Indiecater Records

Oh I know, it’s only the first day of a new year but this record from Belfast’s Burning Codes deserves to be released at the start of a new beginning. Given the excesses of the last while I can’t think of anything as pure and cleansing as this. Paul Archer’s (Burning Codes leadman) gospel fuelled emissions are a thing of beauty and serenity, a perfect calming sensation, deep reflection put to music. We’ve been enamoured by the band for a while now and they’ll always hold a special place in our hearts as they opened our very first compilation back in June of last year. ‘Burning Codes’ is an absorbing listen, something that can easily play in the background as you stitch your plans together for the forthcoming year. This is the perfect slowdown for a world that gets more frenetic by the day. ‘Burning Codes’ came out in late October 2008 and should you wish to buy the CD instead of our digital offering please visit the Burning Codes website.

We spoke to Paul recently and asked him to give us the background to the recording of the album.

‘‘Basically I’d been living in The Fens since coming over from Belfast in March. During this time I was writing, singing, touring, and playing with my previous band, the Ghears (now on a break). Through a set of various circumstances we were given an opportunity to move to a large wooden bungalow in a quiet village high up in the forest, above the village itself just beyond the town of Corby. We had a lot of hard work and commuting for many months to get the house ready as it required extensive work. When we had a housewarming my brother Iain came up from London with his old pro tools rig and he very kindly loaned it to me. I stared at it for about 3 months thinking ‘but I’m used to 4-tracks, then studios and engineers etc.’. Iain kept calling me and asking, ‘Have you done anything yet?’ Finally 3 months later I thought, the only way I’m really gonna be able to do this is really to disable my songwriting conventions and to try to make myself as vulnerable as possible and fly by the seat of my pants and see what happens. Very strangely this seemed to unlock these long hidden inner messages almost like pulling out a plug and many of these codes are flowed out! I would sit in my large white studio room looking out at the trees, watching the wind blow the branches, sometimes even encountering deer and the like and I found a whole new kind of place, a massive place full of light and hope, empathy and discovery, experimentation, melody, innate feeling and expression, harmony, vulnerability and great awe…’’

‘Burning Codes’ is certainly different (although the keen eared amongst you may hear latter day Spiritualised creeping through) and we’re so proud to offer this album to you. It costs €4 which gets you all 11 tracks (+1) and the original artwork and lyrics. As a bonus this digital release also includes a glimpse of Burning Codes next album. The ‘Away’ demo is completely realised but Paul has plans to take it in a different direction when his sophomore is recorded with the help of several friends sometime later this year.

Listen To The Album Before You Buy It!

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Free Download: Cloak & Dagger

Press Quotes

‘As quietly awesome and deeply intimate as catching the first glimpse of dawn from a secret solitary place.’

AU Magazine

‘A truly remarkable debut album’

Hot Press

‘affecting to the point where I get emotional every time I hear it’

mp3hugger

2008 has been our most exciting year and by a strange coincidence it has also been our first one too! After several reissues and compilations we now present our last release of 2008 and it’s a cracker, a Christmas cracker to be precise. ‘An Indiecater Christmas’ is the work of 17 brilliant bands from all over the world. As you’d expect some have been very clever in taking potshots, others have played it straight down the middle and then there are some who’ve clearly never heard what an archetypal Christmas song sounds like! That said we think it’s magic and a great addition to the canon of Christmas releases that you will be able to return to every December. As ever with indiecater releases the majority of the income from the sale of this album goes straight back to source so while you dance around the yuletide log you can also be assured that you’ll also be warming the pockets of these talented acts. Happy Christmas and here’s to a great 2009! Oh yeah, read what the press are saying about ‘An Indiecater Christmas’ here.

So here it is, An Indiecater Christmas, the full line-up!

1) The Cloud Room - Melody, Like Snow (Dancing Around The Christmas Tree In New York)
2) Nina Hynes - Twinkle (Fixing Fairy Lights In Berlin)
3) Kill Krinkle Club - Songs Of Noel (Playing Twister In Dublin)
4) Bill Baird - Christmas In Jail (Throwing Snowballs In Austin)
5) Idaho - Santa Claus Is Weird (Leaving Cookies Out In Los Angeles)
6) Venice Is Sinking - The Grey Line (Putting Up Decorations In Athens, Georgia)
7) Normandy - Merry Christmas, Blogosphere! (Ice Skating In New York)
8) The Very Most - This Year, Christmas Came November 4th (Playing Santa In Boise)
9) Remington Super 60 - Here Comes Christmas (Wrapping Presents In Fredrikstad)
10) Jape & David Kitt - I Will Cry This Christmas (Sobering Granny Up In Dublin)
11) The Specimen - Wish It Would Snow (Listening To The Bells In Brooklyn)
12) Nonstop Everything - There Is No Santa, Little Boy (Pulling Crackers In Pittsburgh)
13) My Teenage Stride - Is It Christmastime Already? (Hanging Mistletoe In Brooklyn)
14) Dora Flood - Coastal Winter (Carving Turkey In San Francisco)
15) Loxsly - Santa Got The Spins (Feeling Stuffed In Austin)
16) Track A Tiger - Once In The Wine (Singing Carols In Chicago)
17) The Winks - Action Figures (Stoking The Yule Log In Montreal)

All this including some unique artwork and messages from the bands for just €6.50!

