The material for Modern Country was written while guitarist and composer William Tyler was holed up in a quiet cabin in Mississippi. The music is inspired by the idea of a remote and backroad America—an older, slower country of cars and farms and local stores. The instrumental sounds on this lovely record conjure a sense of the open road, big skies and vastness bordering on intimidating emptiness. It can evoke quietly lush countrypolitan production or the soothing acoustic guitar music from mid-‘80s Windham Hill Records. Though it’s not as neutered as that, Tyler has a Zen pace. There’s less of the ominous, swarming drone heard on his Deseret Canyon, re-released last year. There are several remarkable things about this record. The guitar suggests country music, with careful fingerpicking and a bright flickering tone, and then drifts into abstract atmospherics without ever seeming to be disjoined. And the whole mix on the album is astonishing, with the drums (played by Wilco’s Glenn Kotche) providing surprising drive while subdued by mallets or pressed down in the dynamic range. (Listen to what amounts to a kind of deconstructed Afrobeat pattern on the expansive opener “Highway Anxiety.”) Modern Country is something like the mystic vision of America that U2 set out to make when they did The Joshua Tree, only played from the inside, minus the grandiosity and the vocals. Tyler’s Live at Third Man Records—which is raw, unlayered, virtuosic and restraine—provides an informative counterpoint to the almost-ambient studio record. Tyler can do American Primitive, or he can do new-age-ish chillout. He can make a single guitar (and a nice reverb-y amp) sound as wide-open and void-suggesting as his work with a whole band. Tyler has built a bridge between regions that might not have seemed connected before.