Q&A with Mark Rushton
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Mark Rushton’s Interpolation in the Arts is a weekly email on Substack where I talk about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist.
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This week’s topics:
Q&A with Mark Rushton
Laraaji + Arji Cakouros - “NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert”
Q&A with Mark Rushton
This week, I thought I’d try a Q&A format.
Initially, I asked the word robot to come up with some questions, but they were lame. I figured I’d wing it with some recent events.
Q: What was the last concert you attended?
A: EXTC, drummer Terry Chambers and a couple of musicians playing the XTC non-hits and some deep tracks. I saw it at xBk in Des Moines last weekend with some friends. I thought they were quite good. Terry’s still a great drummer at almost 70.
Q: What was xBk like?
A: It was my first time there. I live under a rock. Very nice 250-capacity venue near Drake University. Well-planned out. I’ll be back. Next door, they had just opened up the xBk Annex, a very small space with a capacity of maybe 40 if you’re lucky. I got a card for the booking agent and we emailed. I’m likely doing an “ambient / chill out” gig there in a few weeks.
Q: How long has it been since you’ve played live?
A: I play in my studio most evenings every week. In public, it’s been over a decade.
When I lived in and around Iowa City, from 2007-2022, that town was impossible.
Getting the OK to play on the Ped Mall or in the Environmental Education Center was a gigantic hassle thanks to government bureaucracy. Public Space One, when it was located in the basement of the Jefferson Hotel, was OK, but it moved and was eventually run by idiots.
The Englert, when I helped fundraise for the building’s renovation 20 years ago, said it was going to reserve some time for the community, and I did some things through Jared Fowler’s excellent “I Hear IC”. But after Jared finished grad school and moved away, everything drifted, management changed, and eventually it was going to cost a small fortune to rent the space even if you were doing that under a non-profit and during an off-night. Typical bait and switch. They talk about promoting local artists, but things change.
Cedar Rapids, where I lived from 1997 to 2007, was a little better.
I played The World Theater before it closed. Jon Harnish and I did things at the Matyk Building and CSPS and a club called Emerald Isle. But all that was before the 2008 flood. Everything in that town changed after the flood.
Now that I’m in Des Moines again, I’ve been trying to get a handle on the musical landscape. Ambient and chillout is difficult anywhere because it is a niche genre. Most people want to go out to loud places and look at their phones. I’m trying to establish a quiet space where people can chill, talk… and look at their phones.
Q: What would be your goal with playing live ambient or chill out music again?
It’s trying to build that local cultural community. There’s 750,000 people in the Des Moines metro area. I’m sure there’s a few people who are into this kind of music. I bet there’s people making sounds in their bedrooms and basements who would like to do something live. That’s what I’ve been doing. I’ve been releasing music on the internet, licensing it here and there, and trying to get it on niche radio stations. I’m doing OK with my catalog, but as an artist I’m kinda restless and don’t want to stay in a rut for too long.
I’m 58. Not getting any younger. I don’t really play an instrument or songs, and I don’t want to recreate anything or play old songs. This isn’t about popularity or making money or anything like that. There’s a few artists who kept going as long as they could. People like Holger Czukay, Jon Hassell, or Harold Budd. Laurie Anderson is still making great work. Robert Pollard. It’s always about the “next thing”. I’m sure I’m missing other artist examples. I want to be in that space. Still cranking new things out in my 70s and 80s.
Laraaji + Arji Cakouros - “NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert”
I mentioned Laraaji a few weeks ago when I talked about Roger Eno & Kate St John’s “The Familiar” album morphing into the group Channel Light Vessel in the mid 90s, which included Laraaji.
The story goes that Brian Eno discovered Laraaji playing on the streets of New York and Eno produced Laraaji’s album “Ambient 3: Day of Radiance”, which is excellent.
This is in the realm of where I’d like to go. Maybe not “playing an instrument”, but perhaps more of what Arji Cakouros is doing - she’s credited for “iPad Synth” - I have a lot of those, and I “play” that into my effects rig.