Special thanks to CBCRadio3, NPR, KEXP, Rdio, eMusic and various friends for most of these discoveries. Do let me know what I missed. And let’s bring on 2012!

01 M83 – Midnight City
02 The RAA – Barnes’ Yard
03 Salteens – If Love Is Gone Where Do We Go from Here
04 Austra – Lose It
05 Young Galaxy – We Have Everything
06 Emm Gryner – Ciao Monday
07 Lightning Dust – Never Again
08 Teen Daze – Let’s Fall Asleep Together
09 Active Child – Hanging On
10 Washed Out – A Dedication
11 Tycho – A Walk
12 Cut Copy – Need You Now
13 Holy Ghost! – Wait And See
14 Beach Fossils – What a Pleasure
15 Hey Rosetta – Seeds
16 Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues
17 One Hundred Dollars – Ties That Bind
18 J Mascis – Not Enough
19 The Dodos – Black Night
20 Craft Spells – Party Talk
21 Braids – Lemonade
22 Timber Timbre – Black Water
23 Low – Try to Sleep
24 Bon Iver – Calgary
25 The Antlers – No Widows
26 Alexi Murdoch – Slow Revolution
27 CYHSY – Same Mistake
28 Tapes’s ‘n Tapes – Freak Out
29 The Fires Of – Pulse

enjoy!

http://thomaspurves.com/media/Bestof2011/Bestof2011.zip

01 Jónsi – Go do
02 CEO – white magic
03 Crystal Castles – Baptism
04 Daft Punk – Derezzed
05 We Love – Hide Me
06 Delorean – Real Love
07 Active Child – I’m In Your Church At Night
08 Diamond Rings – Something Else
09 Groove Armada – Paper Romance
10 Broken Bells – The High Road
11 Brasstronaut – Slow Knots
12 How To Dress Well – Ready For The World
13 Agnes Obel – Riverside
14 Stornoway – Zorbing
15 Mountain Man – Sewee Sewee
16 The Tallest Man On Earth – The Wild Hunt
17 Shearwater – Black Eyes
18 Active Child – Wilderness
19 Ratatat – Alps
20 Stars – We Don’t Want Your Body
21 The Guest Bedroom – Curses
22 Stornoway – Boats And Trains
23 The Mountains & The Trees – More & More & More
24 The Sadies – Another Year Again
25 Zeus – Marching Through Your Head
26 Brasstronaut – Hearts Trompet
27 Woodpigeon – My Denial in Argyle
28 Royal Wood – Do You Recall
29 Love Is All – Take Your Time
30 Vampire Weekend – I Think Ur A Contra
31 The fires of – Pulse
32 Caribou – Odessa
33 Groove Armada – History
34 CEO – illuminata
35 Jónsi – Animal Arithmetic

Instructions: 1. unpack the zip and drag the .m3u file into your fav media player 2. Rock out

Download: Tom’s best of 2010

^{pic: The Fires of CD release party at El Mocambo 2010}

^{psst… and for the nostalgic, see also Tom’s best of 2005}

My good friend Graeme recently started a new band with a bunch of his more musically talented friends called the Nobodies. Caught them live last night and they’re pretty awesome. The nobodies just had their first CD professionally produced and mixed.

The great thing, Graeme tells me, about starting a band with seven people in it, is that it’s a lot better deal to produce and put out an album. You can split the whole cost of it seven ways.

Just under the wire for 2009, I bring you my last of my 2009 music mixes. As always, this is a sort of autobiographical best-of mix featuring the songs that made the biggest rotation in my itunes since the last 6 months or so when I last published a mix. Some great tunes on here. But not only that, this mix also features redoubtably one the best lyrics of the year “back up – because the laser beam gets so hot”. Who hasn’t always wanted to say that?

Pictured here Air Heart performing at the Gladstone Nuit Blanche 2009. One MC, one DJ and one PS2 voice-amp controller.

Track listing:

 
Note, I downmixed these mp3s slightly to save on file/bandwidth size. If you like em, you should go support the artists by buying the originals in their full glory from itunes/emusic/band-website etc.

but meanwhile, enjoy!