Listen To An Indiecater Christmas Before You Buy!

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Free Download: Nina Hynes - Twinkle

Read what people are saying about this album here.

Thanks also to Twig, Magical, Beautiful, Seaside Stars, Peppermint Wad, Beau Jennings, Burning Codes for their wonderful submissions!

Free, torrent, rapidshare, mediafire, yousendit, sendspace, .rar - thanks for visiting you! please buy our album instead of trying to snag it for free, the money goes back to the artists you know so you will feel good inside when you do the right thing!!! we are really glad you think it is good enough to download though.

Not only is this a great album but it also provided a small group of us the opportunity to act the eejit for a couple of years around the mid-nineties. For a time there was nothing to beat the Brilliant Trees experience. The Finglas band had an exhilarating live presence which meant their gigs were raucous events full of jangling guitars, energetic vocals and intermittent football chants (!). ‘Friday Night’ was the bands sparkling debut; stacked high with indie anthems it also carried a message (listen to the lyrics on ‘Home’) which gave the record extra gravitas. Alan Hoey’s vocals were instinctive and lead the line superbly and his accelerated delivery was only matched by the freewheeling chiming chords. We’re very proud to present this reissue to you, it means a lot to us and hopefully in time it will become something you’ll treasure as well.

To give some perspective here is Tony Barrett from the band with his version of what happened on ‘Friday Night’.

“I suppose after 12 years since the recording of Friday Night I can look at the album through slightly less rose tinted glasses than I did then. Never the less I think the record has worthy moments of which I am to this day still quite proud. An honest record put together on a shoestring and recorded in 10 long hard days at cannibal studios Dublin. I cant help feeling we were among the fore runners of bands which tried hard to pull Irish bands away from a rock oriented sound towards a new sound, jangle down stroke guitars with melody sweet voices and politics. Songs from the city in which we lived. I remember playing a TV show at the time and the presenter described us as rough diamonds. I suppose Friday Night was a bit of a rough diamond too, but hey who wants to be polished.”

Listen To Friday Night Before You Buy!

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Free Download: The Brilliant Trees - Don’t Believe The Right

Press Quotes

‘The Irish quartet walk in the cemented footprints of early-’90s shoe gazers Ride, Catherine Wheel, and the Stone Roses, while their predominantly jangly guitar rhythms chime in pop perfection worthy of the La’s.’

Amazon.com

‘If you put Billy Bragg, the Smiths, and the Jam into a blender, you might begin to describe the Brilliant Trees’

The Boston Pheonix

‘Talent ruffled the Irish charts and those who bothered to seek out the album could see that the Brilliant Trees were a sublime prospect’

mp3hugger

*** If you’ve read this far then you are really a fan and we’re thankful. Listen to the closing exchanges of ‘You Have Changed’ and you’ll hear an instrumental at fade out. It is taken from a song that the band never recorded called ‘If I Die’. In saying that it made it onto a radio session (for the Dave Fanning show) and we’ve got a really lo-fi (i mean really lo-fi) version of it so if you’d like to hear it just give me a shout and I’ll email it on. Love this band. ***

This one is a departure of sorts for us (again) in that ‘Youth Is Wasted On The Young’ is neither deleted nor hard to find. In fact if you still believe that mp3s are the devil’s spawn you can buy the CD from here. But, as you’ve probably suspected by now we are 100% digitally minded round these parts so are proud to offer Michael Knight’s fabulous debut for the all inclusive price of €3.50. For that you get the music, the original artwork and the cosy feeling that you are directly supporting Richie and the gang. That and the fact that once you’ve crossed our palms with paypalness the whole package can be yours within minutes (or seconds if hyper broadband be thy name). No wasteful packaging, no aimless rummaging, just good music in an instant.

‘Youth Is Wasted On The Young’ came out in 2005 and since then it has hasn’t strayed too far from our attention. In fact for most of December that year Mr and Mrs Indiecater danced around like mad things with the album as our private disco. At the time I was a Belle & Sebastian obsessive (wavered a tad since) so the perfect little cherubs that were ‘Waves To The Shore’, ‘Leaving Town’ and ‘Seasons’ put a spring in our step and a glow in our heart. But, the delights didn’t end there, no ‘Youth Is Wasted On The Young’ is scattered with genius like moments that never lose their sense of fun or sweet melody. You’d have to look long and hard to find an album so well endowed with winning tunes and that’s why we are intent on doing our best to bring it to as many new people as possible.

