Timepieces - Bandcamp Listening Party
Attack is What We Lack
Mark Rushton’s Curator Mindset is a place where I talk in 2026 about my ongoing work as a recording artist and visual artist, tech things, and provide music recommendations. This is being released on Saturday, February 7, 2026.
Topics:
Mark Rushton - Muted Blurb
Timepieces - Listening Party on Bandcamp
Google Sites
Phillip Lynott - Yellow Pearl
Mark Rushton - Muted Blurb
The Timepieces soundtrack is now out on Bandcamp. On streaming March 2nd.
Here’s the 24th track on the album, Muted Blurb. It’s sorta meant to be played between 11pm and midnight, if watching the clock. Processed electronic gestures.
Timepieces - Listening Party on Bandcamp
I’ll be having a Listening Party on Bandcamp on March 2, 2026, at 8pm CST. RSVP, if you can make it. I’ll be text chatting with whoever shows up about the Timepiece album.
I attended my first Listening Party a couple months ago, when Damien Jurado released Private Hospital. It was a fun time.
Google Sites
I’ve been experimenting with Google Sites to rebuild a simple information site for my domain.
This past week, I got a small web site built, and adjusted the markrushton.com domain from pointing to Substack over to Google Sites.
Google Sites is part of Google Workspace, and Google Workspace used to be called Google Apps for Your Domain almost 20 years ago. I had that back in the day, and I kept the account.
I’ve found Google Sites very easy to use. Gemini has been helpful with figuring out the techie things. I’ve used a lot of platforms over the years besides Substack: Cpanel WSIWYGs, Squarespace, Wordpress, Microsoft Frontpage (!), “hand-coding” HTML, and I’m sure there were others.
If I had to give advice to others, I’d say: keep it simple.
And don’t reside in the walled garden. Like Facebook. Or Substack.
I’m not leaving Substack. Not yet. I think I might “abandon” it at some point.
I’m hoping to move my mailing list from Substack back to Email Octopus, where it previously was, but I have some additional testing to do with their forms and Google Sites.
Another thing I might do is switch my “blogging” over to Blogger, which can be integrated into Google Sites. Substack has RSS feeds, but Blogger does, too.
If I move my emails back to Email Octopus, they’ll be less frequent. Maybe monthly. You probably don’t need to hear from me every week.
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Substack has become enshittified in the past year ever since BOND and The Chernin Group added $100 million of funding to it. So you get crap like Notes, which is basically Twitter/Facebook reactionary insanity, and now Substack TV, which is YouTube minus the audience.
And lots of bots. Substack has obviously added a lot of botted accounts in the past year. It has turn into LinkedIn, Jr.
It’s no fun anymore.
It is foolish to venture into strange enchanted places if they aren't the places you want to be…
Phillip Lynott - “Yellow Pearl”
I love how, in the late 70s and early 80s, some of the rockers and guitarists started fooling around with synthesizers with great results. Bill Nelson’s early 80s solo records are fantastic. Neil Young’s “Trans”, especially “Sample and Hold”, is on it’s own planet.
Then there’s this: Thin Lizzy’s Phil Lynott essentially fronting Visage or Ultravox for a few minutes.
Everybody forgets that Midge Ure replaced Gary Moore in Thin Lizzy for a tour. Comprehending that is kinda difficult. That’s how Lynott leap-frogged a couple of mountains to go from “The Boys Are Back in Town” to “Yellow Pearl”.
This sure is catchy, even with the primitive synths and bombastic synth-drums. It was probably every rocker’s favorite synth-pop song until Van Halen’s “Jump” came along, but even this doesn’t have a guitar solo. It just has that manic kind or urgency that is timeless, or at least stuck in 1982.
Attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack, attack
Is what we lack