DOWNLOAD as one big-ass zip file of individual files
DOWNLOAD as one single 84 minute mixed-together-fancy mp3 file

^{This post made possible by: itunes, winamp, emusic, last.fm, mixmeister fusion, cool edit, textpad, notepad, google spreadsheets, filezilla, photoshop, firefox and microsoft windows7}

Long time readers will know what time of year it is. It’s indie-punk-ass music mix time of the year on thomaspurves.com!

Here you go kids, this year’s 2009 compilation. Enjoy =)

Link: Tom’s 2009 Christmas mix (105MB)

Note, if you already have last year’s edition, here are this year’s two new songs: 2009 xmas additions (6.5 MB)

Instructions, unpack the zip file to a directory where you keep your music and load up the .m3u playlist file to your media player of choice.

Of course, the Christmas video of the year has to go to the year’s creepiest santa Bob Dylan:

Honorable mention for new tracks year goes to “Do they know it’s Christmas Time” by just about everyone in indie rock. Not include here because you are supposed to buy it for charityand because I’m not entirely sure it’s a good song but you can judge for yourself.

ATTENTION NEW VENUE: Canadian Corps Association Hall 201 Niagara Street Toronto

Introducing Lift@Home Toronto and DemoCamp 2019 [ticket link]

LIFT Conference is an international tech conference based out of Geneva, with events in Switzerland, France and Korea. For the first time this year, Toronto has been invited to participate as part of the Lift@Home. Lift is not your usual tech conference in that it tends to mash up web tech with arts with humanism and futurism. Cool stuff

To give this event a special Toronto flavor we’ve teamed up with the Toronto DemoCamp community. But, there’s a catch! We want to see demos only of things you can’t build today. We want to see demos from the near-medium future of 2019. Predict the future one decade out. This is DemoCamp 2019.

Our presenters have a fairly open ended but challenging design brief. We’ve tasked them with imagining a future state of the world, to make a bet on what might happen to the earth, technology, society in the next decade, and then present to you what will be the killer demo in the year 2019. So unlike normal demos, we don’t want to see working code. We want to see stuff that would be impossible or hopelessly impractical today, but could be the killer app in just a decade more.

Each presenter will have a hard limit 12 minutes to present their visionary design, and you the audience will have several minutes to question, to critique and discuss. (But what’s your revenue model?! and so forth…)

There will be a couple special guest presenters as well as 3-4 open slots. There will also be good prizes for the best demo in the open category.

If you, and/or your handpicked team of future-visionary design all-stars would like to sign up to be a presenter contact me for watch for further instructions (application form coming soon).

DATE: November 17th, 2009
TIME: 6:30pm, doors at 6:00pm
VENUE: Drake Hotel Canadian Corps Association
LINK: GET YOUR TICKET HERE to LIFT@Home Toronto

^{Lift@Home Toronto is being organized by: Francesca Birks, Mark Kuznicki, Michele Perras, Milena Vujanovic and Thomas Purves}

What might the Future hold? Inspiration for our presenters

UPDATE: Sign up here if you would like to present!

Resources
19x20x21.org 19 cities with 20 million people in the 21 century
gap minder Great for extrapolating demographic and economic trends, will the U.S. and English still dominate the web in 2019?
The paleofuture blog (guess what, in 2019 we still won’t have jetpacks)
Climate Change forecasts (google)
Demographics Trends (google)
Globalization Trends (google)

Technological Enabling factors
Ubiquitous connectivity – wireless broadband may be the dominant form of connectivity by 2019
Falling costs of telecom – The long-run cost of bits trends to zero
Moore’s law, It’s hard to underestimate the exponential nature of moore’s law. every 18 months silicon gets by a factor of 2 (choose any combination of) cheaper, faster, half the size, better battery life
A globalized internet – e.g. there are currently 7 new undersea cable projects heading for Africa. People around the world now get a full featured netbook for a few hundred dollars, a mobile phone for much less. They are only getting cheaper
Biotech, civil, chemical, materials, environmental & genetic engineering – What progress will be made, what will advances in these fields enable?

