Indie 69 September 2011 New Music Playlist

ASCII and ye shall receive

Letter Nate than Beaver, as they say.

Oh that cannot be right. Isn’t that what they say?

Oh, yeah. Better late than never. Very true, unless you’re waiting for an organ.

Minimalist cover art this month, eh? It’s a new trend for me, I think.  For a while anyway. This image caught my eye, as I have been reading a few non-fiction books covering the influences of 60’s culture on science and technology. The best so far has been “What the Dormouse Said – How the 60’s Counterculture shaped the personal computer” (non-affiliate links to Amazon), but I’m still digging into “How the Hippies Saved Physics: Science, Counterculture, and the Quantum Revival” and really enjoying it.  So when I saw this GEM of an old kit computer, AND it said “69” on the display, I stopped looking. Perfection.

If someone tries to tell you the 60’s was a waste of a decade, slam a pie in that person’s face. That person is full of poop. Why not full of pie as well? Mmmm… pie.

Oh, I almost forgot to make excuses.

Here it goes…..

Umm, my dog ate my playlist. Traffic was HORRIBLE! I just found out that one guy, yeah, who used to clip my uncle’s toenails and collect them in jars? Yeah he like, died and stuff. We were so close. TERRORISM! (was scary) My boss made me stay late ’cause Greg called in sick.  My socks didn’t match and it took me 14 days to find a pair.  I was naming my new band and all I could come up with were combinations of  the words tropical, party, vacation, summer, youth, young, camp, ocean, lagoon, river,  a whole bunch of Canadian provinces/cities, and lake.  Weird. Kept.  me.  busy. ( is it just me?? or does anyone else notice this stuff?? )  My playlist fell of the back of my truck.  No, seriously.  And I don’t even have a truck.  Wow.

The truth is actually a tiny bit personal and a little of the same old, same old problems with Internet, memory cards/sticks, etc. When I finally did have time, I didn’t want to do a rush job. It ended up taking a lot longer than I’d expected (or am used to). So there’s that. Seems to be yet another trend. Note to self: Start earlier AND never type “note to self” again….. again.

The good news is…. great playlist.  138 tracks! Another double-sizer.

You can get it …HERE… and in all of the usual dens.

Sorry if you spot any dupes/repeats (songs that have already been featured in previous months). I do my best to catch them. But there are 2 or 3 tracks in there that are not particularly new. Just new for me, and hopefully you too.

See you here and in October.  I’ve gotta get to recording *Camp Alberta Lake Summer Youth Party Vacation Lagoon Kids‘ debut E.P. , tentatively titled “The  End Of Summer Bonfire Singalong E.P.”  Or maybe it’ll be self-titled.  See you here (perhaps) soon and in October for sure.

Cover art credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/drewish/3270049605/
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* the band previously known as “you will know us by the trail of excuses your mom made to herself in order to drink until her pee was flammable and sleep with random bellboys….”

(that’s 4 dots at the end, very important)

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Indie 69 August 2011 Playlist Released

empty.... full

August already? The summer is going by fast, and not as “summery” where I am.  Not much to say this month except that I think its a good , if sparse , playlist this time.

Get it HERE ( TPB link )

No “Tasty Leftovers” planned this month. May be a failed experiment. Hard to say.

Cover art credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/sandcastlematt/2628582339/

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See you here, and in September.

Enjoy. Get some sun while you can.

Indie 69 July Playlist Released!

BANG!

A few days late, but worth it. This one just took FORfriggenEVER! There will again be a “Tasty Leftovers” playlist in July, some time around the 15th. There were again just far too many good tracks to fit into a 69 or even 100 track playlist. And when the size of the whole thing approaches a GIG, you know it’s just too much for one music download.

