Indie 69 Best Of 2012 AND Jan 2013 Playlists Out Now

Here it is, finally. I know I said in the NFO for the Jan playlist that the blog is dead (for now), but I figured what the heck. I might as well pop back in.

I’ll make this brief…

There are two playlists available now (and a few I have not blogged about) that are pretty new. Jan was released yesterday and Best Of 2012 was released a few days ago. I think the Best Of 2012 is the best playlist I’ve done, but that’s not my work… it is due to the amazing tracks that came out this year, even though it was not a great year for me personally. A lot of this music really saved me, lifted my mood right when I needed it. So here they are….

Indie69 Best Of 2012 Playlist can be had HERE.

Indie69 Jan 2013 Playlist can be  had  HERE.

Enjoy and I’ll see you in Feb for my 4 year anniversary playlist.

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Indie69 March 2012 New Music Playlist Released

Who is that mysterious female?

Well, at long last, it has arrived. Let me explain…

I got busy,  I got distracted,  I “got late”.** (If you want to know what’s really going on, I’ve written a form-letter-like explanation. Just e-mail me and ask at the e-mail address provided below. I don’t want to *bum out* everyone.)

The good news is that the March 2012 playlist is here. It is my first playlist for 2012. My first in months. There are really, really new tracks here as well as the best of the tracks I had ready for several aborted playlists. There are some really amazing tracks on this one. I always say that, really. But this time it’s really, really true.

It seems at times that even the elements are against me when it comes to these monthly things. Just as I was putting the finishing touches on the playlist and browsing the files ready for the best of 2011 playlist (coming soon),the power to my entire neighborhood went out. No files were lost, thankfully, but I had to sit in the dark and just wait it out.  All while the clock on my mobile inched closer and closer to my self-imposed deadline of midnight (or quit doing the playlists for good). I had to cheat a bit on my own deadline because I didn’t have electricity! Oh well. I don’t think I could quit anyway. I have too much fun doing these.

Thanks for being patient again and a huge thank you to everyone who left messages and sent e-mails. There was nothing any of you could have done that would have helped make it happen these last few months, but it was nice to know my playlists were missed.

So dramatic, eh? Without further ado, hours  days after my deadline… and months late…..

You can get the Indie69 March 2012 New Music Playlist HERE and in any of the other places you usually stumble into my playlists.

I imagine there has to be at least one or two dupes/repeats. I tried my best to prevent it, but at some point you just have to let go and release the thing.

Special thanks to Catherine for the cover art. So far this year, including this month, next month and the best of 2011, all of the cover art has been submitted/requested art/photos, or my own art/photos. Nice. I’d like to keep it that way this year. So if you want to submit art for the May/June playlists, send it in to:  indiesixtynine@gmail.com

Hope you love the music this month and please remember to seed until it hurts. I’m going to put my headphones on now and bathe in the pleasant afterglow of accomplishment neurochemicals for a while.  I love those things. Combine accomplishment with a nice 2 hour stationary bike marathon and you’re swimming in the suckers. Nothing beats it.  🙂

Be well music lovers.

** If you want to know what’s really going on, I’ve written a form-letter-like explanation. Just e-mail me and ask at the e-mail address provided below. I don’t want to *bum out* everyone. The reason it’s like a form letter is that I don’t want to go through it 100 times writing it out again and again. I’ll respond to any questions, but I can’t go through that over and over. My health is fine, by the way. It’s just… complicated and not for direct public consumption.

Update on downtime

I have said many times that I am *this* close to releasing both new playlists and the “Best of 2011” playlist. Pretty flaky, even for me, the king of procrastination.

This has been true.

BUT.

Each time, I have been distracted and/or occupied with events and situations that have prevented me from giving it the attention it deserves. This time, however, I truly am close to releasing a Jan/Feb/March playlist (called simply the March playlist). This will be followed by a late, yet wonderful, best of 2011 playlist. The best of will take some time (it will perhaps be the latest “annual best of” anything… of all time), but the March playlist is very close to finished (80%, with submitted artwork for the cover and a verbose NFO) and is to be released before the weekend. If not, I will cease doing these playlists. This is not my intention, but I felt it was necessary to give myself some real stakes to motivate me.  And I am tired of making empty promises that I keep breaking. It ends up making me feel terrible. I wish I could explain the extent of the troubles that have prevented me from doing these playlists that I love doing, but I cannot without just…. really feeling exposed.  It’s not trouble with the law, or lawyers or anything like that. I am simply doing a good thing for the people I love and I’ll have to leave it at that. It takes up not only my time, but much of my energy and has had an impact on my desires to do anything but rest during down time. I’ve been doing a lot of resting, vegetating and reading when I’m not virtually making a slave of myself (my choice).

Each time I sit to go through submissions I am called away before I can feel like I’ve really made any progress or built any momentum. This has caused much frustration and has left me feeling discouraged more often than not.

Thank you all for the messages, comments and e-mails of encouragement/concern. I’m going to be fine, and all WILL return to normal soon. This appears to be a yearly thing now, but I will do my best to make sure it doesn’t happen again in 2012.

I am also planning to move the site and finding the right host and platform has been frustrating, so I am setting that aside for the moment and getting on with things.

Fingers crossed, folks. I’ll be doing my best because I love doing this.

Indie 69 October 2011 Playlist Released

Not too cheesy I hope.

Late again. Sorry. There was simply no way to get it done any faster this month. Well, without it sucking.

I think this is a solid collection though.

The extras have some pretty good tracks, too.  Some were just too good to leave out, even though I’m doing my best to go back to the 69 tracks limit. Maybe next month, with fewer extras.

I don’t have much time left right now, so I’ll leave it at that and just let you enjoy the music…

You can grab it HERE and any of the usual places.

See you here or in November.

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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.

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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)

.

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

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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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Yeah, I took the leap. I’m on.. Facebook

So I finally broke down, and although I don’t have a personal profile, I have a “Page” for Indie69 on Facebook now. Not sure if I’ll ever get a personal profile. But if I do, I’ll post about it here first.

So if you’d like to keep track of what’s going on with the Indie69 stuff on Facebook, follow my page or be a fan or whatever it is..

HERE

I looked for a way to add a button, or to make it pretty or something, to no avail. So there it is.

EDIT: If anyone has any trouble adding/following/being a fan of my Facebook page, PLEASE let me know in comment. The whole thing feels wrong and I’m just not sure if I set it all up right or not.