According to the liner notes, part of the inspiration for this album was the rediscovery of tapes from an old machine owned by Tyler’s grandfather, from which loops were extracted that provide textures and backing tracks. When plucked acoustic guitar surfaces on tracks such as “Concern,” “Howling at the Second Moon,” and “Anima Hotel,” the impression is at first a return to more traditional song structures, but the loops gradually recenter the pieces, which resolve into eerie, decaying echo, drones, and/or choruses of unintelligible voices.

The effect is somewhat similar to that achieved on Daniel Bachman’s recent releases in terms of blending acoustic and treated sounds and the pervasive sense of melancholy and to Scott Tuma’s sense of childlike wonder and near abandonment of rhythm. Like their compositions, Tyler’s here are carefully structured, with a languid sense of forward movement. The contrast of what sounds like a toy xylophone with scraping percussive noises propels “A Dream, A Flood” toward its momentarily rough conclusion while “Electric Lake,” appropriately, shimmers and pulses. The penultimate track, “The Hardest Land to Harvest,” seems to waft through car windows from miles away, and “Held” brings things to a serene conclusion, with an especially lovely moment when crystalline acoustic guitar returns.

The relative brevity of the tracks, which average around six minutes, keeps things focused, and the whole album seems to slip by much more quickly than the 50-minute running time. Responses to Tyler’s previous release, Stratosphere (Merge, 2023), were mixed (more accurately, pretty much everyone liked it but me), but Time Indefinite is so deeply engaging and flat-out beautiful that pretty much anyone with even a mildly adventurous taste in music will be playing it all summer.