Ben Seretan occasionally releases straightforward vocal-driven indie rock albums like last year’s Allora, but mostly he tends toward the abstract, experimental, and instrumental. That’s the kind of music he delivers weekly in his Thursday newsletter My Big Break. Seretan is compiling the best of last year’s email offerings into a new album called astral projecting into flavortown, and today those of us not on his mailing list get our first sneak peek.

The first track offered up from the project, out now, is a five-minute ambient drone and piano piece called “they wanna hear another heater.” It’s peaceful yet piercing; you might not realize just how intense that background din has become until the song is over.

Some background on the project from Seretan:

Since 2018 I have been sending out new sounds and new writing via email nearly every Thursday. I call it My Big Break. Five minutes or so of audio, 1,000 or so words of writing, straight to the inbox. Sometimes I fail to make something, sometimes I share singles from an LP or promote some other project, but pretty much mostly I keep doing the work. If it were all to be collected in a book it would be over 650 pages. You would need at least 28 LPs in order to fit the music, by some rough math. It’s become a huge and not that closely managed apocalypse bunker cache of content. “astral projecting into flavortown” are the most graceful moments of sonic encapsulation from 2024’s year of effort.

I am not precious about the work but the work is so precious.

What I mean is: there is very little perfection, very little tweaking, very little editing. First thought, best thought, only thought. I try as best as I can to squeeze in a few hours of dedicated labor each week, gathering sounds in a butterfly net and keystroking my spells and remembrances. A cool word I learned recently: scriptorium, plural scriptoria, meaning the room in which medieval monks copied down their illuminated manuscripts. I often feel like a calligrapher, a capturer – I’m taking down what is and what has actually been, not inventing anything out of whole cloth. Get it, grab it, hold on to it – there’s more running through your fingers every moment than you could ever remember in a lifetime.

So the work is a holy labor but it is not belabored. It is coming to you. I am dedicated to it in all its flaws and typos and accidentally muted tracks not noticed in the bounce. And very little else has kept me as sane or kept me as in touch – with the readers, the listeners, the divine. I continue to very much need to do this.

You’ll hear many different worlds and modes of being throughout the course of this compilation’s 77 minutes – ebow laid gingerly on the strings of my home piano, big stacks of vocal loops folding in on themselves, sibilants cascading in stereo, a drumset recorded in a living room in Austin, Texas, layers of cassette tape stretched like a taffy pull, a fat stack of guitar amps captured in a gallery in Detroit. Two of these you might be right to call a banger. And some of these recordings are something of a mystery to me – I am not sure how a few of them came to be. Feels like weird, actual, visitation magic.

To visit and to be visited, to have something to copy down, this is perhaps the sum of all I hope to do with the Thursday email effort. This is the work that I am doing, this is the program I am working. Glittering verses from the breakorium.

Listen below.

TRACKLIST:
01 “a silly little guy on the fabric of your memory”
02 “he’s so much more vocal in his dreams”
03 “fill the bellows of your belly with their mechanical wings”
04 “an upwind conflagration”
05 “they wanna hear another heater”
06 “the screens of phones held to heaven”
07 “a surreal hour of normalcy”
08 “sugar on the breeze”
09 “veiled in the cheesecloth of exhaustion”
10 “a rare primordial elation”
11 “it wouldn’t be so bad if it were just like this forever”
12 “astral projecting into flavortown”

astral projecting into flavortown is out 2/7. Pre-order it here.