Anyway, enough of my blathering, it’s always better to hear it from the horse’s (or foals in this case?) mouth so here is lead singer Richie Murphy’s version about how ‘Youth Is Wasted On The Young’ was brought to life.

“To the minority in any way familiar with my working methods, that the first Michael Knight album’s journey from genesis to completion was inordinately long should not come as a surprise. To the remainder, presumably, it will be simply a neutral fact at the start of an already increasingly dreary sales pitch.

It took approximately two years of rampant inefficiency to complete the record, which began after the release of the No More Lonely Knights EP at the end of 2003. It took seven or eight months to rehearse the (mostly already written) songs, recording was relatively swift (more on that later), mixing dragged on a little but then artwork dragged on A LOT. Mainly because it took stupidly long to figure out a suitable “concept” on my part – the artists and design people involved were infinitely more organised. Depressingly, this pattern was to be repeated with the next record. The recording was probably the most fun, no, interesting, no, expensive part, as is inevitable for anyone’s first experience in a REAL STUDIO.

Was it exciting? Being the sort more easily shaken than stirred, I can’t claim to have been rabidly and uncomplicatedly enthused, if for no reason other than that the time spent in the studio alternated between ecstatically listening back to newer recordings (a pox on flattering studio monitors) and disappointedly listening back to older recordings (…whose flattery could only go so far). Being an actual three-piece band who were all good friends and mostly sequestered for the recording period was a fun aspect, and contrasts with the more piecemeal approach of the second album (which brought its own rewards too, I must confess).

In terms of the music itself and how it sounds now…it’s hard to say. It often sounds like someone else’s record now, which is what one hopes for if they’re to progress artistically (though there may be other explanations, such as personality disorders). It’s clearly quite a different record to the newer one in some respects, but I often recognize similarities, or anticipations, or echoes (in the other direction), and then there are the moments of joy that are entirely unique to it. In some respects it’s like reading an old diary and lamenting forgotten aspects of oneself.

Finally, a pointless anecdote about the recording itself…the engineer received a text from the owner, informing him that if someone identifying themselves as Bono were to call the studio phone, they were Bono, and he should take the call. Given the utter pointlessness of such a directive, you can probably guess whether he called. If not, the answer can be found in the sleeve notes.”

Listen to Youth Is Wasted On The Young!

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Free Download: Michael Knight - Waves To The Shore

Press Quotes

‘they sound like a charming hybrid of Belle & Sebastian, Camera Obscura and delicately sung Burt Bacharach numbers’

Gareth Maher, Cluas

‘redress the indignity of this album’s criminal disregard and pick it up now’

Lauren Murphy, Entertainment.ie

‘This is quite a lovely debut’

IndiePages

‘the only musical kitt you’ll need for your home, portable or, of course, your car stereo’

Indiecater ;)

What started out as a once-off compilation consisting of unreleased tracks from some of our favourite bands has quickly mushroomed into something resembling a record label (!). For the most part it has been great fun and a lovely way to give something back to the talented musicians who fill our evenings with such sparkling soundtracks. So after a couple of compilations and a couple of reissues we are proud to present our latest offering Indiecater Vol. 3. As ever we are indebted to all 10 contributors who have very kindly offered up their work to us. We hope that somewhere deep inside this compilation you’ll find something that meets with your approval. We think it’s a good one but that won’t matter a whole lot unless you do too.

Here is the track listing:

1) Sa Sevol - The Little Ones (Michigan)
2) Ral Partha Vogelbacher - Birthday in Beijing (San Francisco)
3) Ian Love - The Only Night (Brooklyn)
4) Bakers At Dawn - Hopeful (Malmö)
5) Cats On Fire - Higher Grounds (Åbo/Turku)
6) Celestial - Fragile Heart (Örebro)
7) The Dying Seconds - I’ll Make The Best Weapon (Dublin)
8) Starfucker - German Love (Portland)
9) Ravens and Chimes - General Lafayette! You Are Not Alone (New York)
10) Angel Pier - Sprites (Gorey/Ottawa/Dublin)

All this including some unique artwork for just €4.50!

Listen to Indiecater Vol. 3 in its entirety!

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Free Download: Starfucker - German Love

If you don’t have a paypal account or credit card just email me and we can sort something out.

Please remember you will need to use Winrar to extract the mp3s, information sheet and artwork from the file you have purchased. If you don’t have Winrar you can download it for free from the Winrar website.

If you are having any problems purchasing or downloading the compilation please give me a shout.

