Ben Seretan & John Thayer

Photo Credit: Lea Thomas

There is no such thing as a field recording. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that all capture of audio constitutes a recording of the field. To conceive of one’s studio as distinct from the outside world is reductive - us bed sleepers, us gasoline burners inherently inhabit the Earth. Acoustic panels, architecture, isolation booths - all exert some level of control over what gets in the microphones, but no recording is truly pristine, somewhere they crackle and buzz. Then they’re played back on technology made of elemental metals pulled from dirt. You might as well be aiming your condensers at the trees.

The critic Leo Marx in his analysis of the American Transcendentalists describes the “machine in the garden” - imagine a pastoral reverie punctured by a howling steam whistle, here comes industry. Two centuries following Whitman’s first publishing, after blight’s claimed 99% of American chestnuts, the upper Hudson Valley musicians Ben Seretan and John Thayer offer Sunbeam of No Illusion, an extraordinarily meditative collection of augmented keyboard improvisations that serves as reversal, a garden in the machine. Imperfections, signal noise, ground buzz, blips, plonks, glitches, and stutters accrete over clumsy, delicate loops of Rhodes, accumulating into something that very evocatively emulates the susurration of the leaves, the sparkling white noise of water, the calm swell of a breeze.

The album’s name comes from actual correspondence between Emerson and Whitman - Ralph praises Walt’s manuscript, he can’t believe how good it is, the 1800s equivalent of a fire emoji. The epistolary pull quote serves as cheeky acknowledgment of the mutual admiration of this project’s partnership. This is the duo’s first official work together, though they’ve both played in ensembles and toured together previously (up to you to decide who’s the Emerson and who’s the Whitman here). But it’s also a perfectly appropriate description of the serenity at the core of these sounds, a warm blade of sun laid across your cheek. And pulling something from these sages of old also draws in the haunted, crumbling charm of the historic river valley where the two both now live and record, a place of snaking waterways, 200–year-old industrial ruins, centuries of ghosts.

It is slow, intentional work profoundly acted on by seasonality. The two got together casually at Thayer’s creekfront studio over the course of 18 months, beginning each hang with a spontaneous keyboard gesture. They would construct hypnotic loops, transforming the audio through various novel means, like Thayer’s modular rig, his tape echo, or most notably his not-quite-perfectly-operable PrimeTime 93, a rack mount digital delay from 1978 with an uncanny rhythmic abilities. Over top the two traded off sprinkling overdubs - synthesizers, slide guitar, the very occasional percussion part. That rhythmic whooshing on “Wild Mint Breeze?” The sound of Thayer hitting nothing - simply the sticks cutting the air. Each track has a microseason - “Little Winds” like the geometric ice that flows upriver in winter, “Valley Spirit” calls out the crocuses of spring, “Peat Fire” like a humid night thick with smoke.

More natural than silence, more reflective than reflection, more peaceful than a moment of peace - Sunbeam is a fine slice of hyperreality, a nuanced, BGM-inflected postmodern pastoral, circuits and electricity conjuring light through the leaves. One part Yoshimura, one part Budd, one part Fennesz, one part Badalamenti. It’s an uncanny suspension, much like Lydia Kern’s sculpture featured on the cover - dried flowers kept alive, entombed in forever plastic and glowing in the sun. There are very few places left in North America where one cannot hear the rumble of multi-modal transport, but this record - sublime and often a little sorrowful - offers an alternative. 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. 

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