Earlier this year, this site’s Downstream department output was increased to daily from weekdaily, to seven days a week from five days a week. The goal wasn’t so much to increase the number of recommended free downloads, though that was an obvious result. The goal was to free up space for repetition. In other words, I wasn’t as interested in increasing the number of musicians I highlighted as I was in increasing opportunities to repeat appearances by specific musicians. The thinking was, the more slots available, the less stingy it will feel to focus on more than one occasion on the same musician.
Mark Rushton is such a musician. Based in Iowa City, Iowa, he has produced an extensive array of ambient music that has a rural intent, due in large part to its frequent rootedness in field recordings. A recent track added to his soundcloud.com/markrushtoncom account, two minutes and twenty two seconds titled “Machine Shine,” veers from the lush haze common to his work in favor of something, per its title, more mechanical. Despite which pulsing mathematics, it still retains a simplicity and elegantly threadbare quality that marks it as clearly his own.
Track originally posted at soundcloud.com/markrushtoncom. More on him at markrushton.com.
The first appearance of the word 
When an album cover shows Minecrafty visions of interstellar pixel sheep, one shouldn’t be surprised that the music has the kind of canned bliss often associated with early digital synth music. There are two tracks on Le Voyage du quadrupède by Pecora Pecora, and the opening, “Vent ionique,” indeed has the pulse and sheen and automation of mid-period Tangerine Dream at its most pop-kosmische, but the second, “Las Valse de Gogol,” drops the metronomic activity in favor of something more sinuous and burbly and wavering. It still sounds primed to serve as the score to a midnight event at the local planetarium (a brief liner note provides the album’s program: “A quadruped takes off aboard the Pecora Pecora spaceship on a trip across the infinite and the discovery of a timeless planet”), but it’s also subtle enough for general use (
Puppet State Shaman by Chairs, on the TVK netlabel, is border-state music. It’s Fourth World music, as sonic futurist Jon Hassell envisioned it. It is the sound of cultures rubbing up against each other and producing, as a result, these fractal associative patterns of chance aesthetic convergence and contrast. At times the music of Chairs, who are based in Houston, Texas, has the feel of a neighbor’s plaintive rituals heard through an inadvertently open window, of an old-world festivity restrained by the needs of privacy (by the challenges of assimilation), yet still seeping, relentlessly if patiently, into the world.