William Tyler – Impossible Truth (Merge Records)
It must be difficult to be an artist attempting to draw from the past without specifically attempting to recreate it. The Information Age has laid out all extant artistic accomplishments like a tasting menu to be sampled without regard for nuance and context, their component elements subsequently regurgitated onto a listening public who is excited simply to be able to identify some chunk of what once was real and vibrant in the puddle of bilious remains. And even those withered remnants often hold attention only as surface-level signifiers, tags that cling like a stain to even those who invest the most effort into moving out of their shadow.
William Tyler – Impossible Truth (Merge Records)
It must be difficult to be an artist attempting to draw from the past without specifically attempting to recreate it. The Information Age has laid out all extant artistic accomplishments like a tasting menu to be sampled without regard for nuance and context, their component elements subsequently regurgitated onto a listening public who is excited simply to be able to identify some chunk of what once was real and vibrant in the puddle of bilious remains. And even those withered remnants often hold attention only as surface-level signifiers, tags that cling like a stain to even those who invest the most effort into moving out of their shadow. And thus, William Tyler’s second release under his own name will, in most eyes, never escape the John Fahey/Takoma Records comparisons that will invariably find themselves applied to it, despite this album being leaps and bounds more creatively realized than anything by the average dabbler in this sort of thing (the type of dabbler that saw peak popularity about four or five years ago, who put out a few limited CD-Rs as a stab at Pitchfork recognition right after they stopped liking Modest Mouse, but before they went full-on stoner metal).
This isn’t to say that Impossible Truth is some ahistorical anomaly or sharp deviation within the world of instrumental guitarwork, but any comparison with the more persistent ghosts that haunt that style amounts to only a small part of the picture. Though the album features a fairly even split between solo pieces and works fleshed out with additional instrumentation, the former seem to pay more direct homage to some of the style’s cornerstones. But even within this framework these songs still offer a variety of mood and timbre, with the sprightly bounce of “A Portrait Of Sarah” coming off in stark contrast to the lithe, tremolo-heavy darkness of “The Geography Of Nowhere.” When additional instruments are incorporated (most courtesy of former BR549 bassist Chris Scruggs, whose upright bass and lap steel are at turns earthy and ethereal, in a manner not wholly dissimilar from the contributions Daniel Lanois made to some of Brian Eno’s better albums), the songs seem to expand outwards. The knotty, fleet-fingered guitarwork at their core is adorned with a sparse framework, the interstices of which provide an enclosed contextual space for the tangles of notes that pour out of Tyler’s guitar.
When these elements are supplemented with still further instrumentation, such as the percussion and horn section on closer “The World Set Free,” each component facet seems stretched to its breaking point, casting the whole thing a distended, expansive take on the manner in which certain brands of recent popular music have attempted to entwine disparate strands of traditionalism. “The Last Waltz by way of Terry Riley played sitting around a campfire” might be too pat a summation, but Impossible Truth acts as a mirror of the sort of recontextualization that’s done out of love and understanding of its source material, rather than reliance on the idea that the novelty of pastiche alone renders an endeavor worthwhile.
But this is ultimately one of the few points at which Tyler’s music does overlap with the Fahey-ites of the world. Apart from some surface-level similarities, the real comparison is more a spiritual affinity, one in which varied strands of thought can be mined and reconfigured into an individualist statement of purpose. Impossible Truth has less to do with the phraseology that seems to come part and parcel with this specific subgenre – American primitive, or Weird America of any age – and more like a highly distilled version of the cosmic American music that Gram Parsons had hoped to create: a stylized but natural-sounding ebb and flow that functions like a sonic representation of a highly abstracted sense of place; a self-made map of an imaginary country bearing symbols that may seem familiar, but are configured into an order all their own.