Not much to say here aside from posting the link. I’ve been busy with a few other things, far too busy to be posting my musings and meanderings here in the old blog. But that will change as the summer moves along. I had some trouble with truncated files again. Somewhere through the process of using memory sticks to bring all the files with me so I could work with them wherever I decided to be for the day, many files ended up with the end of the song missing, or the file going from around 6mb to around 300kb. NOT good. So I ended up spending a LOT of time, last minute, seeking out copies on Hypem. I sent off e-mails to the artists whose tracks I could not locate copies of. Sadly, I couldn’t wait around for replies. So if you are one of those people, not to worry. You’ll get on next month.

I found a few surprises in the inbox as I was going through submissions. One was a very special song by an artist that I love, based upon a true story I wrote. It was moving, beautiful.  I cannot WAIT to get permission to share it with all of you. The other news was that I was sent an invitation to Google Music Beta!!! I’m excited to give it a shot and when I’ve used it for a few days I’ll be sure to write a review up and post it here. Has anyone who reads this blog tried it? What did you think?

So on to what you’re all here for…

Grab the July Indie 69 New Music Playlist

HERE

(and in all of the usual places you steal it from… lol)

SEED SEED SEED!

Hope you enjoy the hell out of it. I think it’s a “very special” playlist this time. Like a very special episode of your favorite sitcom. Except without a victim.

Whatever that means.

Be sure to read the NFO file inside the playlist and give me some of the specific feedback I’m asking. (open it with notepad or your favorite plain-text reader of choice… look for PDF versions in the near future)

Cover Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/frankauge/2646601665

Cover and this document: Creative Commons: Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic (CC BY-NC 2.0)

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/deed.en

See you in a couple of weeks for the Tasty Leftovers. I’m going to have some real fun with it this time.

Indie69 June 2011 Tasty Leftovers Now Released

I can has head?

Okay, so what the hell is this??

Well, these days I’m getting about 400 tracks a month or more. And to be honest, there’s only room for just SO many tracks on the main playlist. And I’ve noticed that there’s SO MUCH good music left over every month, it just gets tossed into a folder and forgotten, for the most part.

That’s not fair if the whole point of this is to get new music HEARD. So I decided to put together a second playlist now, every month (I presume), featuring these leftover tracks.

These TASTY leftover tracks. So eat up!!

GRAB IT HERE!!: GULP!

Yummy.

You may notice a lot more remixes, instrumentals and more obscure experimental or weird stuff here on this playlist. So if that’s your thing, you may like this one even more.

But that’s not everything here… there’s plenty of sweet pop goodness and rock delectibles and edibles to chew on.

Enough eating metaphors to fill you up yet??

groan.

Anyway. Enjoy. And remember, if you found YOUR music here, it doesn’t mean I thought any less of it.. quite the contrary. These are NOT REJECTED TRACKS!! Those go in the trash.

That comes to about half of what I get going into the recycle bin.

Hope you all like it. It was fun to put together. As much as the other playlist. I imagine I will even do this one with quite a bit more care and attention from now on, even throwing
in some older stuff and personal favorites from time to time. A kind of playground for my evil whims. Bwahahahaha!

See you in July, Guy.

Cover Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mohawkalex/4503736486/

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P.S. – The concensus is in. The concensus being that I decided. I’ll put these out when I have enough tracks to justify it about halfway through the month.

Indie69 June 2011 New Music Playlist now available

The mantis quietly judges you.

Well, well. June has arrived. And change is in the air.

…So that’s what that smell is…

I’m going to do things this month a little bit differently. Instead of stuffing a few tracks left over into a folder, and because there are now usually SO MANY good tracks left after I’ve narrowed it all down, I’ve decided to do a second playlist every month featuring what I call the “Tasty Leftovers”.  These are not rejected tracks. These are the ones that I liked but for whatever reason just didn’t seem to fit. Or would have made the playlist just TOO huge. Since I started off about halfway through the month this time with (around) 400 tracks, and STILL didn’t catch up with 100% of the e-mail submissions alone (if you were left out and your track was great.. chances are I just have not heard it yet.. check next month), I decided that it’s just getting far too huge for a convenient download. I cannot imagine everyone wanting to download over a gig of music just from my playlist alone, every month. So now there’s a second playlist (watch for it here) to take care of what was left for the month that didn’t suck. The whole idea of all this is to help this music get heard, new music. And with so much of it being so good, it just seemed wrong to stuff it in a folder and forget about it.  And let’s face it, that’s what was happening. There are only so many hours in a day and so many days in a month. The “Tasty Leftovers” for this month number more than 100 tracks. It’s up to you if you want to grab both playlists or just the main one. If you dig the instrumentals and remixes, the extremely eclectic or bizarre.. you may find a few examples of that in the leftovers. But there are quite a few pop and rock tracks in there as well.