Disabling factors?
Environmental decay
The cost of energy
The cost of green energy
Global conflict
Pandemics
Death of Journalism
Economic stagnation
Religion, fundamentalism, homeopathy, or other anti-science superstitions

Context – What is possible in a decade?
How far we’ve come, Killer Products/demos of 1999:
- Napster launches
- The first candy-colored apple iBook is introduced (“the first laptop for ordinary people” says Apple)
- Blogger, livejournal launched (the seeds of web 2.0)
- Online banking starts to go mainstream
- MSN Messenger launches
- Internet explorer 5
- IEEE proposes new wireless standard called 802.11b aka “wifi”
- Intel Pentium III reaches 10 million transistors in a desktop CPU (fyi: in 2009 intel announces chips with 3 billion transistors)
- GM cancels the EV1 setting back electric car development for a decade
- George Bush announces he will run for nomination for the Republican Party

Nonetheless here’s the list of tracks and bands that have been piling up in my OMG great track, I gotta podcast this folder in iTunes. Consider this my autobiographical best-of music mix for 2009 so far:

enjoy:

Here’s the download link: In one big-ass 76MB zip file

If I’m organized enough I’ll also post the mixed-together streaming/podcast version for any of you still out there who subscribe to my podcast rss.

Thanks for all the facebook birthday love! I was overawed by so many taking the time to say happy birthday. Yay for social media. Here is my return present to you! Pirate radio free dingo is now live, streaming the very best of 33 years and one half dog years. By limited engagement through to Saturday night. 200 tracks curated so far and counting. Imagine these coneheads broadcasting direct to your heart by pirate satellite.

If anyone is curious I can post later a how-to on how to convert an iTunes playlist to a live streaming radio station. (At least the way I eventually figured it out) there’s a few steps to the process.

Recently played (or reload page for updates):

Next up? tune in to find out…

Click on this link to listen: http://bluedog.wavestreamer.com:9155/listen.pls
or http://public.wavepanel.net/CG68ERU7VH5QPBEG/listen/m3u

This year’s mix is an update from last year with some of your old favourites and a couple new 2008 tracks mixed in. First of the additions we have the new Yeah Yeah Yeah’s Christmas song as well as a nice Barenaked Ladies version of God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen. But then if the BNL isn’t quite high enough on your punk-ass o’meter I’ve balanced that off with Oh Come All Ye Faithful by … wait for it … Twisted Sister — OH GOD YES.

Grab the big giant zip file (93MB) here, download, import the included playlist file to itunes (or whatever your music program) to get all the songs in the right order and burn to CD and or listen away. Should *just* fit on an 80min CDR.

enjoy!

UPDATE: 7am Dec 22. Well that didn’t take long, bandwidth exceeded on server #1, give me an hour or two to set up some more bandwidth. BTW. Anyone else got a mirror they would like to lend for a few days?

UPDATE2: 2:14pm Dec 22 Alright you rapacious revelers found a new mirror for the file. go at it.
Meanwhile tonight’s project: learn how to make and host a torrent (any tips?)

UPDATE3: 9:35am Dec23 That twisted sister rendition? The internets have just informed me that there is a video…

After kicking around on my iPod for a while, I’ve finally found the time to package and upload this mix to the site. The last mix was in spring, so this one covers all the essential indie-awesomeness I’ve been listening to in the meantime. As it happens, the last one was pretty funky/electo while this one kicks off with a way more retro bluesy/old-school styled indie (good stuff)… but watch for some special dancier bits in the center. For best effect, listen in sequence.

I used to call these mixes “podcasts”, until I accidentally deleted my podcast page a while back. I’ll have work on that.

Here’s the track list:t

1. Dr. Dog – Hang On
2. Human Highway – The Sound
3. Delta Spirit – People C’mon
4. Chinese Food – Test Pilot
5. Mates of State – Get Better
6. Girl Talk – Play Your Part (Pt. 1)
7. Deastro – Light Powered
8. You Say Party! We Say Die! – Opportunity
9. TV on the Radio – Dancing Choose
10. Maybe It’s Reno – Gravestones and Christmas Trees
11. Fleet Foxes – White Winter Hymnal
12. The National – You’ve Done It Again, Virginia
13. Mirah – Dreamboat
14. Shearwater – Rooks
15. Okkervil River – Lost Coastlines
16. Wolf Parade – Call It A Ritual

Enjoy!

Link: Download as one big zip file
Link: Play as one long mp3 file (coming shortly)

Pic: Chinese Food playing Kensinton Market NXNE08 where they gave me a CD for free =)