NYC musician Ben Seretan released his third solo album, the very good Youth Pastoral, in 2020, and he'll be following it with Cicada Waves, a collection of field recordings and piano pieces, due out April 30 via NNA Tapes. He made the new album during the pandemic, at an artist's residency in Georgia, where he planned two spend two weeks recording with a 100-year-old Steinway piano. In the process, he found that the sound of his surroundings -- the cicadas in particular -- were inescapable.
"It was clear the moment I hit 'record' that any sound I captured from the piano would always carry some other sound with it," Ben says. "There would be no silence whatsoever. So I gave in—I threw open the windows and let the world in."