That happy looking fellow above is Ben Seretan, a Brooklyn based artist. A lot of Ben’s work that I’ve heard consists of song cycles so these are not short pieces. Last year he put together a series of sunrise concerts at Silent Barn, an all-ages art incubation space in an outer borough of New York City which featured a host of talented New York musicians. The film below was made during the summer of 2013.
I spent two months living in Southeast Alaska, living on a former college campus and playing guitar in their old steam power plant building, often during long, lazy sunrises. I rehearsed a certain amount of continuous time each day, logging almost 70 hours of uninterrupted improvisation. I recorded a number of these sessions, and layered them into two tracks.
In addition to playing guitar, I also hiked into waterfalls, went swimming all the time, watched sunsets from the tops of mountains, helped process thousands of spawning salmon, etc. I took my camcorder with me most of those places. I’ve compiled some of the things my camcorder saw into this video, a format I’m tentatively calling a collaged home movie. It’s in two parts – Side A, and Side B. Each is about a half an hour long.
The film is best viewed in full screen mode.