"Pound to the Beat" is the new single by Chicago-area musician, Mary Lemanski

Voice-first bluetooth earrings with a swappable module bring day-to-evening glamor to earphones

Snyder's book has received 29 industry awards. His father, pilot of the 'Susan Ruth', was shot down over Europe during WWII. 'Shot Down' is a dramatic retelling of the stories surrounding that event.

The Authors Show® is a publishing industry podcasting pioneer, producing author interviews since 2005

Indiegogo campaign will launch on September 20, 2017.

The COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic has shown the dire need to have essential health goods manufactured in the United States, rather than places like China. Startup company SerraeX is aiming to change this with their ambitious new crowdfunding campaign

The HASHWallet Indiegogo campaign is out! Sign up and get 30% off and Free Vault service.

Blue Frog Robotics has launched its adorable companion Buddy robot on Indiegogo. The robot has many features. It can be a personal assistant, playmate or security robot.

Read more on howtoweb.com

DUALTONE MUSIC GROUP has partnered with THINKINDIE, MAGNOLIA RECORD CLUB and WEA/ADA DISTRIBUTION to raise money in support of independent retail record stores through sales of a new, … more

13 Questions You Should Ask Before Backing A Crowdfunding Project on Kickstarter, Indiegogo and Beyond

As per this AskMefi question, I've been selected to be part of a US West Coast spoken word & performance tour in March 2020 and I'm looking to extend that to other places in the US while I'm up there.

I'm in Australia. I've lived in the US before but in the West Coast, so I'd like some assistance in figuring out how to best plan my potential tour elsewhere in a cost-effective and time-effective way. Mainly I'd like some help with working out a route and base itinerary - I can work on organising bookings, but if you can assist with that that'd be great too.

Budget is highly limited but let's chat!

Seattle indie rock stars Car Seat Headrest get a sonic makeover with its electro-charged new album “Making a Door Less Open,” dropping May 1.

Each Playlist Is Categorized By GENRE So You Can Easily Contact The Curators

Follow No One, Colorado-based Vocalist Rich Hall And Portuguese Guitarist Pedro Murino Almeida, Won Best Rock Act At The 2019 JMAs In Dollywood.

Antikvariniai Kašpirovskio Dantys Competed With Bands From Belgium, Sweden, Armenia, Germany, Japan, South Africa, India, Norway, Poland, Italy And The UK As Well As China

"‘Wish I Were Here' Is So Engaging, I Can Hardly Believe It's Their Debut"

Follow No One, Colorado-based Vocalist Rich Hall And Portuguese Guitarist Pedro Murino Almeida, Won Best Rock Act At The 2019 JMAs In Dollywood.

IndieOn Is Confident Of Creating A "music Miner" Who Listens More And Grow Their Token Value

Independent Record Labels Now Represent 38.4% Of Global Recorded Music Market Share In 2016 With Global Revenues In Excess Of $6bn

Clouzine Discovers And Promotes Indie Talents Part Of Discoveries (#16) Tremendous (UK), Jennifer Mlott (USA), And King Fally (Nigeria).

[Written by Don Burgess] A local author has won an international award for her book. Rachel Sawden’s Runaways won the Chick-Lit category in the National Indie Excellence Awards. It was also recognised as a finalist in the Next Generation Indie Book Awards, which made it one of the few self-published books to be honoured. Runaways […] (Click to read the full article)

The post Indie Means Indie appeared first on Fiction Notes.

Smashwords’ Mark Coker is sounding the alarm about indie publishers (those who write and publish their own works—let’s get the terminology right–it’s INDIE publishers, not the deprecating “self-published”) relying too much on Amazon. I agree with Coker. Two and half years ago, I started advertising on Amazon’s AMS platform. It doubled my sales. But then, Continue Reading

The post Indie Means Indie appeared first on Fiction Notes.

