Mark Rushton's Return to Live Ambient Music
Thank you, Streamyard and Sweetwater and Empress and Focusrite and MyVolts
Last night, I decided to test drive a new effects box via a 25 minute live stream to YouTube, Twitch, and Facebook. I think it sounds excellent! If you listen, wear good headphones. I use Grado headphones.
I’ll tell you the story about how I got to this point and where it’s going.
In late 2004, I was living in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, had released my first album, and started making “live ambient” and noise at the World Theater, the Matyk Building, and the Cherry Building. I had bought a Bose L1/B1 line array speaker and thought it would be fun to mess around with the loops on my laptop, make sounds with others, and record it.
By early 2005, I was able to do this more regularly at the Matyk Building thanks to the help of Blair Gauntt, bassist Jon Harnish, and the building owners, Mike & Lynette Richards. I have a lot of recordings from this time period, but a lot of them aren’t the best quality. We did tend to gravitate more towards “noise”.
A good “live” example of what Jon and I produced was eventually released is “Live in Iowa City 2005”, where we played on the Ped Mall in downtown Iowa City around skateboarders, although I remember how reserving the public location was a bureaucratic nightmare. We only did this a couple of times, but the Bose L1 carried our sound a couple of blocks down the street at modest levels.
In 2007, I moved from Cedar Rapids to Iowa City to be closer to my day job, so the Matyk performances ended, although Jon and I did some recording at the old Public Space One location, then located in the basement of the Jefferson Building in downtown Iowa City, and those recordings were released as the Bathyscape album. Some of the tracks feature guitarist Craig Erickson messing around on a Memory Man looper:
In 2008, a flood destroyed a lot of downtown Cedar Rapids, and heavily damaged the Matyk building. In 2009, Jon and I recorded by ourselves outside the back of the Matyk, which was being repaired, and this became the album “Ambient Matyk”. I still think the track “The Water Tower” is amazing, and I should note that most of The Water Tower was Jon doing his thing:
Jon and I have made additional recordings over the years. In 2013, I rented the “Environmental Education Center” building on the SE end of Iowa City, where recycling is dropped off and the Re-Store is located. Out of that session was “Waves and Waiting”:
Since then, Ambient Matyk has mostly been me making “ambient improv” direct into an audio recorder and then releasing it.
The Ambient Matyk recordings have done very little on Spotify over the years, although they seem to have found an audience on Pandora Radio where the “band” is closing in on 300,000 lifetime streams. In the past couple of months, Ambient Matyk has been improving considerably on Amazon Music, gathering a few thousand streams in recent months with zero effort on my part.
Now that I’ve moved to Des Moines, I wanted to try to step back into the world of live performance. But I’m old now and have no interest in staying out late. Finding other people to collaborate with is difficult. So I thought I’d try my hand at live ambient improvisation via Streamyard to YouTube, Twitch, Facebook, and other sites.
My performance rig is very simple, fits in a laptop bag, and is powered by a battery. The effects boxes are mostly by Empress Effects, although I have one by Electro-Harmonix. The power cables to the battery are all by MyVolts, out of Europe.
After consulting with my sales rep at Sweetwater, I bought a Focusrite 2i2 4th Gen audio interface to get the sound from my rig and audio recorder into the laptop. I also bought a new (third) set of Grado headphones.
Along the way, I saw a YouTube video demonstrating the Empress Effects Para EQ Mk II box. I don’t want to overdo with it equipment, but this seemed like a worthwhile edition, so I ordered one and a MyVolts cable.
After the box arrived, I realized I was hooking up a bad cable to it, and had to order a new one. The new cable arrived yesterday and I decided to test it out “live” - with what I thought were excellent results
Now I’m back in the world of “truly live” ambient improvisation.
For me, playing “live” is all about exploration. I mess around with the equipment, try to find something new or interesting, and then move on to the next thing. The point is to keep it as seamless as possible. It’s not easy. I like the challenge.
If you don’t use YouTube, the videos will be on other platforms:
Twitch: https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2045916429
Facebook: https://fb.watch/pSehVl07Qa/
Rumble: https://rumble.com/v49v2u3-live-ambient-saturday-night-with-mark-rushton.html
Odysee: https://odysee.com/@markrushton:9/live-ambient-music-saturday-night-with:d
and eventually BitChute: https://www.bitchute.com/channel/Wm6OcMlyIThS/
I might throw the occasionally live stream on to X (Twitter): https://twitter.com/ambientrushton
That’s probably a longer post than I wanted to write, but I figured I’d supply the history. It’s been a 20 year thing to get to this point.
Mark Rushton is a Des Moines-based visual and recording artist.
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