Part 48 of 48.

My Life's Work is 24 hours of guitar improvisations recorded over three nights, August 2017.

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I recently had the opportunity to rifle through a bunch of shit I left at my parents lake house in Missouri the summer I graduated college. That was 8 years and a season ago now and most of this stuff I hadn’t thought about or even remembered ever possessing. It’s now wallowing and slowly eroding away inside purple plastic tubs kept in a storage unit in Las Vegas. I took a quick inventory. There was my yellow melodica, purchased at a flea market in Berlin when I was 17, along with a felt replica of my yellow melodica, don’t remember who made it. A beautiful tambourine, a set of bongos, an old transistor radio. There were old LPs from various people’s collections - I recognized my brother’s taste in 90s hardcore and power metal and my dad’s love of fusion. Most of them are warped and probably won’t play right, but I took a few under my arm anyway. There were three unlabeled VHS tapes, no idea what they are. Books I read in college, graded papers, notebooks full of notes from classes. I can barely read my own handwriting. The hat I wore at my college graduation plus some of the decorations from a party I don’t remember. A kaleidoscope. A “don’t tread on me” flag. A signed picture of the Beach Boys I received in the mail at age 7 after I sent a letter to their fan club. Brian almost wears the big tweed suit and beard comfortably, with dignity, but he’s in the back, obscured behind Al Jardine. Mike Love has “USA” written down the sleeve of his leather jacket. There was another picture of the Beach Boys, too, this one larger and unsigned and in sepia tones from their early, striped shirt days. The contrast and the gulf of time between the two photos is astonishing. There was the label from an antique can of squid given to me by a docent at a maritime museum in California in 2008, neatly preserved in plastic. High school yearbooks full of inside jokes indecipherable to adult me. There was a really official-looking commendation from the state of California recognizing my efforts in organizing a charity dodgeball tournament at my high school on behalf of the victims of a tsunami. A copy of my high school girlfriend’s child modeling headshot. 3 paintings by Steve Keene I won in a raffle in 2009, one of them is a quickly rendered version of the album cover for Neil Young’s “Everybody Knows this is Nowhere.”
All of this took me back. It took me aback, too, but the thing that really got me was the amount of correspondence I held onto, how many letters and postcards I accumulated. I found a note from my friend on the night of my senior thesis recital - there’s a facsimile of an Agnes Martin piece on one side and him saying he believes in me on the other. I don’t remember receiving the note or having read it or why he apologizes at the end, but the physical proof of it existing, of it having been in a box next to a lake for the last 8 years, gets stuck in my throat. There’s a letter from a friend of mine written on a particularly large leaf. We don’t speak anymore, not out of anger or out of anything other than growing apart. Her handwriting is craggy and hard to make out and the more I handled the leaf the more it crunched, pulverizing in my hand. I remember getting really stoned with her once years ago and throwing a frisbee around and giggling nonstop, a pure and simple moment of boneheadedness. And now we don’t speak, but there’s this leaf. There were two photos of someone I once considered my best friend, tucked away discretely behind other powerful totems of my history. Some days I feel that I ruined that friendship, other days I feel it’s his fault...

A project by Ben Seretan. Hotline coding by Johann Diedrick. Recorded overnight at Spaceman Sound. Released in collaboration with Infinite Best.

My Life's Work - 48 - Far Away From Where I Am, Further Still From Where I Was

**ECSTATIC / ELECTRIC**
"Whatever's clever"
Super down to play weddings

My Life's Work - 48 - Far Away From Where I Am, Further Still From Where I Was

benjaminseretan