Cicada Waves [Cassette]

During an artist residency in the thick of a pandemic, alone in the woods with an $80,000 concert piano at the bottom of the Appalachian mountain range, Ben Seretan set out to finally make the pristine piano recordings he had always wanted to make. As it turned out, the generously-windowed dance studio was no match for the relentless din of nature: crickets and feral cats, all manner of birds, and swarms of cicadas so loud and so multidirectional ready to lift the studio right off of the earth.

Cicada Waves documents an artist adapting--something we’ve all had to do during a surreal year full of remarkably strange circumstances. The recordings are shared with as little artifice as possible; there are no edits or comped parts, no mixing, no second takes. The sounds you hear are, more or less, exactly the sounds that happened in the world at that moment.