“One afternoon in the middle of North Carolina a storm rolled in. The wind picked up and the rain started falling and the front porch wind chimes, ordinarily gentle, almost inaudible, began cutting through the weather. Each tone called something forth, overlapping swirls of resonance—lives lived and lost, a million things to notice, fat drops of water in the loam.” So describes Ben Seretan of his latest release, a music and text project that pairs natural field recordings with gentle ambient tones and a set of five contextual essays which aim, in his words, to “explode the meaning of each movement.”
Seretan is no stranger to this interconnected music/writing form. For the last couple of years he has been running My Big Break, a weekly newsletter that delivers writing and a piece of new music every Thursday. Those familiar with the project will recognise sandhills music—evocative soundscapes and ambient experimentations combined with writing that’s poetic and openhearted, displaying a diary-like candour and Seretan’s usual irrepressible outlook on things. The result is a set of multisensory snapshots. Times, places and feelings captured through an unique filter, helping Seretan to hold up the world and our lives in it as something to appreciate and savour.
“sandhills music started off with a recording of wind chimes,” Seretan describes, “captured off of a zoom recorder I threw in my backpack when my girlfriend and I unexpectedly travelled to North Carolina for a funeral.” The tape’s entire second side, ‘pedal steel warping in the mph’ and its associated essay captures this moment most directly. It’s twenty-eight minutes of elegiac drift, like the sound of the world continuing to spin, accompanied by a journal of that one particular place and time. The infinite details to notice and get lost in, the sounds of passing traffic, of household appliances and garden tools, voices human and frog and bird. As Seretan describes, “These chimes—recorded, splashed on cassette tape, and re-sampled into a digital keyboard—indicate one thing: that one afternoon, while visiting my girlfriend’s parents, a storm rolled in, fat teardrops splashing in the sandy loam.”
But what began as a document of one specific time and place grew into something larger, the moment a jumping off point for all kinds of thoughts and memories. Each of the essays shares a thematic link to summer but otherwise travel through time and space, as if the porch and its ambience sent Seretan’s mind spiralling back into cherished or otherwise poignant moments from his life.
‘head in the water child’ is something of a coming of age tale, reminiscing on various summers spent on long bus rides or travels by scooter, sitting in church to avoid the bullies or playing bass at the guitar store for as long as possible before being asked to leave. Eventually using those months to hit the road and play music with friends. Moving forward to more recent times, ‘In colors just a little too vibrant to be naturally occurring’ is a tribute to Devra Freelander, both a celebration of her life and a lament for its loss. Here, perhaps more so than at any other moment on sandills music, Seretan sounds acutely aware of the small details which signal the strangely comforting pain of passing time, while also expressing his fears for a world we have set alight. Not to mention, despite everything, joy for the sheer privilege of being here to experience it.
Her work glowed, a little phosphorescent and a little radioactive. A technicolor warning: this won’t last forever, nothing will. And maybe that’s why she was always conjuring, always wringing out the last few drops of the day—abandon and urgency. And on the hottest days, the longest ones, when we think how much more can the planet possibly stand, we stay out late, another summer passing.
Other pieces speak of pet dogs, dying relatives, the “clear and common miracle” of that porch’s windchimes. And somehow the music does too, evoking tones and atmospheres impossible via simple words on a page, folding experience and memory into one complete whole. In this way, the music says, nothing is ever lost. The people and places that have gone are still with us, just as we left some part of ourselves with them. For the present resonates with everything which came before it. The past is really no past at all. Something Seretan urges we remember as we step toward whatever awaits us. Especially as the future is clouded, and further storms begin to roll in.
