(Newswire Today) —  Iowa City, IA, United States, 2008-02-11 - Ambient musician and podcaster Mark Rushton has two new releases. A solo album, Flow, is just out. Rushton also has a new album with bass player Jon Harnish.

To celebrate the releases, Rushton has announced that the new albums and his back catalog have been made available at the low of price $3.95 per album in MP3 download format from CDBaby for a limited time.

The music on both instrumental albums is a haunting blend of atmospheric keyboards, field recordings, sound loops, and bass guitar.

On “Flow”, Rushton strung together improvised sections of pulsating quiet electronic sounds into beautiful melancholic layers of warmth and texture. Opening track “Pajarito” sets the tone for the album, which ends with the 15+ minute ambient opus “That Was A Different Life”.

On “Mark Rushton and Jon Harnish”, the pieces feature more instrumentation and a wide variety of audio palette as heard in the stark desolateness of “New Bohemia” to the droning industrial hum of “Brine” and the shortwave-sampled “Money Agent”.

Rushton - talks about why he has dropped the price on his pay-download albums:
“Many people still haven’t purchased a download album, or are maybe on the fence about doing it, yet they have these MP3 players.”

“CDBaby sells DRM-free MP3s, which means they can play on any player. The quality is very good, a 200 kbps variable rate of MP3. If your hard drive crashes, you can go out to your account at CDBaby and download again what you had previously purchased. CDBaby takes credit cards, Paypal, and even international buyers can join in and take advantage of an exchange rate that is favorable for them. It’s a really easy process, and at less than $4 an album for my catalog right now, you can’t really go wrong.”

“The world is going digital for music. We should stop worrying about expensive CDs with their surfaces that get scratched and the tiny artwork compared to albums, or even the breakable plastic jewel cases. Let’s embrace the new medium fully.”

Rushton (markrushton.com) and Harnish are planning on some live dates in the spring of 2008 and hope to do some live reinterpretations of their songs which will be included in future podcasts.

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