it'll be. I have a couple of good ideas, like the venue and how we set up the room," Cook said. "I think about it a lot, so I want it to be a special show."