I must apologize, however, for not having the time to double-check for duplicates this time. I scanned over it and trusted my memory this month. I hope it served me well and did not fail all of you. But if it did, I hope it’s not too much trouble to delete a couple of dupes. But let’s get to the playlist now and I’ll save my babbling on for a little further down the page…

You can grab Indie69 June 2011 New Music Playlist HERE and at all of the usual places you find it.

I would also like to announce my official intention to move the site to a new host with more flexibility, even though I adore WordPress.com. There are just a few tiny, specific reasons why I want to move to a new place. One of them is better community flexibility and more direct control over ways to submit music, as well as a specific interface I prefer at the new host. IF you are interested in guest blogging, let me know. I’m interested in finding music lovers who would like to post short reviews and mp3 downloads. Although I adore music criticism, I prefer to focus on what you DO like rather than posting articles about things you hear that you do not. I find very little value in being “warned” about bad music when so much of it is available for free. What’s the risk?? If I like a sample track, chances are I won’t HATE the album. And if I hate the sample track or single, why on earth would I buy the album? There’s no risk anymore which kind of takes the purpose of a lot of the criticism and flushes it right down along with things like Blockbuster stores and floppy drives. It’s still really enjoyable to read a well written review, and there are so many of those out there. But when things go negative these days, I tend to find myself wondering about things like motive and personal issues rather than the music. Is it just me? I’m not saying  “love everything you write about”, I AM saying “don’t write about music that you think is terrible”. There are exceptions, of course.  If something is so terrible that it becomes humorous or compelling in some other way, by all means write about it. I also ask that the focus be on new music or specific genre. If this all sounds fantastic and you’re okay with just getting a link and credit, get in touch at indiesixtynine@gmail.com . I expect to start the move this month.

Coincidentally, May was this blog’s best month ever, stats-wise. That was nice to see.

I hope you love the playlist(s) this month. Keep in touch, I love the e-mails and submissions. You know where to find me now on Twitter and Facebook (personal profile coming soon, I think). And keep your eyes open for the “Tasty Leftovers”, expect to wait no more than a few days, if that long. Comment if you’d rather see it arrive halfway through the month instead.

..and remember, always.. SEED SEED SEED! (even the old stuff.. I just re-seeded all of the 2009-2010 playlists)

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Indie 69 May 2011 New Music Playlist Released!

Do not taunt happy playlist fun ball!!

Funny story. See, I was up all night finishing this sucker, mostly because it’s  couple of days late, but partly because I’m just like that. Once I get really rolling on a project, it can be VERY difficult for me to set it aside and finish it later. So I pull all-nighters. But I feel good, because this is a great one. And what makes it special is the huge number of artists that I’ve never, EVER heard of. And I could not, again, narrow it down to just 69 tracks. What I did instead was try to place the more “out there” tracks toward the end of the playlist, in the 80s and up. I suggest that you listen to the whole thing, but if you have limited time up front, this will make it easier if you know that the VERY strange tracks and instrumental-oriented things are at the end. I guess. It just depends on what you consider “strange” and “out there”.

I also had some really great, positive conversations with artists last night as I was reaching out to a final few at the last minute. And one of them was with the artist at the number one position this month, “New pyjamas”, someone I could only find a single blog post about. And the track I included, “fishing” really surprised me. Can’t wait to hear what he does next and I’ll be sure to share whatever I can when it happens. But enough of my chitter-chatter. If you want more info, a few links and more of my rambling on, see the NFO file in the torrent, which you can open with notepad or any old plain text editor. But for now…. finally….