Show notes for Episode #2: Subscribe to the Internet Musician Podcast with iTunes: In this episode, I present “Music Tools for the Indie Artist”, a topic that I recently presented to a local songwriting group.  Specifically, I present the tools and process I use to capture and preserve those moments of musical inspiration–no matter whether they strike […]

Show notes for Episode #3: Subscribe to the Internet Musician Podcast with iTunes: Also in this episode, I discuss the five things you must believe cultivate your DIY music attitude, including: 1. The business has been lying to you. Major label artists are not getting rich off of record sales. Radio is fake. Don’t belive […]

Show Notes for Episode 6: Following my recent appearance on the Film and TV Music Licensing Panel at the MidAtlantic Music Conference here in Charlotte, NC, I definitely have music licensing on my mind.  It’s always been a passion of mind…one of those areas of music marketing that I’ve researched exhaustively for years.  It’s also […]

The company's animation studio has produced a segment of Netflix's "Love, Death & Robots," Disney's "101 Dalmatian Street," and music videos for Gorillaz

The post Nick Southgate Named CEO Of Indie Producer Passion Pictures appeared first on Cartoon Brew.

Portland's beloved indie bookstore Powell's Books rehired more than 100 employees after seeing a surge in online orders.

Earlier this week, Bookshop.org hit $1 million in earnings that will go to bookstores endangered by the coronavirus outbreak.

The Sundance Institute's Keri Putnam speaks about the $1-million relief fund for artists and arts organizations in response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amber Havard and Rob Morgan co-star in "Bull," a drama about a troubled teen in a poor Houston neighborhood who comes under the tutelage of her neighbor.

St. Paul & the Broken Bones, Moon Taxi will headline Holler on the Hill, a new two-day Indianapolis music festival.

BRIDGETOWN, Barbados (CMC): Former Windies fast bowler Kenny Benjamin says that cricket in the Caribbean is suffering from players’ lack of loyalty and commitment and that intervention is required to save the sport. The Antiguan called for coaches...

Crowdfunding has become a popular tool for people and organizations to use to test out their new ideas for green products while securing funds to begin operations. The most well-known crowdfunding websites, Kickstarter and Indiegogo, have helped a significant amount of projects in renewable energy and sustainability get off the ground, projects that have been the focus of previous installments in my ongoing articles series about crowdfunding in energy.

MUMBAI, INDIA – HARMAN Professional Solutions, the global leader in audio, video, lighting and control systems, including networked AV, today announced popular fusion rock band Swarathma, Rajasthani folk singer Mame Khan and percussionist Darshan Doshi...

In Vivarium, a young couple in need of a starter home meet an estate agent who is very definitely not what he seems, and nor is the estate he shows them, finds Simon Ings

(Matador)
Will Toledo’s alt-rockers have emerged out of lo-fi fuzz, but seem unsure of where to turn as they drift toward the mainstream

Anyone wondering how things have changed in the world of lauded US alt-rockers Car Seat Headrest might consider the four years that separate Making a Door Less Open from their last album of new material. Ordinarily there would be nothing unusual about that gap – but in the first four years of Car Seat Headrest’s existence, its mastermind, Will Toledo, released seven albums (one of them a two-hour double), four EPs (one of them as long as an album) and two compilations of outtakes. That’s more than 150 songs and 12 hours of music: a lo-fi spewing forth of ideas that won Toledo a cult following, which then grew exponentially, both in size and rabidity, when he recruited a band and signed to the august US indie label Matador.

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US indie rock maverick Will Toledo is back with an experimental album that finds him collaborating with his own electronic side project

You cannot accuse Car Seat Headrest, AKA Will Toledo, of taking the easy route. Four years on from the release of breakthrough record Teens of Denial, Toledo is back with new album Making a Door Less Open, only now he is going under the name Trait and is wearing a gas mask in photos. Toledo’s restless and impassioned indie rock is looking a little different, too. The new album blends his classic songwriting chops with a bold exploration of electronic textures. This is the result of essentially making the album twice: once as Car Seat Headrest, and again alongside producer Andrew Katz as their jokey EDM side project 1 Trait Danger, before landing on a middle ground.

