Today, Ben Seretan announced Cicada Waves, the musician and composer's first proper instrumental release since 2018's enormous My Life's Work (a 24-hour long album recorded over three consecutive nights, sunset to sunrise). Cicada Waves directly follows Seretan's acclaimed album of songs, Youth Pastoral, which earned Best of 2020 accolades from Pitchfork (35 Best Rock Albums of the Year) and Paste Magazine (Best Songs of 2020, Best Albums of 2020). The release of Cicada Waves via NNA Tapes on April 30th, 2020 will coincide with another release: the arrival of the once-every-17-year Brood X cicada, one of the world's largest swarms of the noisy insects.
Over the next seven weeks leading up to the release, Seretan will share a new track alongside accompanying videos and essayic writing via his regular
newsletter. The weekly rollout starts today with the serene album closer "
Fog Rolls Out Rabun Gap", a title which nods to the album's remote recording location in Georgia.
During an artist residency in the thick of the pandemic, tucked away in a dance studio at the base of the Appalachian mountains, Ben Seretan set out to finally make the piano recordings he had always wanted to make: pristine, clean, ringing, indeterminate. For two weeks he would be alone with an antique Steinway-a blessing that, in spite of an unexpected, globally tragic, and tremendously surreal circumstance, miraculously remained possible.
But "silence" and even "peace and quiet" are slippery, man-made illusions that we can never quite grab hold of, and this proved to be especially true in the woods. The environs there were riotous, almost joyously noisy; the old wood creaking with rot, rain pelting the roof five times a day, rolling thunder. And then there was the breathtaking presence of critters; hissing feral cats, fiddling crickets, birds belting their songs every morning and, ever-presently, the sea of cicadas-enormous swarms of them-so loud and so multidirectional, as though they might try to lift the concert piano right off of the earth.
"It was clear the moment I hit 'record' that any sound I captured from the piano would always carry some other sound with it. There would be no silence whatsoever. So I gave in-I threw open the windows and let the world in."
Cicada Waves, then, is the sound of allowance. It's the sound of room being made, of guards being dropped, of adaptation. It's more often than not the sound of a piano *not* being played. It's the sound of wings or wind or water doing what they will.
These recordings are shared with as little artifice as possible; there are no edits or comped parts, no mixing, no second takes. The album is, more or less, simply and exactly the sounds that happened in the world at that moment, as chaotic and full of sound as they ought to be.
Photo Credit: Gracelee Lawrence
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