Indie+Music

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Hello!  My name is Mike Gurnham and I am extremely passionate about my music. I have been playing guitar for nearly 9 years, I recently started to play the djembe drum, and I also play harmonica when I am in the mood. I am hoping to learn how to play the banjo at some point in my life. So, in my spare time I can usually be found in my room strumming away on my guitar. I love to write my own songs. I write a lot of instrumental acoustic songs, because I am not the most talented singer, but I also believe that the vocal element of music is simply that...only one element of something that is much, much bigger. For me, a good song is something that will make you stop what you are doing, sit back and listen, and for the duration of the song you feel as if you are in another place, where nothing matters except listening to that song. Music can be very powerful, and it doesn't have to involve singing in order to posses that power.

Anyway, enough with that! That's just a bit of a background about me and my love for music. What I am going to do with my Wiki page is talk about Indie music. Over my life I have gone through many, many different phases of listening to music. When I was younger it was all about punk rock. Then it moved into hardcore and what they call "screamo." In my later years of highschool I was 100% into metal, and that lasted until about a couple years ago. I still love metal, but I have recently been getting into a whole lot of indie music. So, I will answer your first question now...what is indie music? Despite what I used to believe, and what many people probably think, indie is not actually a specific genre. Its not like, metal, or rock, or hip hop, or anything like that. Indie music can encompass all genres of music. Indie is simply short for 'independent,' meaning that an indie band is a band that refuses to sign with major record labels, instead producing their music themselves or with a small, independent record label.

On my Wiki page I will talk about why a band would want to be independent, then I will give some recommendations of bands that I currently am listening to. I hope you learn something and find a couple new bands that you like!



My Pages

 * **Canadian Indie**
 * **International Indie**
 * **Why Be Indie?**
 * **My Top Ten Albums**

YouTube Videos
The Weakerthans - Civil Twilight (from their latest album Reunion Tour)

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Sun Kil Moon - Lost Verses (from their album April)

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Insomnium - Down With The Sun (from their latest album Across The Dark [this song is pretty heavy...])

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RSS Feed - Indie Music News
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Reflection
The use of the wiki for this assignment was actually a pretty interesting experience. It was a bit frustrating at first trying to figure everything out, but the instructions provided with the assignment and detailed and WIkispaces itself it pretty user-friendly. It is really easy to put all different sorts of information and media into your page. For example, putting a youtube video in is a lot easier than you would think. A wiki is a very quick and easy way to post whatever you want to the internet. In this case I was talking about music, and I wrote a whole lot more than I expected I would, simply because it was so easy to do, it didn't take me long at all. I think this was a good assignmet because I actually learned what a wiki is. I was never really sure...I only really ever used wikipedia, but I never edited it, only used it to get information (which subsequently is not allowed to be used for anything handed in at school...). But I learned the basic idea of what a wiki is and how it works, and I think this is useful knowledge to have. The internet is such a powerful tool and a wiki makes it so easy to use that to your advantage, I think it is important to learn how to create a wiki, and I think this assignment was a good and interesting way to do that.