featuring the experimental films of Harry Smith
May 10, 2014
Getty Museum, Los Angeles
William Tyler is a Nashville-based guitarist who has spent the last several years recording and touring with Silver Jews and Lambchop, among others. In 2010, Tyler struck out on his own to record Behold the Spirit, which was celebrated by Pitchfork as "the most vital, energized album by an American solo guitarist in a decade or more." His latest project, Impossible Truth, was inspired by two books: Barney Hoskyns's Hotel California, which chronicles the Laurel Canyon music scene of the early 1970s, and Mike Davis's The Ecology of Fear, a sociologist's take on the history of the destruction of Los Angeles via real and imagined disasters. The simultaneous tackling of these tomes led Tyler to build an instrumental narrative inspired by the promise and psychosis of Southern California, producing an atmosphere of apocalyptic expectation and bittersweet nostalgia.
