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.

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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)

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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.

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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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New: Lying Mouth (free mp3)

Lying Mouth

Every once in a while, I’ll have a “down day” like I was having today. I decided to get some sunshine and head outside to work on this month’s playlist (coming along nicely, down to 100 more tracks to sort through now) to see if it’d help with my mood. ( I love netbooks ) It did, a little. But then I watched a new Tweet come through from @DT4F (Doyle and the Fourfathers), letting me know that William Doyle had sent me an e-mail. I jumped on to my gmail immediately to find 2 tracks that would have been a 2010/2011  solo project under the moniker “Lying Mouth” waiting for me to download. This improved my mood significantly, until I heard them…..

And my mood skyrocketed into the ionosphere, just as the sun finally made its way through the clouds. These are magnificent tracks. I love Doyle And The Fourfathers’ stuff, but I was a fan of William Doyle’s music long before the band existed. I look forward to any music from William, solo or otherwise.  He gave me permission to release them, and I am doing so here as well as on the June playlist. I think you’ll like them too, as they are vocal heavy and walk that fine line between the future and nostalgia without crossing back over into “I remember when” territory. Great songs, too. I hope we hear more from this project someday (Total Strife Forever?) , as long as it doesn’t cut into the wonderful output of DT4F.  So here they are…

Lying_Mouth-Dripping_Down

(right-click-save-as)

Lying_Mouth-Looking_For_Someone

(right-click-save-as)

Keep your eyes open for the June Playlist. I hope to get it done this evening. You’ll know it’s close when my Twitter icon changes and the bugs come out to play.

(and watch for 2 torrents this time, to make it easier for people to get the initial 69 tracks by separating the extras, which are getting out of hand and making the torrents HUGE. I am tentatively calling the extras torrents “INDIE69 – Tasty Leftovers – Month Year”)

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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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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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.

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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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New Playlists – A Few New Finds

Just a quick post to let you all know I found a few new playlists and one I think I missed before while taking a break from going through the hundreds and HUNDREDS of tracks in the SXSW torrents(as well as hundreds more for the April playlist). Watch for that best of SXSW torrent soon. It won’t be called “Indie69’s Best of SXSW” since I’m not interested in calling attention to myself with this little side-project, I’m just interested in making it easier for people to find the great stuff swimming in that gigantic OCEAN of new music. Daunting project, but there are some great tracks in there. My hope is to simply make the process easier for you by eliminating the Holiday Inn sounding acts and the indecipherable oddities (not in a good way). Also eliminated are the Cookie Monster Metal, cookie-cutter screamo, band-of-the-moment sound-alikes and general *suckiness. When you get down to the meat of these torrents, there are some real decent finds. Again, I’m trying not to select tracks based on my personal tastes and instead on my instincts and ability to spot quality work. (meaning overall quality, not just sound quality which would preclude pretty much all low-fi an any genre with the word “wave” in it)Watch for that thing soon. I’m still not 100% on the need for it, but I’m going for it anyway just to see how many people grab it. No promises on when it’ll be done. Days perhaps. Before the April playlist for sure.

These playlists appear to be very dance-music heavy, so if you focus on that area of music, these might be nice for ya. These were all found at TPB. I’ll be looking around again elsewhere soon for other more obscure monthly compilations and playlists. Enjoy! If you like them be sure to come back and comment on the torrent pages to encourage these people to keep it up. I know from my own experience that these things take a lot of time and effort, and the encouragement is as nourishing as a home-cooked meal.

All 3 links are TinyURLs leading to TPB torrent pages.

Partyaids – You can grab their Feb playlist HERE. The torrent description describes the playlist as… “Hailing from Melbourne Australia, a small group of professional DJ’s and music enthusiasts spend their free time uploading killer content on Partyaids.tv . We scourer(sic) the internet and hit up Melbourne’s famous nightlife to find you the best tunes. It’s tough but someone’s gotta do it.  We published both unsigned and signed artists. You are bound to hear some completely new and mind blowing tracks. Nothing makes the party aids team happier than uncovering fresh new local and international artists. DO NOT FEAR IF YOU HEAR A FOREIGN SOUND IN YOUR EAR – It’s just refreshingly good music the radio and media have deprived you. ”  Sounds like a fun way to do it. 581.39MB and 63 tracks for the Feb playlist.

Muusika playlist – Musiaylist (LOL!!!) By HR. Janno – Now I’m not sure if it’s the bug that named his playlist a “Musiaylist”, the very same bug that did the same thing to mine a while back, or if it’s a kind of tribute or participation in the inside joke. Either way, I got a laugh out of it. Grab Vol 1  HERE . I only recognize a few artist on the list of tracks, which I find very interesting. Since so many of the artists have “DJ” before their names, I must assume this playlist is very dance music oriented as well. Hopefully there’s some good glitchy, technoey, or even 8-bit goodness in there. Could be good. 704.19MB and 150 tracks for Vol 1.

bazinga! Indie/rock playlist – Love the name, and it seems I recall it from my old monthly roundup posts. I’m too lazy to go back and check. In any case, this one seems to be a sort of grab-bag surprise playlist, as there is no file list in the description and the files are in a zip archive. So no way to tell what’s in there without downloading it. I’ll have to pass for now since I’m so busy already going through the SXSW tracks. But that won’t stop you from grabbing Vol 14 (!!) HERE . 139.3MB and 20 tracks for Vol 14.

That’s it for now. Hope you get some good music out of those, you music junkies. (like me!)

*Please, if I left your band out, don’t take it too badly. I decided to pick 100 tracks, max! So some decent music was thrown out in the process. I had to narrow it down or the point of it all would have been lost. It doesn’t mean that I think you suck. Besides,it’s not my fault that you sound like an Alannah Myles or My Chemical Romance cover band.  BAZINGA!