Indie Acoustic Project Announces “Best CDs of 2009″ Finalists

The Indie Acoustic Project is proud to announce the finalists for the IAP’s “Best CDs of 2009″ Awards.  The 3 finalists in each of 12 categories were selected from the multitudes of CDs that were considered for the awards.  The quality of the CDs submitted was terrific, and this has lead to the only major problem we faced: because there were far more than 36 excellent CDs (and only 36 finalist slots), many deserving recordings could not be included.

It is our hope that these awards will help all indie artists by generating increased awareness of independently produced music from around the world.

FINALISTS: The artist’s name is first (listed alphabetically within each category), followed by the CD title in italics, followed by the name of the record label.

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Wish You Were…Where? Jewish-Balkan Twang Busts Boundaries on Beyond the Pale’s “Postcards”

photo by Asli Alin

Tattered stamps and postmarks from disparate east European locales. Barely legible scribblings from anonymous correspondents of yesteryear. An old-country wedding band of mustachioed men in bowlers crowding around a long-gone shtetl cottage, their instruments held with pride. A serious little Polish-Jewish boy learning to play the violin… these images on the cover of Beyond the Pale‘s Postcards (Borealis Records; July 14, 2009) capture lost moments of a once vibrant Eastern European musical world, as much a historical memory as a mythical ideal.

But this innovative Toronto-based acoustic group seeks to do more than simply put the pieces back together. They reframe this vanished world on Postcards, re-forging fragments into a distinct Jewish-Balkan twang that flows from virtuoso musicianship, group improvisations, new compositions, and an eclectic palette of North American sounds, from jazz and rock to bluegrass and funk. Live music fans can catch their approach this June in New York, Amherst, Princeton, and Montreal, including a performance at Carnegie Hall on June 15, 2009.

“Our music coalesces around a kind of amorphous and scrambled geography” explains Eric Stein, group founder and mandolin maestro. “Each song is like a snapshot, a postcard from one or another of the far-flung realms in our eclectic musical universe.”

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