Annex as a Noun
Melodie is a Wound
Mark Rushton’s Abundant Spare Time is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This email is brought to you by the Mark Rushton Gallery, for printed and original artworks. License my music, sound fx, and illustrations at Pond 5 for your creative project. I’m on Bandcamp and all the usual streaming services.
This week’s topics:
An Ambient Chillout Evening with Mark Rushton
Stereolab - “Melodie is a Wound”
An Ambient Chillout Evening with Mark Rushton
It’s official. My first public live performance in 15 years will be on Saturday, July 19th at the xBk Annex, 1163 24th St, Des Moines, Iowa, near Drake University. Starts around 7pm. Capacity is around 40. They have a small bar with some couches and chairs. It’s free.
It’ll be my ambient tracks and projects, but with live processing. What do you call that? They’re not really songs. It’s not exactly like a DJ set. It’s bringing the studio to a small stage and expanding on things.
I’ll have free swag. No live merch, but links and QR codes to the online merch.
What’s the point? It’s to hang out, sit around or stand, talk, look at your phone, and have some ambient sounds swirling around you. There will be bands playing next door, across the patio area, so there will likely be a blending of sounds and I’ll try to play around with that.
(And yes, I changed the name of my publication again - to Mark Rushton’s Abundant Spare Time - it’s an inside joke…)
Stereolab - “Melodie is a Wound”
In the early 90s, I became a fan of the band Stereolab and enjoyed most of their discography in that decade, generally described as “slightly noisy French/English avant-pop”. Into the 2000s, their sound had evolved and become more “lounge jazzy” and I began to lose interest. After 2009, the band went on hiatus for a decade.
Last week a new album appeared, Instant Holograms on Metal Film. I haven’t heard all of it, but I rather liked the third track, Melodie is a Wound, especially the Situationist lyrics. It’s a three or four-parter, which they have done a few times with other songs over the decades, and they really whip things up in the final few minutes.
Melody is a wound for me. I almost never go there in my music. I have enough difficulty with chord progressions in my music. (Chords? What chords?) I’m fine staying in the soundscaping clouds.