Related: The Guide: Staying In – sign up for our home entertainment tips

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The two-year-old got very creative with her mum's make-up...

What at first seemed like a potential April Fool's joke has turned out to be real: almost seven years after the original came out, Cellar Door Games has confirmed it's working on a Rogue Legacy sequel. The indie studio didn't share a release date for Rogue Legacy 2, nor did it say anything about potential platforms. In fact, besides some screenshots showing off a lovely new art style, the only significant tidbit of information we got is that Judson Cowan and A Shell in the Pit will return to score the game's soundtrack.

Warm sunny spells for many today, Sunday colder and windier.

Veteran character actor Peter Gerety has a meaty role in Richard Jury's "Working Man" even as the movie shifts from quiet dignity into melodrama.

Nuelle™ Chief Commercial Officer Lesa Musatto briefly shares why Fiera® was created, its benefits and how it works.

Today Kevin’s game, Starcom: Nexus, releases in Early Access on Steam. It’s a thing of beauty, and also a lot of fun. If you like games that take you into outer space where you get to explore mysterious worlds, build a powerful ship, and explode bad guys, you should buy it, and play it, and let your gamer friends know about it. Yes, I’m biased, but reviewers and streamers  - who are not his spouse  - also love it :o). (FYI those last two links go to youtube streaming vids.)

***

Conversation at the dinner table:

Kevin: How was your day?

Me: Okay, I guess. I still can’t figure out how to get this girl to accidentally set her house on fire, then cause an explosion and get stuck in a window grille.

Kevin: I believe in you.

Me: Thank you. How was your day?

Kevin: Okay. When my enemy ships get within a certain distance of each other, they spontaneously explode.

Me: Oh!

Kevin: It’s not supposed to happen. It’s a bug.

Me: Oh.

Kevin: I can’t figure it out.

Me: I believe in you!

***


There are a lot of similarities between the work Kevin and I do. We both create complicated worlds with characters and plots. We’re both entertainers.

Meet your commander.

We have some processes in common: for example, we both study the books/games we love, then try to learn from them. We both think about the things we don’t like in other books/games, then try to come up with alternatives we prefer. We both know how to wear the creator hat; then switch to the reader/gamer hat, reading/playing our own project with a critical eye; then go back to the creator hat to fix what isn’t working. We’re both extremely familiar with the phenomenon wherein you change one little thing, then a ripple effect passes through the entire work, complicating/breaking things in ways you didn’t anticipate.

Meet the Ulooquo, an underwater alien race.

We can also get similarly overwhelmed by our own projects. I’ve talked a lot on the blog about how a book has many parts, and writing a book involves many jobs. Well, a game has SO many parts. It has music and art, visual effects, numerous interfaces, plot and character, mysteries and rewards. It must be able to support and absorb the choices of individual gamers, over which the creator has no control. It has SO many (literally) moving parts!



We also both work by ourselves for years on self-directed projects… then put our creations out into the world, hoping they’ll find the people who will love them.

These similarities are deep. They help us to understand each other’s frustrations and joys, and support each other meaningfully. This is awesome. However, I want to talk a little bit about the differences, which are many.

For example, in my writing career, I have an agent. She connects me to an editor who helps me craft the right words. Then, my editor works with my publisher to create a beautiful physical book, publicize and market that book, and sell that book for me.

An indie game developer, on the other hand, does everything himself, in an extremely saturated market with a lot of roadblocks. He can hire other people to help. Kevin hired a composer and an artist, to help him with his music and his characters (like the Commander and the Ulooquo above). He hired a marketing consultant to do a few things too. But he worked closely with those people, because he knew exactly what he wanted. And everything else has been the work of his own hands. He’s done SO much marketing and publicity work on his own that’s made me appreciate my own marketing and publicity departments even more than I did before. Self-promotion in a saturated market is really, really hard. It’s also stressful for a guy who happens to be humble and was raised with the good-old New England ethos of not bragging about himself :o).

