There are few things more enjoyable regarding online music experiences then to discover a great record label that you didn't already know of. This month's indie label honor goes to Dead Oceans Records.

The label is based in Austin, one of the country's top indie/alternative rock cities, where each year two of the music industry's biggest events - the South-by-Southwest Conference and the Austin City Limits Music and Arts Festival - are held. Smart place to start a record label if you don't mind the Texan heat.

Dead Oceans has a great line-up for a relatively small and new label, including indie and alternative rock bands like Explorers Club, Bishop Allen, White Hinterland, The Bower Birds and Evangelicals.

The label has just released The Explorer's Club new debut album, Freedom Wind. This is an interesting album and definitely worth a try, especially if you enjoy the following free track from the album.

MP3: Do You Love Me - Explorers Club

You can purchase Freedom Wind at from Dead Oceans

MP3: Skeleton - Evangelicals

Another recent release from the Dead Oceans indie record label worthy of checking out comes from The Bower Birds. This is a new and pleasant discovery here at IRC. Many fans are enticed by the band's Middle-Eastern influenced tracks that are adeptly mixed with a kind of indie rock that is rarely heard.

The band's song "In Our Talons" embodies this ecelectic offering of influences on The Bower Birds sound.

MP3: In Our Talons - The Bower Birds

View amazing artistic, albeit low budget, music video for "In Our Talons" featured on MTV2 and YouTube.

Canadian Director Alan Poon describes the making of the video to subterraneanblog:

"The images were created by taking individual snapshots of each animal in each position [for] approximately 5 seconds...per day...features three different nature vignettes - a crow (we think), a pair of preying mantises and a crab - and there are three members of Bowerbirds."

In a way coming upon the Dead Oceans Record label was a bit jarring and coincidental for me . Only two days earlier, I had heard a report on NPR about "dead ocean zones" increasing worldwide. The dead zones, a major concern of enviornmentalists and governments worldwide, are growing at an alarming rate worldwide.

The dead ocean zones take over when high concentrations of oxygen-sucking algae form at the mouths of major rivers. Fertilizer run-off from farms flow into streams and then major rivers where they amass in piles, choking the ocean zone's oxygen and killing marine life.

In places like Florida, Japan and Europe, there have been an alarming increase in the number and size of dead ocean zones during the past four decades. Marine environmentalists and oceanographers around the globe say that dead ocean zones are the greatest threat to the world's already threatened oceans.

Hopefully bringing this issue to your attention might get a few people to write their Congressional representatives (it's our democracy if we want to take it).

Labels: Dead Oceans, Indie Record Labels, MP3s