The next Mark Rushton album will be called Extra Spaces.

Track listing will be:

1. The Long Drift (9:00)
2. Montage Yen (17:30)
3. Spacious Landscape (18:30)
4. Extra Spaces (26:53)

It should be available in early-to-late September 2010, through iTunes, Amazon, Napster, Rhapsody, etc, as well as “pay optional” at Bandcamp.

Web page for Extra Spaces will be here.

Bandcamp will be hosting all the free downloads.  You can get everything either as 320 MP3s, FLAC, AAC, OGG, or ALAC.  If you don’t know what all those formats are, just get the MP3 version.

The way I figure it, if everything is free then more people will download and listen.  If they like it, then maybe they’ll pay eventually, or buy some merchandise like a t-shirt or an art piece, or listen to my stuff on a royalty-paying service like Pandora Radio.  If they don’t pay ever, that’s OK.  If there’s something they don’t like, it can be deleted.

So, here are some links below to the particular albums on Bandcamp that are available now.

The Driver’s Companion (2004 – electronic rock, chillout, ambient, dance)

Hum and Drift (2006 – ambient, chillout, world, electronica)

Regeneration X (2007 – downtempo, chillout, electronica, ambient)

Mark Rushton and Jon Harnish (2008 – ambient, soundscaping)

Flow (2008 – ambient techno)

Ornate Culmination (2008 – live, improvisation, electronic, soundscaping)

Ambient Matyk (2009 – live, improvisation, ambient, avant-garde, field recording)

Three Sketches EP (2010 – soundscaping, ambient, minimal)

Themes For Boundoff.com (2010 – compilation + 3 new tracks)

Before the Ambient Matyk – Live In Iowa City 2005 album is released, I’m putting out another freebee very soon.

It’s called Themes For Boundoff.com and features full tracks of music that have previously been used as snippets for the intros, transitions, and background music for the Boundoff.com literary podcast.

It’s a free download from Bandcamp at http://markrushton.bandcamp.com/album/themes-for-boundoff-com – and you can preview every single track fully.

Track listing:

1. Brush Creek (6:16)
2. Potential Ride (3:37)
3. Memory Trigger (3:25)
4. City Car (5:33)
5. Post-Rock (4:31)
6. Anoka-Hennepin (3:05)
7. Pajarito (5:21)
8. Flow (8:41)
9. Free The Airwaves (3:46)
10. Preemergence (3:53)
11. Whiteout (6:19)
12. Minus Eleven (3:28)
13. Perpetual Vision (3:53)
14. Bell Sketch (3:20)

City Car is previously unreleased.  Potential Ride was released as a free download via Soundcloud.  Bell Sketch has been available as a free download via the Three Sketches EP as well as via Soundcloud.  All other tracks are from previously released albums of mine.  Everything was created between 2002 and 2010.

The “Three Sketches” EP is now available at the Audio Gourmet netlabel.

Track listing is:

1. Bellsketch (3:20)
2. Fieldsketch (4:10)
3. Owlsketch (7:20)

Visit:  http://music.audiogourmet.co.uk/album/three-sketches and grab some of the other free EPs as well.

1. Birds and Dogs (7:56)
2. Evening Air (6:22)
3. Evening Breeze (9:42)
4. The Lost Walk (7:26)
5. From Here To There (3:19)
6. Open Sesame (1:56)
7. In The Sky (5:51)
8. Washington Cherry (13:54)

Jon Harnish – bass guitar, zoom fx box, bass amp
Mark Rushton – laptop, loops, sony acid pro, bose L1/B1, sony minidisc recorder

It’ll be released for free via Bandcamp first, and then eventually on pay services like iTunes, Napster, etc.

Why have these recordings taken so long to be released?  I think at the time we felt that we’d just release them via the podcast since they were recorded outdoors, but now with all these services like Bandcamp where we can just make it a free download album then that’s easy to do.  If people feel compelled to buy or use a subscription service to download then we’ll give you that option.

Bend at Imagekind

Simple Blue at Imagekind

Ambient Matyk is now a free download at Bandcamp.

It’s available in 320 MP3, FLAC, AAC, and other formats.

Anybody can download it.  No restrictions.  No money.  No email addresses will be collected.

Jon Harnish and I made the decision today to give it away.  It’s just after the 2nd anniversary of the Flood of 2008 for Cedar Rapids.  We recorded this outdoors under a tree at the end of July and beginning of August 2009 right after the Matyk Building in the New Bohemia arts neighborhood got electricity hooked back up.  We ran an extension cord out the back door and hooked up our equipment and played outdoors.

We think this is an amazing album of improvisational live electronic music coupled with the ambiance of a re-emerging neighborhood wrecked by flooding.  It’s not for everybody, but we want to have as many people listen to it as are interested.

- Mark Rushton, June 14, 2010

Made in 2002 when I was stringing together sounds made by others in order to try to create my own sound. Things have changed since then, but this is still a great electronic-driven groove-rock track. Previously unreleased, other than on my MP3-only data compilation CD called “Florilegium (MP3s 2000 to 2003)”.