Tom & Alissa

Alissa pointed me to the Square Peg Alliance recently, a collective of musicians doing the indie thing mostly sans-label. Their mission? “Helping bang the Square Pegs into place.” And I think that’s into your average round hole of the world. Members include songwriters like Andrew Peterson, Eric Peters, Jill Phillips and her husband Andy Gullahorn, Billy Cerveny, and Sandra McCracken, along with her husband Mr. McCracken (a.k.a. Derek Webb). All they need now are Jars of Clay, Bebo Norman, and Caedmon’s Call to have the most powerful Christian folk rock force in the universe. But oh wait, those guys are still all on major labels making mucho pesos.

The Square Peg Alliance even managed to round up its disparate members for three shows in August at Nashville’s Radio Cafe. All those guys, in the same room, at the same time…talk about rocking your folky face off! The best part is they recorded it for our free enjoyment, which leads me to this…

I lost count of my bootleg concert collection somewhere after the three-hundred mark, but most of those recordings are from recent awesome bands like Iron & Wine, Sufjan Stevens, and Over the Rhine–bands I fell in love with primarily since I moved to New York. Severly missing are all the groups I’ve grown up with that are still performing their butts off–most of whom, oddly enough, are in the Square Peg Alliance. So when I saw on their website they’d recorded their recent shows and put them online for free I rushed over to grab them.

There used to be an FTP server called Ragamuffin for Christian bootleg concerts (allow me to clarify that these recordings are first given the ok by the artists before being made available to the public or, more often than not, the artists have a recording policy for what can and cannot be done in regards to live fan recordings, so this is legal if the artist allows for it, which this group of artists does–you may now let go of your concern).

Anyway, the concerts on Ragamuffin generally took forever to download and were of poor quality (MP3) compared to todays nearly lossless standards (FLAC). Most of these newer sites use a technology known as BitTorrent, which you can read about here (it’s already been explained better, so why bother). Well, the site the Square Peg Alliance uses for their concerts is brand spanking new (it started in July) and utilizes this new technology for high quality downloads, and also includes individual concerts by many of the same artists that comprise the Alliance. Allow me to unveil…IndieRiver.Net. You may now ooo and ahh.