Ben Seretan
Photo by, Benedict Kupstas
Meet Ben Seretan
Ever producing innovating, and charming the music of Ben Seretan is a modern marvel. The musician is constantly churning out different ideas and notions adding to a vast but approachable library of works. Their album “Youth Pastoral” is one of my favorites to have come out in 2020. Get to know this terrific person as we chat about school detention, music, and magic lassos.
A self-portrait by, Ben Seretan
Would You Rather
have a magic lasso that would make people tell the truth or everyone believes every lie you ever told? Why?
I really think you gotta go with the first option because how could you live with yourself?
Some questions with Ben Seretan
Did you ever get detention in school? If so, why?
Strangely enough, I don't think I ever actually received detention, but I went to really progressive schools starting in about 4th grade and I don't actually think they used detention as a punishment! I feel like I was given the occasional emotional talking-to by teachers who treated me as a peer, honor system, not mad but disappointed, that kind of thing. But there was no way before the 4th grade I was ever going to break a rule - I was a deeply obedient child and in many ways have remained hideously obedient into adulthood. In college I played guitar for a Crass cover band that only ever did guerrilla performances, meaning that we'd just set up our gear wherever usually outside wherever people were gathering, and just start blasting away. We didn't get in trouble for that, exactly, but the campus life folks were just kind of like more or less - hey, that's technically not against a rule but it's really annoying - would you mind stopping? And where did you find those five TVs to smash with a bat, anyway? I think at one point they weren't going to let the singer graduate and that was the end of it. But in general, I hate being in trouble and hate it when anyone is mad at me for any reason whatsoever!
How have you been navigating the current climate as an artist and musician?
Navigating is an interesting word there - kind of implies having a map or a steady ship, using the stars as your guide and a general aim to where you're headed...not sure that applies to my experience this year as a musician! A better metaphor might be throwing fistfuls of spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks (not much).
It's interesting how there have been phases to life under COVID - I foolishly thought we'd be back to shows by April when this all got serious and, looking back, I can't believe the amount of effort I put into doing live streams, a practice so pertinent and meaningful for a few months this year (streams are still occasionally pertinent and meaningful, but far less ubiquitous than they once were).
I'm very unsure of what role I ought to be filling right now, unsure of how to best "help" or "contribute," whatever those words might mean.
But one thing that's keeping me going is taking on a tremendous project, a laughably ambitious and even more sprawling second part to the 24-hour recording I put out in 2018. I've been slowly chipping away at it piece by piece, and the thought of one day finishing it is a light on the horizon.
How do you approach writing lyrics? What kinds of stories inspire you?
Though I love a well thought out and finely crafted song with rhymes and clever turns of phrase and whatever else, I find that the songs I write need to be written absolutely as quickly as possible with as little editing as possible. They're a bit boneheaded in that way because the more I tweak something, the more I bend it into shape, the less "real" it feels to me. And if a bridge or a better rhyme doesn't occur to me in the first 20 minutes of working on something well, it probably will never get that flourish. The process for me is much more like having the thought and then spending a year figuring out the best way to materialize that thought, in other words how best to perform that lightning flash that is the song in its first appearance to me.
But the stories I love and the ones I always come back to are all about radical intimacy and personal redemption and the cathartic emergence of a magical phrase. I think I just really deeply love it when people are nice to each other.
How did you navigate the transition from your earlier more ambient work to your more recent release "Youth Pastoral" which consists of songs with a more concrete structure?
I've very organically over the years vacillated between song stuff and the washy, impressionistic instrumentals - they're kind of two sides of the same coin! Which is to say that the songs and the albums of songs are all about catharsis, of big crashing crescendos and pushing a flaming ship out to sea...the instrumental work can maybe be seen as what happens afterwards, the negative space of quiet after the band stops playing. So it makes sense that after the towering guitar drones of MY LIFE'S WORK, the 24-hour thing from a couple of years ago, I'd want to sing and scream and yell and boogie in the way that we do on YOUTH PASTORAL. Mostly this year I've found myself much more interested in the instrumental stuff, but I recently wrote my 2nd and 3rd song of 2020, so I might be coming back around to singing shortly.
If you could give one animal species (besides people) the ability to fly which would it be? Why?
I think the capybara ought to be given the ability to fly. I've always found them to be so regal, so calm...there's a self-assuredness in their lightly squinted eyes...when I see a picture of a capybara I am always calmed and soothed...if they were to be found in the skies above us, effortlessly sailing through the air, breathing in the cool breeze, I think we would all benefit as a species. We could all take a moment to appreciate them.
Who are your favorite musicians active in NYC right now?
Well I'd like to plug basically everyone on Whatever's Clever, the collective label I'm a part of - Scree is one of the best bands I have ever seen and they recently played an actual live gig with 2/3rds of their members, Ian Wayne played that show, too, and he's got one of my favorite ever singing voices...they might be the most "active" musicians I know of, in terms of actually playing! And Caitlin Pasko just put out one of the most emotionally startling records of the year, it's gorgeous...But everyone on the Whatever's Clever roster rules (cough cough, ahem: https://whateversclever.bandcamp.com).
Other musicians I love in NYC who may or may not be active there again soon ~
OHYUNG put out an amazing album this year:
https://chinabot.bandcamp.com/album/protector
boio puts on a chaotic sloppy and joyful live show that I miss terribly:
https://boio.bandcamp.com/track/ball
And on the dance music end of things I love AceMo and have been digging into the catalog deeply lately:
“ECSTATIC JOY” is listed in your Bandcamp bio. What is the significance of this phrase, and how has it shaped your work?
"Ecstatic joy" is a convenient shorthand for the type of big, celebratory, confetti-explosion burst of human energy happiness I'm looking to savor at all times. At first I thought it was a good description of what I was trying to do musically - I wanted the band to be LOUD and I wanted it to be FALLING APART A LITTLE and I wanted everyone to be SMILING on stage and in the crowd alike. But after I got it tattooed on my chest I found that I wanted it everywhere - wanted to burst out laughing uncontrollably, wanted to sweat profusely on a treadmill, wanted to dance until long past the sun rose with a shit eating grin plastered across my face. It's all I ever really want - the safety and security and presence in a room or in a space to let those loud peals of laughter echo around. That's what it's all about!
Any final comments? (This is your electronic soapbox for one last answer.)
Hm, I guess I'd just like to say something I need to hear, which is that we all need to work harder to make sure that we're keeping up and really checking in with our loved ones...it's been a long and kind of terrible run for most of this year and we're all fatigued...it feels like a chore to setup a phone call with somebody after spending all day online but it's worth the effort, tell someone you love them today, take the extra time to engage with someone else, see how someone is doing. There's so much assurance and unspoken communication and love happening when we gather in a room and we're all missing that very badly!