Local Waves at The Local is a new free series at The Local curated by Mike Amari/Chosen Family in partnership with Wave Farm's WGXC featuring Hudson Valley artists performing original music.

Sunbeam of No Illusion is Thayer and Seretan’s first official collaboration on record, though they’ve performed together in a wide variety of contexts since 2023. Drawing on the resplendent natural world of their shared upstate New York the pair calls forth the specters of the valley.

Ben Seretan (Climax, NY) makes music that is always very something: loud, cathartic, gentle, serene, open-hearted, off-the-cuff. Centering joy, his work takes many forms - a 24-hour-long atlas of guitar clouds, secular praise exploding into crash cymbals, tremendously gentle piano chords on a bed of bugs. He also maintains a correspondence project called My Big Break featuring new sounds and new writing every Thursday.

John Thayer is an audio engineer and multi-instrumentalist (chiefly drums and percussion) whose experiential compositions are inspired by a deep attention to the sounds of the natural world. His recordings, centered around a hybrid of studio techniques and improvisatory performance, range from long-form, multilayered ambience to polyrhythmic electro-acoustic collage. Having been a very active member of the New York experimental scene, his compositions and installations bear wide-ranged influences drawn from his many collaborators over the years.

"We need to think small. We need to think local. When all the music ever created is a swipe away on your phone, it's easy to miss the incredible original artists who are making and releasing music right here in the Hudson Valley. This series will serve as an expansion of the Local Waves radio show I co-created with WGXC (which plays all new, local music every Friday 8pm) to further highlight these acts with a free, monthly concert in a fantastic venue at The Local. I hope that folks will use this series as a way of discovering new artists, and getting to know their neighbors in the process." - Mike Amari

More about Local Waves here.

RSVP for the August 12th show here.