Indie 69 May 2011 New Music Playlist – which you can GRAB HERE. (TPB link, tinyurl shortened)

840 MB , 114 Tracks.

I’m a little extra proud of this one, the music I picked, and how it just flows. It’s a good one. So if you like it too, please spread the word. Link to this blog, re-tweet the link to the torrent and my related tweet. Just generally spread the word. Let’s get this one to as many ears as possible. And the same goes for the other playlists out there such as Blalock’s, Criznittle’s and the others. All of which can be located using indierockplaylists.com .

Summer is almost here now, too! I think it’s going to be a great one for new music, if this is any kind of preview. There was just so much more than usual. I’ll see you in the blog posts and on Twitter @indie69 .

Okay.

Enjoy… shutting up now. I’m a little delirious now, off to bed.

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Image Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/crashmaster/2331011051/

Sasquatch! 2011 Playlist upped.

Everybody Run!

I didn’t do this one, but it looks pretty good and has a TON of tracks.

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I would have loved to have been there, and if you’re like me and couldn’t make it this year ( I heard it sold out) ,  this will give you a “nice” reminder of what you missed.

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This features 350 tracks, it’s a big torrent. And rather than the usual 1 track from each act, there are multiple tracks from many. I have no idea if this is official in any way whatsoever. So it’s up to you. It’s also over 2 gigs, and so far only has one seed. But that will change soon as it’s being leeched heavily. It should not take too long to be well seeded.  (EDIT: as far as I know, these are not live tracks)

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Get it HERE.   ..Enjoy. Just a heads up. (TPB link via tinyurl)

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Image Credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jonathanmcintosh/4297597790/

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Indie Rock Playlist Database (new site/service)

Old school database

I discovered this service/site when its creator, Javier Fernandez, e-mailed me for permission to include my playlists in his database. I of course said yes and was immediately curious about the whole thing. Well, it turns out it’s a great service. If you’re looking for a song based on title or artist or even just want to see what was on the playlists in a particular month or year, this could be a convenient way of doing it. And the potential is there for it to become even more. It’s also nice in the sense that this is another sign of these playlist things becoming more like a larger community, with associated and related services, aggregators and forums (which BIRP is the best at IMHO, great site).

Check the database out HERE and try a search.

I’d been meaning to write about this for a while but somehow set it aside and forgot to get back to it.

Currently the database uses Criznittle’s original Indie Rock Playlist, BIRP, Jimdo, The IndieRockPlaylists.com site, Indie69, last.fm and myspace, although I’m not sure how the database uses data from last.fm or myspace. Perhaps this is a future addition or feature. Hopefully the site will eventually include Samy’s, Cut The Crap, SaG’s, Shankly and PlayIndie. The database interface is simple, clean and to the point. No bells and whistles. I like that, a lot. I can just imagine how useful something like this would be if it could also get an unlimited “firehose” of data from a site like Hypem. Wondrous! Or perhaps even bypass the use of another aggregator/curator like Hypem and just seek out the direct rss feeds of particular blogs that feature artist and label submitted promotional tracks. You could have the future of free legal music search encompassing the best of both music blog curation and the playlist community. The database could be useful to artists as well, as a way to track their exposure.

The only bug I noticed was with bands that have “and” in their names, which is quite a few. If you use the word “and” , some bands won’t show up.  Eliminate the “and” part of the band name and they DO show up, with some of them using “&” instead of “and”. (*another reason why I avoid using characters like “&” in filenames) Once you have results you can sort them by artist, song title, file size, length of the track, the month of the playlist, the year and the playlist (IRP, BIRP, Jimdo, etc etc). This is a great service to both music fans and the playlist community, and I hope Javier continues to work on it in the future. Fantastic work. It’s even available en Espanol !

