Indie Artists are the Bomb!

While searching for the link to the Gotye video I posted last Thursday, I was reminded to go look up Walk Off the Earth's remake of the song "Somebody That I Used to Know." Six people playing one guitar. It's fantastic if you are like me and live in a cave, glued to your book writing and painting. There are times when I'm creating that I stop seeing the world around me. Anyway, while catching up on things, I got sucked into viewing some of this Indie Canadian band's other videos. Most everybody has already caught on to Walk Off the Earth, who have become a Youtube sensation. I was just a little behind the eight ball. But, I'm officially caught up, now.

Anyway, I love their low budget self-made videos a lot. But, their recent professional video called "Little Boxes" really stood out for me. Though, not for the reasons you might think. First, because of the visual elements of a set designed entirely from recycled cardboard. But, what really caught my attention and held it were the fantastic cigar box guitars (CBGs) the band used to make the music. If you havn't already seen it, here's the video:

Back to my internet catch up. Before I knew it, I'd gone from Gotye and his found music, where he samples old records to create his songs (check out that post here if you missed it,) to Walk Off the Earth's found object guitars. Here is a a quick "making of" video that tells a little more about these wonderful CBGs made by Daddy Mojo:

Cigar box guitars have been around a long time, and have a long history of being played by musicians with no money to purchase an instrument, so they had to improvised and make their own out of the things they could find around the house. Taking this old tradition and running with it, Daddy Mojo is a small shop in Canada that's creating some wonderful works of art with their CBGs along with quite reputation for quality in the music industry. If you are interested in learning more about Daddy Mojo and the history of CBGs, I highly recommend checking out this little slide show documentary.

This is the kind of art that I think of as a true treasure. It's spectacular to find so many Indie Artists out there going their own way, making art by any means that they can, and getting their art out there via the internet. I particularly love that so many of these artists are creating their work through green practices like recycling and the reuse of found objects. My hats off to Walking Off the Earth and to Luca Tripaldi of Daddy Mojo. I'm most impressed with you all.

A couple of quick side notes. If you like science fiction, don't miss out on my Sharon & Alex story that published over at The Ravens Crossing today. Only two more weeks until the season finale. Things are really heating up in Wildwood. And if creative non-fiction is your thing, one of my short essays about some chimps I used to take care of was just published at The Canary yesterday. Hope you have a fantastic weekend.