Here’s another big difference: Kevin can release his game while it’s still in production, then use the feedback from early players to shape it and make it better. He can write code into the game that allows him to see how long players play; where they decide to drop out of the game; which options are being chosen more often than others. (He receives this information anonymously, in case you’re starting to worry that he can actually tell what you’re doing inside his game!) As a writer, I definitely don’t know where someone decides to abandon my book. Nor do I want to know, because once people are reading my book, it’s final! If everyone is bailing at a certain point, there’s nothing I can do about it. The words in my book are not going to change. Kevin’s game is more of a living, growing creature, even after it releases, and based on player reactions.

Another big difference is that while I am a wordsmith, Kevin is a programmer. A lot of the time, when I step into his office, he’s working with programming language on his many screens, and I don’t understand the smallest bit of it. My readers read my actual words. His gamers play a game built on a framework of programming that looks and feels very different from the actual game. He also works with a lot of complicated software (like, for 3D modeling) and does a lot of math. He uses trigonometry to [I just asked him to explain it and he said something about spaceships shooting at each other, vectors, and cosines. ???]. I can come home and tell him practically everything I struggled with at work that day. A lot of what he does is too technical for me to understand—though he is really good at creating analogies and explaining things to me when I ask (and when I'm not rushing to finish a blog post!).

Another difference is that he is a visual artist. For example, he created Entarq's Citadel below, which is one of the worlds his gamers get to explore.


Here's another.


Another difference:  I can do my work anywhere. All I need is my notebook and a pen. Kevin needs his fancy computer and his big monitors. So he works from home. Home office and self-employed means he’s working most of the time. Most mornings, he’s working by the time I get out of bed. By the time I leave for my office, he’s put hours in. I come home and he’s making me dinner; after dinner, he works for a few more hours. I go away on trips without him; he works while I’m gone! I always thought I worked really hard. I have a new standard now.

And now his work has created this beautiful, fun game that’s getting really positive attention from gamers and streamers :o). Today, you can buy it in Early Access, and become one of the players who contributes to what it will ultimately become.

And that's my little explanation of what it's like to live with an indie game developer. Check out the links if you’re interested! The trailer is below.

We’ve passed our goal and greenlit one more episode of Multiplex 10: The Web Series, so we’ll get back into production as soon as the Indiegogo campaign ends. But we’re not done yet! We have exactly one stretch goal: for every $2,500 over the base goal, we will produce at least two more minutes of … Continue reading Multiplex 10: The Web Series is FUNDED on Indiegogo!

Palash Kothari. Pic Courtesy/Fahama Sawant

It's a hot, toasty afternoon in Mumbai. We can see bits of the pumpkin-coloured sky through the window blinds. The phone rings once, twice. On the other end is 21-year-old Palash Kothari aka Sparkle and Fade. "I really don't know what to expect," Kothari admits, speaking about his upcoming gig with Bengaluru-based producer-drummer duo Nikhil Narendra and Shreyas Dipali.

The Fringe is a new gig series to be launched in the city, which will feature artistes who create hybrid music. "Hybrid is very open. It can be analogue or digital, classical or jazz, acoustic or electronic, basically the coming together of conventional and non-conventional methods," explains Sainath Bhagwat, programmer at Mixtape, a Mumbai-based artist and event management company.

Nikhil Narendra + Shreyas Dipali. Pic courtesy/Mayuresh Vartak

"In the current scenario, there's a bulk of electronic and live music being made, which cannot be performed/consumed in a traditional club space. The idea for this night was born out of a collective desire to create a platform to showcase these artists in the right environment," Sainath adds.