Image Credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/adesigna/3237575990/

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* I have come under fire for my “weird” file naming structure in the past, but this is just another example of why I’m right and this criticism is based on a lack of understanding. (OOOH, arrogance!!)The way I name files is standard based on being the most compatible with things such as databases, alternative operating systems and file systems.  But the way I do it balances between being human-readable and machine-readable quite nicely. I certainly didn’t come up with it myself. This is why I avoid empty spaces/special characters. The rest is just logical. The dash represents a division in the file name clearly pointing out when the band name stops and the song name begins. The underscores are used because using a dash would be confusing. Duh. 😉  And seeing as how many don’t even include the name of the band in the filenames when they create mp3s lately (hrmph) , my way is at least an improvement in that regard. Having learned to use computers on a machine that was not running windows, (not linux) a filename with empty spaces within it seems alien to me and always will. Endrant.

Indie69 April 2011 Playlist is out!

Sorry, no April fools joke this year*. Just couldn’t come up with a good one. Saying I’m quitting is old hat now, so it’s just played out and tired to do the same old thing over and over. Bleh.

So this year is the year I decide to leave the jokes and pranks to others.

The music is a big improvement over March, with many happy surprises. I’m going to leave it at that for the most part and just remind you that I love music submissions ( indiesixtynine@gmail.com ) and if you search sxsw on TPB you will find my best of SXSW 2011 torrent. I picked what I thought were the strongest 100 tracks out of the thousands that were made available this year at the official site and the unofficial torrents of said tracks.  Get that thing here. (tpb link via tinyurl)

But I know what you really want…

Indie 69 April 2011 New Music Playlist (TPB link via TinyUrl)

Grab it, seed it, share it, talk about it, use it to decide what to buy! Find a way to support the artists you love. Then do it. Vital.

I expect May to be my official celebratory playlist, double length. February was my real anniversary, marking the start of my THIRD year of doing this. Crazy, I know. It doesn’t seem like that long, but there it is. I was in far too bad shape at the time to really do it justice. But I’m far better now. So look out. See you then, and in between here.

Image and cover art credit:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/thraxil/1387925406

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*Oops, 96 tracks instead of 69. Must have mixed up my numbers. My bad.

Best 100 of SXSW 2011 (unofficial) Released

(unofficial) Best 100 of SXSW 2011

Well, after weeks of hard listening and extreme ear fatigue, I finally sifted through the thousands of tracks available in the Unofficial SXSW torrents and selected/curated what I feel are the best 100 tracks of the bunch. Now, of course, my opinion will vary from many others. But my selection process weeded out only what I felt were either sound-alikes or not representative of musical ideas that captured the independent spirit (as nebulous an idea as that is) or just simply sounded like crap, and not in a lo-fi way. I also assumed that listeners would want variety, which would include tracks that sounded good but were not my “cup of tea”.  I narrowed it down to 134 tracks from the 1154 tracks in the two unofficial  torrents representing the promotional tracks made available on the official SXSW site for this year. Then I went back over that 134 and narrowed it down to a very difficult 100 tracks. That was tough, dropping tracks that I thought were great but not as great as others. But I finally did it and here it is…

Best 100 of SXSW 2011 (unofficial) *tpb link*

Grab it if you want a decent cross-section of the good stuff this year but don’t want to download 6 and a half GIGS of music to do so.  I did this because I figured that most people wouldn’t want to devote that much space to something that would probably only yield about 100 tracks they’d want to keep anyway. (for most, probably much, much fewer) I found as of yesterday I’ve kept about 20 tracks. I did have a few duplicates in there. If you download my playlists and other’s, chances are you will find a few duplicates as well. I really hope this is something people will want and if they end up downloading it in droves, I’ll do it again next year. (unless I’m actually there… in which case I’ll most likely do it many days after it’s all over due to being worn the hell out)

Indie69’s April Playlist is coming, hopefully early this time instead of the usual lateness. Enjoy this in the meantime.

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