Second Monday of the Week
Second Monday of the Week
My New Syncopated Groove
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:
Second Monday of the Week
My DISCO.AC Site
How Do You Pronounce Qobuz?
Changes in the Way I Work
Second Monday of the Week
This week’s new release is Second Monday of the Week, 10 tracks of beeping, buzzy, and glacial synths with ever-changing nervous rhythms. Some tracks feature my new Mellotron-like processing pedal, which makes the synths sound a bit more like cellos. That pedal is a keeper.
Second Monday of the Week is available on my DISCO.AC site in streaming form only.
I don’t plan on releasing anything new to the commercial streaming services for a while, and I’ll talk about why in a little bit.
My DISCO.AC Site
If you want to visit my public DISCO.AC site and listen to what I have out there, click this link and it’ll take you to my Albums page.
The music varies between bubbly ambient, calming ambient, film scene music, processed kalimba, drones, and tabla, and my “syncopated beats and weird synth” sounds. It’s all instrumental. I have a lot more music planned for release.
The point of the DISCO.AC site is to publish recordings there and then try to interest music libraries so that the music can be licensed and used in films, tv, advertising, etc.
I already have some music in a library and am looking to get more out there.
Years ago, my wife was watching the Jennifer Garner TV show “Alias” and thought some of the music in it sounded like what I do. That show was from about 20 years ago.
It’s taken me a while to get interested in pursuing making music for this kind of audience. I’m not a typical “composer” and I wouldn’t dare call myself a “musician”. I’m a “recording artist”. It’s taken me a few years of educating myself on this part of the industry - what they call the “sync” side. It’s very complex.
I will likely release new music to streaming services and to Bandcamp in the future, but it might be a while. I’d like to focus on “sync” and see what becomes of it.
But I’m happy to share these sounds with my readers, too.
How Do You Pronounce Qobuz?
After leaving Spotify a few months ago, I switched to Deezer - a French-based streaming service that also operates in the US.
But then somebody on Substack informed me that Deezer also imposed a convoluted, anti-artist, sorta-non-payment scheme. I checked it out and it’s true. So I cancelled Deezer.
I suppose I could have switched to some of the other streaming services that I pay for and never use: Apple Music, Pandora, YouTube Music, and the Prime version of Amazon Music. Why do I have so many streaming services? Well, as an artist who was regularly distributing to streaming services, I needed paid accounts to make sure everything was flowing correctly and to process the public playlists that I occasionally craft. It’s a minor business expense. Out of those four, I like Pandora Premium the best.
Recently, I’ve been hearing good things about Qobuz. It’s also a French-based streaming service. About the same price as everything else. So I canceled Deezer and started an account with Qobuz. Transferred some playlists. Downloaded apps. Started listening.
The desktop version is 24-bit / 48 kHz. That’s high quality. And it sounds great in my Grado headphones. When I stream to my car via Bluetooth, Qobuz sounds way better than Spotify or Deezer did. It’s not even close. I can easily tell the difference in my basic Toyota Corolla speakers.
And then there’s the Discover / Magazine parts of the app. I joined Qobuz on Thursday. On Friday morning, the new releases included some of what you see above. I guess the site is curated rather than “pay to play”. Right down my alley. That Laurie Anderson album is excellent, and I’ve listened to the new Jon Hopkins and it’s very good.
Changes in the Way I Work
I’m almost done with my music publishing catalog transfer cleanup work that started in May. Lots of tickets and updates and database cleanups. It’s been a learning experience. Never give up control of your catalog to anybody else!
I’m probably going to stop livestreaming my music on YouTube. I had been doing some improvisations. I plan to go back to creating music behind the scenes, editing it, and quickly putting it on DISCO.
Because of this, I probably don’t need my Streamyard subscription anymore. I will let that go and simply upload videos via YouTube. By uploading to YouTube, I automatically hit “translator” video streaming channels at BitChute and Odysee, and that’s enough.
I guess this also means I could sell my Focusrite Scarlett, a device I use to output my audio to my computer for live streaming. I got it at Sweetwater and it’s worked perfectly, but I don’t see any other use for it.
I’d like to get back to making visual art during video live streams again. I took a break from that. I’ve been busy this summer.
As I said recently, I plan to leave Art Storefronts when my contract ends in October. I’m just not the right kind of artist for that system. They did teach me a lot of things.