Cleaning Charles Ives
Moving Into a Musical Future by Tidying Up the Noisy Past
Mark Rushton’s Perseverance in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
This week’s topics:
Cleaning Charles Ives
It’s OK to Disappear
Free Agent Kanban
Slightly Dirty Ambient Beats
Cleaning Charles Ives
Obviously, this isn’t the gravestone of the composer Charles Ives, but I couldn’t help but notice it in the cemetery where I occasionally perform volunteer work.
Like most gravestones under or near trees, or are vertically facing, it needed a little bit of cleaning. I use D/2 Biological Solution, a soft brush, and a pump sprayer with water. Cleaning stones gives me time to think, especially in the evening when the weather is excellent.
It’s OK to Disappear
Earlier in the week, I added It’s OK to Disappear to my DISCO site. I may release it eventually, but for now it’s streaming-only. It’s processed ambient. I’m just trying to figure out how to use the DISCO site better.
Free Agent Kanban
This next week is going to be busy. On June 30th (today, as I write this) I’m leaving the company that was my “publishing administrator” for the past 5 or 6 years, and am going back to self-managing my catalog. They weren’t getting things done in a timely manner. It shouldn’t take 16 months to register a title with ASCAP.
For the past few weeks, in anticipation of this change, I’ve spent time cleaning up my database of titles. I have published and distributed a little over 3000 works. About 1900 or so are musical and the rest are field recordings of natural sounds.
I suppose I should put my “Business Analyst” hat on and create some user stories for all this work. Or tasks. I could probably just craft a simple Airtable base and have it act as a Kanban board.
Slightly Dirty Ambient Beats
This past week, I bought a used Korg Volca beats at the local Guitar Center, and I’ve been messing around with it in my studio live streams - mainly running it through my chained effects boxes. Here’s the first video, which started just a few minutes after getting the device powered on. It’s imperfect, but it goes in some fun places. Hope you like repetition.