Junto Profile: Mark Rushton

From Des Moines, Iowa: streaming live, and leaving nothing on the shelf

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

This Junto Profile is part of a new series of short Q&As that provide some background on various individuals who participate regularly in the online Disquiet Junto music community.

What’s your name? Mark Rushton.

Where are you located? As of early 2023, I live in the Des Moines, Iowa, metro area — where I grew up. I moved back in the summer of 2022. Working backwards, I’ve lived in Iowa City, Iowa; Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Houston, Texas; and Kansas City, Missouri.

I started making music on the computer after a work colleague in Cedar Rapids showed me a loop-based program during the night of Y2K. Also during my time in Cedar Rapids, in 2005, I started a “live ambient improvisational” collective called Ambient Matyk.

What is your musical activity? Starting in the early 2000s, I’ve created and independently published a lot of electronic music, mainly ambient. I also publish downtempo, beats, drones, cut-up technique / spoken word things, and environmental field recordings. These are released under about 20 different names. My catalog contains over 2800 titles.

In the past decade, most of my music has arrived from iOS apps. I started adding effects boxes a few years ago, and I usually live-mix the final recording. Every now and then I’ll put some loops and beats together on the computer, for old time’s sake. I don’t really play an instrument. I avoid MIDI and deep menus.

What is one good musical habit? In a 2011 interview in The Believer magazine, later reprinted in Salon, Brian Eno was asked about what advice he’d give if he could email himself when he was 20 years old. Eno replied, “Put out as much as you can. It doesn’t do anything sitting on a shelf.”

I first read this in 2015. Eno’s advice was a siren call for me. It gave me permission to release under pseudonyms and experiment with different genres, effects boxes, distribution companies, and see how my recordings are discovered on the numerous streaming services. It also inspired me to release the Disquiet Junto recordings I made entirely on my own.

After 20 years, my fun hobby that made no money for a long time turned into an incorporated business. Today, I can support my family with the income. I wouldn’t be where I am today without applying Eno’s advice as a general work philosophy. I don’t think Eno really practices it. Robert Pollard and Chihei Hatakeyama do something similar.

What are your online locations? Most evenings, I’m creating visual art and drinking kefir on my YouTube channel, youtube.com/markrushton. Those live videos are rebroadcast on my Facebook page, Twitch, and other video services that are tied to YouTube. I often talk about music and quote lyrics while working on paintings.

It’s difficult for me to hang out with most musicians, so I don’t do it anymore. I’m enthusiastically pro-streaming, and many aren’t. As far as I’m concerned, distribution is everything, or at least a starting point. It’s a grind to find listeners, especially in the genres I work in, but they’re out there.

What was a particularly meaningful Junto project? I really like 0393, where I made a new composition out of my favorite parts of three previous recordings.

Most of the music I create is original, but every now and then I like to combine past recordings to make something new. It’s like that William S. Burroughs quote, “When you cut into the present, the future leaks out.” I’ve been a big fan of Burroughs’ “cut-up technique” since first hearing it around 1986.

Do you think cut-up technique is even more trenchant today than it was in Burroughs’ time? Cut-up, when applied to musical passages and beats, rather than strictly words, became the total basis for turntable-based hip-hop music and then sampling.

Did it take effort, after reading that Eno quote, for you to change your attitude about releasing music, or was it more like a light switch being flipped? The Brian Eno quote arrived to me in 2015 when distribution to streaming services was becoming cheaper and quicker for independent artists. When I started releasing music in 2004, it took forever to get on every digital download service. It’s not like today where you upload your tracks and they’re on Spotify tomorrow and Resso in a few days. Back then, Pandora’s process was curated, you got approved, and then you had to mail them a CD which took months to get digitized and into their system. It was like a 6 month wait.

For Eno to say this in 2011, when the interview was conducted, seems very prescient. Spotify only arrived in the US in the summer of 2011, but it really wasn’t until about 2017 or 2018 when subscription-based streaming services seemed like they were here to stay.

Even though I released more music and sounds after 2015, it took a while to get traction. There were a lot of frustrating hurdles along the way. Looking back, I think the music industry is way better for independent recording artists today in 2023 than even five years ago. People might disagree with me, but I don’t care. I’ve been through the fire.

You also sell your paintings online. Is working in painting commercially similar to doing so with music, or is it quite different? Visual art is like that AC/DC song, “It’s a Long Way to the Top (If You Want to Rock ‘n’ Roll),” because there’s no wide distribution network. And I wouldn’t say a website that hosts artists or their artworks is a distributor because discovery is a pain. Most visual artists are terrible at marketing online. It’s a hard road. I put things online, but my main focus for this year will be pop-up shows at local events. A lot of my paintings get used as cover art for my sound recordings.