This is our second reissue and this time it comes from an act much closer to home. Back in the mid-90’s Sunbear were touted as future kings but in the end it all came to naught. Wasn’t for the lack of quality output however as their debut album remains an incandescent example of a young band pulling out all the stops to dramatise what was buzzing around their heads. ‘Sunbear’ was a remarkable achievement that pushed the boundaries in an already vibrant indie scene in Dublin at the time. Sadly a miniscule marketing budget didn’t help and despite numerous replays of ‘Notebook’ on RTE’s seminal ‘No Disco’ programme ‘Sunbear’ faded from view. Of course the boys from Sunbear went on to form the very much alive and thriving Ruby Tailights so who are we to rule out a one-off ‘Sunbear’ extravaganza. Many thanks to Paddy and Martin for their efforts in making the reissue of this important record possible. The album is selling for €3.50.

To give ‘Sunbear’ some context the band’s vocalist Martin Kelly has kindly pieced the story of the album together for us.

“Well, way back in 1993 Sunbear made its first attempt at playing a couple of songs live in front of a somewhat bemused audience. Lyrics weren’t the problem, as I never saw the necessity to write too many of them in one song, but singing was a major issue! I never wanted to be a singer (I still don’t actually!), but we all gave it a go and it was decided that I would take the role and try my best to weave my mumblings somewhere between the distortion of all our crap instruments. The only reason being our uncontrollable desire to be in a band and play really loud music.

As well as smothering our ears in My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth, Dinosaur Jr, Swervedriver and Pale Saints amongst others, we were all so influenced and impressed by the amazing bands that played, what seemed like, every weekend in Dublin at that time (In Motion, The Idiots, Luggage, The Mexican Pets, Pet lamb). After a while we were lucky enough to share gigs with all of them.

We also played a lot with Whipping boy, and in time started to pull quite a few punters into the support gigs we were playing. It was all very shambolic if I remember correctly! Someone said once that the reason they liked seeing us live was our unpredictability – things could go to shit at any point and swing to a moment of sonic bliss the next. I’m not even sure if we ever really enjoyed it as we were never happy with the gigs and I seem to remember lots of arguments and drunken stupidity!

So after a year or so hauling our gear to every venue in the city, and playing as many gigs a week as we could, we decided to record an album. It was a kinda spur of the moment thing in a way. A conversation with Og Crudden, from Dead Elvis records, who were just about to put out the In Motion album “The language of everyday life” planted the seed in our minds. Dead Elvis were working with Marc Carolan, who was the main engineer and producer in a basement Studio in Parnell Street called Fuse. It had an 8 track machine and a live room and was producing some really great records, despite its impoverished surroundings, like the In Motion album and the Wormhole album. So we all saved £200 or so each (which was fucking hard seeing as myself and Moss were struggling in really shit paying jobs at the time!) and paid for a week in the studio & 1000 copies of the album. And away we went!

I think we set out to be as unconventional as we could (It doesn’t seem that way listening to it now I think) and wanted lots of mood and little interesting bits all over the place. I think we took things quite seriously. Marc was really great with us! We had done hardly any recording at that stage so he brought the ideas to life for us. We wanted all out fuzz-distortion on some songs and clear dream-pop melodies on others, and I think we got that. And I think all the influences are there, but I hope we still kept a feeling of originality. “Resin” and “Things to do” are fairly obvious indie rockers, but we loved loads of different kinds of music, so “Centre Page” was a really nice way to show that. It started out as a real dreamy sound-scape with delayed guitars and then Marc came in and started layering up sounds and we just kept going with it. The computer voice still sounds great even though people always say that we ripped off Radiohead! (They didn’t do it for another 3 years or so – Fuckers!!…only messing!)

The idea of having the two parts on the album (Opening notes and Closed book) came from our real want to bring out vinyl! But that never happened.

Anyway, nearly 15 years on we still love the album, and in a weird “not up our own ass” way, we’re all really proud of it. It’s a really lovely thing to think that other people do too! MP3Hugger has given us a great opportunity to get it to some fresh listeners. There were not huge numbers the first time around, maybe it can become an epidemic this time! It’s a strange little album with lots of flaws and production short-comings (Not Marc’s fault – we just didn’t have the fancy ass stuff folks have today!), but if you can look past these you might just get it….There’s 30 minutes of traffic noise at the end if you don’t!”

Listen to Sunbear in its entirety!

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Free Download: Sunbear - Flutterbye

Press Quotes

‘One album that’s never mentioned in any top Irish albums of all time is without doubt one of the greatest. Way back in the early 90s a young Dublin band called Sunbear recorded a stunning debut album’

Totally Dublin Magazine, October 2006.

‘Sunbear is an album of exhilarating but mysterious guitar music’

Alan Corr, RTE Guide.

‘Sunbear wed that pure Byrds-like high intensity pop melody to wild and divergent surges of amped up craziness’

Hot Press, November 1994.

‘Sunbear have managed to create an enlightened, playful and powerful record’

Michael Ross, The Sunday Times, March 1995.