Stop Updating
So Shall You Be
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.
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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:
Stop Updating, pre-release on Bandcamp
620 Film Processing
Seefeel - “So Shall You Be”
Stop Updating, pre-release on Bandcamp
My next album, Stop Updating, is on pre-release at Bandcamp. By pre-ordering, you can get the title track now and the rest of the album on Monday, January 6, 2025.
The streaming service release date is Tuesday, January 7, 2025.
It’s 82 minutes over seven tracks of cinematic space electronica with syncopated rhythms and a couple of ambient chillout tracks.
Most tracks are very long. I listen to this music while walking, being in the gym, or otherwise doing things that take some time. I have heard it on cheap earbuds, in my car, and on my excellent Grado headphones.
Everything you hear on the album was recorded live. It's probably hard to believe, but it's true. There is zero overdubbing here. All tracks were live-mixed. Processing and sound manipulation was on-the-fly. I did some editing on the ends and normalization of the audio in post-production. There is no way I could reproduce any of this from scratch.
Stop Updating, the album, is inspired by the burden of modern tech and my father’s illness and death in 2023.
620 Film Processing
After my dad’s death in 2023, I was cleaning up my parents’ basement and found some undeveloped rolls of “620” film, a type that hadn’t been sold since the mid 1990s. My dad never took photos. I assumed it was from my dad’s father, Vinton. Like my dad, Vinton also wasn’t a photographer, but my dad still had some of Vinton’s things.
I took the rolls into a local photography/frame shop. They said it would take a while and could cost a bit of money. I opted for the cheapest method of delivery, digital files.
Only two of the rolls had images, all black & white. One roll had seven. The other had three. Many were grainy/blurry.
The pictures were definitely of Vinton’s little acreage, located on the north end of Centerville, Iowa. Other images were of the original Lake Center Mall, located next door and completed in 1975. My guess is that the photos are from early 1976. Lake Center Mall, barely a “mall” back in the day, was mostly destroyed in 1999 by an arsonist, and only partially rebuilt.
After Vinton died in 1988, the estate sold the property so a Super 8 Motel could be built there. My wife and I and our toddler daughters stayed at the Super 8 when we drove to see “GG”, my grandmother and Vinton’s ex-wife.
The 10 pictures cost me about $70, which I felt was worth it. Even if it had been random photos of nobodies, or nothing at all, developing film is like solving a mystery.
The above image was created using my art process of printing on a thermal ribbon printer, applying ink, and then employing various “reductive” techniques to make everything more scratchy.
Seefeel - “So Shall You Be”
Another new release from Seefeel in 2024, their second this year. They had been dormant for over a decade. I was into them in the mid 1990s starting with albums like “Quique”. They’ve maintained their aesthetic: a kind of heavily-processed, guitar-triggered electronics.
Qobuz, the streaming service I use, classified their latest release, “Squared Roots”, as “Classical - Electronic or Concrète”, and I think that’s very appropriate.
“So Shall You Be” sounds to me like a small classical ensemble that is making minimalist music through electronic processing of instruments.
For this listening link, I’ll use one that everybody can access: Bandcamp.
Wear good headphones, I like Grados.