End of the Year Exercises
If I Was the Queen of the Sea
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 email is brought to you by:
Mark Rushton Gallery - for original paintings, metal prints, and tote bags.
License my music, sound fx, and illustrations at Pond5 for your creative project.
I’m on Bandcamp. And all the usual streaming services. I do all my streaming listening via Qobuz, a service that actually sounds great and pays artists.
This week’s topics:
Van Gogh’s Landscape with a Church
Pashto Haze Salag Valari
Norah Jones - “Queen of the Sea”
Van Gogh’s Landscape with a Church
I follow a bunch of dead artists on Twitter and, honestly, that’s a great way to regularly view a variety of their work. It beats dragging home a 50 pound book from the library.
Whoever programs the Van Gogh bot has been serving up the occasional sketch. These are images I would never normally see.
“Landscape with a Church” showed up and I downloaded it to attempt an interpolation using my low-fi thermal printing and acrylic ink process. I thought this version turned out excellent.
This won’t be in my gallery. It’s just to share. It’s an experiment. An exercise.
Pashto Haze Salag Valari
In the past couple of weeks, I’ve crafted some new tabla-based music as Tanpura Express. These were all done in a number of Salag Valari taals (beat cycles / mantras), and processed with atmospheric ambient and electronic effects. They’re all very chill. It’s a modern-era update of Indian classical music.
The 10-track album, Moon Salag Valari, will be released everywhere on January 14, 2025. You can freely stream the track Pashto Haze Salag Valari at Bandcamp. The rest of the album will sound similar to this style:
Norah Jones - “Queen of the Sea”
As I get older, I’m less into yearly lists, like “The Best of 2024” of this or that. I see these sorts of posts on Substack all through December, and I try to ignore it. I suppose if it’s framed in the context of “Here are some things I heard this year and liked” then I’m more likely to take a look.
Half the time, I’ve never heard of any of the bands. Or they include something that I skipped through, knowing full well it’s industry garbage, and a few minutes wasted confirmed my suspicions.
I have to admit that I’ve always liked that Norah Jones. Her debut album sold a billion copies. Every middle aged woman in the early 2000s owned it. There’s nothing wrong with any of that because she is a fine singer and musician. Once everything settled down, I would occasionally check in with what she was doing. Both albums by her “country” side band, The Little Willies, are excellent and fun.
This past week, I was going through the streaming service Qobuz’s selections for “The Best of 2024” and saw that they included a Norah Jones track. I didn’t know she released a new album. The track was an instrumental. With a jazzy sax solo! That was all very good, but I wanted to hear her singing, and maybe something a little more in her “country-jazz” style.
So I found the album, Visions, and enjoyed it. Especially this track, “Queen of the Sea”.