The Idea of Indyish

Yesterday was an incredible birthday party for Indyish, our crazy legged indie arts network. The show, from my perspective, could not have gone better. The sound team from Sala Rossa did a beautiful job, I didn’t hear feedback all night, and the sound was warm and thunderously full dispite the ridiculous amount of complex instruments and acts. The room was near capacity and really diverse and though the show ran from 8 till 1am it felt light and smooth and really just fun because the event coordinator and stage managers worked it like a dream team. The transitions from hypnotic dance, to brief dark drama with tiny puppets projected, to sparse urban electro music video, to huge sound big group singalong with trumpet solo and acapella in between kind of blew my own mind. And headliners Black Diamond Bay and the Maha Choir laid it all on the floor in a sexy sweaty euphoric pounding heap of rock.

We were talking when we got home last night about whether we should have had a cake for our second anniversary, but Elran and I (co-founders, hence we get our way in the matter =) agree, we don’t like anything to take away from the show. All those artists - over 60 in the show in the end - are the focus for us and we just love to watch them do their thing, and try to create a context that inspires new directions but doesn’t get in the way.

These live shows, when they go well like last night, leave us glowing and riding high. They represent the busting forth of the huge well of talent and also of friendship and goodwill, that is loosely connected to this here website of ours and we feel waves of gratitude watching people come out to enjoy and support. Though the audience on the web is bigger, it just doesn’t have that huge kinetic jolt of a live show. The web has it’s own potency though, for sure, and it always brings us back excited to see what we can do with it. We see the Indyish website (which is actually a small archipelago of sites) as a space where this indie inter-arts harmonizing can go on daily with artists posting video, songs, stories, images, opinions… and then it brings it all together monthly in the real world to blow the quiet web’s quiet lid right off.

Starting in the next hours or few days (can’t say exactly) we’ll be expanding the friendly high five network of Indyish beyond what it’s been so far into a new realm of “social networking” (dum da dum.) We’ll flip the switch and suddenly every member will be able to invite others to be broadcasting with us on this site. These are the people we call on to create the shows, who are the growing chorus of Indyish, who inspired and educate and amaze us hourly…

And we can’t wait to meet them!