On Repeat: Synth, Oliveros, Khosla

Home/office playlist

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Brief mentions each Sunday of my favorite listening from the week prior:

▰ Beautiful ambient track from the England-based musician Oscillator Sink, a solo piece on the Lyra-8 synthesizer: droning, slow-motion, grainy atmospherics.

▰ The ensemble Apartment House, founded by the cellist Anton Lukoszevieze, has recorded a full album of works by Pauline Oliveros, Sound Pieces, for the Another Timbre record label. Four of its 13 tracks are available to preview on its Bandcamp page. Deeply felt performances, played with admirable patience with patient listeners in mind.

https://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/sound-pieces

▰ Tightrope is a characteristically beautiful and intriguing, in equal parts, album from Michel Banabila, the Rotterdam-based musician. The “rope” in question might be the strings of a violin, given the textured ambient orchestral quality of the music. It begins with tension somewhere between the work of film composers Carter Burwell and Bernard Herrmann, and then unfurls into something graceful and glorious.

https://banabila.bandcamp.com/track/tightrope

▰ Also, Siddhartha Khosla’s music for the new TV show Rabbit Hole (a conspiracy-fueled thriller starring Kiefer Sutherland) is fantastic. It has some of the most unusual instrumentation, glitchiness, and sampling I’ve heard in a major TV production in a long time. I don’t think the score itself has been released yet. I’ve heard and enjoyed his music in Only Murders in the Building and The Mysterious Benedict Society, but this is next level.

Scratch Pad: Jordan, Molvær, Fiction

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually each Saturday, usually in the morning over coffee: collating most of the little comments I’ve made on social media (as well as related notes), which I think of as my public scratch pad, during the preceding week. These days that mostly means @[email protected] (on Mastodon). Sometimes the material pops up earlier or in expanded form.

▰ You almost have to admire how when DuckDuckGo doesn’t have a useful response it just shoves a bunch of unrelated stuff at you at random.

▰ The laptop keeps changing “mapo tofu” to “mayo tofu” and, well, ick

▰ RIP, saxophonist Kidd Jordan (1935-2023), one of the greats. I think the first time I saw his name may have been as part of the title of the last track (“Kidd Jordan’s Second Line”) on a Dirty Dozen Brass Band record, The New Orleans Album (1990), but I soon grew to learn about how much further out his music went, thanks to his work with Hamiet Bluiett, William Parker, and many others. Here he is live with drummer Andrew Cyrille just four years ago at the Vision Festival in Brooklyn, in June of 2019. Aim to be this vibrant at 84 — or, heck, at any age:

▰ It’s called The New York Times Spelling Bee but it should be called The New York Times Teaches You Random Words for Fish and Plants.

▰ Watching a new Nils Petter Molvær performance means keeping the video open in one tab while tracking down details in another on whoever else is in the band, because the trumpeter has always got great colleagues, here percussionist Erland Dahlen and bassist Berger Myhre.

▰ I read a bunch in March. I finished three novels and a long book of short stories in the process. The novels were Chemistry by Weike Wang, The Terraformers by Annalee Newitz, and Box 88 by Charles Cumming. (I reviewed the short story collection for a magazine, so I’ll wait until it’s out before mentioning the book here.)

Homeland Intelligence

Listening while home and away in Lauren Wilkinson's novel American Spy

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“It is humbling to have your social fluency, your sense of yourself as a competent, independent person, upended by a foreign city.”

That is the narrator of American Spy, a 2019 novel by Lauren Wilkinson, talking not to the reader so much as to her children. The framing device of the book is that it is a tale told by her (a Black American FBI agent who may or may not have once moonlighted for the CIA) to them while she is evading an unseen enemy — as well as interrogating, through flashbacks, what got her family into this troubling situation in the first place. While the stakes in the book are highly personal, much of it hinging on the circumstances surrounding the death, years earlier, of the narrator’s older sister, the scope of the story is international, its second half occurring largely in West Africa.

Her observation about “social fluency” occurs as a response to an earlier situation, back in Manhattan, when the narrator, named Marie Mitchell, was guiding a head of state around the city (that character, Thomas Sankara, is an actual former president of Burkina Faso). The dignitary was flummoxed at the time by the enormity of the city’s noise.

Now the tables have been turned, and Marie is in his country’s capital city, Ouagadougou, finding herself dependent on the kindness of strangers to navigate a place where no sensory input is familiar. “I thought of the afternoon in New York I’d spent with Thomas, the way he’d been surprised when we were in the park and those kids on bikes had whizzed around us,” she reminisces. “He’d sounded embarrassed when he’d said he’d been unable to pick out the bikes from the ambient city noise, and now with a teenager practically leading me through Ouaga by the hand, I thought I understood why.”

As always, writers of fiction about spies need to be good listeners in order for their characters to be. You can fake an NGO. You can fake a counterintelligence operation. You can’t fake paying attention.