good morning ~

Today we’re announcing a new LP :)

SUNBEAM OF NO ILLUSION is the first official work with my buddy John Thayer, a super studio wizard and percussionist (whose solo album from last year is really good, too).

For something like 18 months we’d periodically gather around his Fender Rhodes, find a beautiful chord or a wobbly loop, then expand from there, using the studio like a celestial radio antenna - these are the sounds the spirits of the valley broadcast.

We’re putting it out with AKP Recordings out of Los Angeles and it’ll be available in a beautiful LP edition. Album and single art features super-up-close details of a sculpture by Lydia Kern. The whole album comes out March 27 and “Watermelon Well,” the first slice, is out everywhere today.

Here’s a link that’ll let you find it streaming everywhere, you can also pre-order LPs:

Ben Seretan & John Thayer "Watermelon Well"

Choose your preferred music service

And here’s a little deeper context on the album and where it came from:

Sunbeam of No Illusion is Thayer and Seretan’s first official collaboration on record, though they’ve performed together in a wide variety of contexts since 2023. Drawing on the resplendent natural world of their shared home of upstate New York, the pair calls forth the specters of the valley, spinning up an offering that's frequently sublime and often a little sorrowful. 

Imperfections, signal noise, ground buzz, blips, plonks, glitches, and stutters accrete over clumsy, delicate loops of Fender Rhodes piano, accumulating into something that evocatively emulates the sparkling white noise of water or the calm swell of a breeze. Sunbeam is a fine slice of hyperreality, a nuanced, BGM-inflected postmodern pastoral that's a heady blend of Yoshimura, Fennesz, Badalamenti, and Harold Budd. The poet Richard Brautigan dreamed of a cybernetic forest, computers in the trees - here the wind is digital, trees rustling in binary. At peace with change and permeability, the metal resonance and electrical impulses of the Rhodes hum in the field of the studio as the Earth orbits the sun, an imperfect looping.

Hope you enjoy - - we’ll return to regular MBB programming tomorrow with a great interview, see ya then