Unsure of what to call Kothari's music, we dawdle between electronic and bedroom producer (a term used for musicians making and producing experimental music in their bedrooms) hoping to understand the use of Hindustani classical samples in his older EPs. "I am not sure what to call my music either. I began playing the synth when I was three and then, I trained in Hindustani classical. That was my first step into music, so the influence comes from wanting to put a little bit of me as a child into the music I make now," he elaborates.

"I was listening to pop and EDM in high school. Swedish House Mafia's concert in India inspired me to finally put my music out. Then I got bored, because it wasn't satisfying. So, I started making music that I felt right about. I mellowed down a little as a person and I guess that comes through in the sound, which is more solitary now," he says.

For Kothari, while the influences are aplenty, not mimicking takes conscious effort. "I am working on something now. So, I am going to stop listening to other music because it's difficult not to emulate them. I don't see any point in making music that already exists. In effect, this will probably also be my last gig before my new stuff is out," he signs off.

ON: May 10, 9 pm onwards
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Catch up on all the latest Mumbai news, crime news, current affairs, and also a complete guide on Mumbai from food to things to do and events across the city here. Also download the new mid-day Android and iOS apps to get latest updates

Last Sunday evening, nearly 400 people made it to Juhu's Novotel Hotel to watch a screening of Pulp Fiction. What made the evening special was that the "seats" i.e. the gaddas were laid by the pool, with cool breeze blowing in from the Arabian Sea.

It was the first film screening in the city organised by SteppinOut Movie Nights, which has presence across Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore. Ojal Kulkarni, the brand head for the firm, says they chose Novotel for its cool vibe and plan a movie night at the venue every two months.

In a city that's brimming with cinephiles it only makes sense to have non-commercial venues that will screen the classics as well as the indie films. And, Novotel promises to be a killer of a venue. Tickets will range from Rs 300 to Rs 400 and the movies will be chosen after a poll is conducted on their FB page.

But, if you can't wait until then to catch a screening of some well-curated films, along with other lovers of cinema, here are the some of the other venues in the city to watch out for.

West Indies cricketers haven't received their match fees since January as Cricket West Indies (CWI) seem to be struggling to generate funds amid coronavirus pandemic which has stalled the game.

According to a report published in ESPNcricinfo, international West Indies men players have not been paid their match fee for the Ireland series at home and the subsequent tour of Sri Lanka in February-March.

Meanwhile, international women players of the country are owed match fees for the four matches they played in the Women's T20 World Cup held in February-March.

"Cricket West Indies is facing a tough time financially," CWI chief executive officer Johnny Grave told ESPNcricinfo. "Whilst all of our contracted players have received their salaries and allowances, and some players have received prize money and match fees, there is still money that is outstanding and we are trying to settle these player payments as a priority."

"We are two months behind making match fee payments," he added.

West Indies players' association secretary Wayne Lewis revealed players have been receiving their allowance salaries but not their match fees.

"The players who are contracted, their monthly salary (and allowances) are up-to-date," Lewis said. "The problem we are having is the retained players in the regional first-class competition have not been paid their match fees for the eight rounds that have been played so far."

Former Pakistan captain Ramiz Raja has also pointed out that it will become increasingly difficult for cricket board across the world to continue giving salaries to players and staff if matches are not held in the near future.

"Cricket fans are starved now and the coronavirus pandemic has brought life to a standstill but I don't think cricket boards can survive for long like this. They can't continue to pay out salaries and expenses without having cricket activities it would be disastrous for them," Raja said in a video uploaded on his Youtube channel.

"I would also urge the Pakistan Cricket Board to think on these lines and hold talks with other boards to see how cricket activities can be resumed even behind closed doors."

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England's trio of young spinners led them to the Women's Twenty20 World Cup semi-finals on Sunday with six wickets between them in an emphatic 46-run victory over West Indies.

England are hopeful of returning to international action on July 8 for a three-Test series against West Indies behind closed doors following the coronavirus pandemic.