Ben Seretan

Ben Seretan never seems to do anything halfway. His records are either filled-to-bursting with sounds, ideas, and personal mythology, erupting into catchy choruses and half-screamed mantras (like the twangy tape hiss of 2016's Bowl of Plums, the breaking-up-with-God anthems of 2020's Youth Pastoral - recently released in a Deluxe edition by Tiny Engines - or the Italian insanity of 2024's Allora ) or they’re patient & unfurling, lyric-less & sprawling, like the 24-hour-long monolith My Life's Work a towering album of guitar clouds recorded straight through over three nights in summer, sunset to sunrise. In 2021 he released Cicada Waves, a serene album of piano soli captured amid the riotous sounds of the Appalachian Woods. And nearly every Thursday he publishes a new track and 1,000 words of writing via his long running project My Big Break (curated into the compilations jesus was a slot machine, heaven is a void between load screens, and astral projecting into flavortown). Seretan's latest projects chalks a bold checkmark in the "life is abundant and beautiful" column - Sunbeam of No Illusion, the first proper album from his duo with John Thayer and their first for AKP Recordings, is a hyperreal slice of sublime, American Transcendental BGM, full of murmuring signal noise and imperfect Fender Rhodes loops, gentle as a sunset.