Dear indie friends,

Most new music enters my life in the least romantic way possible. An email. A link. Usually from artist names I don't know yet.

A few lines asking me to listen and then, every now and then, something rather wonderful happens.

I press play. And hopefully I remember the song and the name.

Maybe I play it on the radio, we exchange a few messages. Maybe another song arrives a few months later.

And slowly, somewhere between Spotify links, emails, radio shows and ridiculous conversations about music... a song becomes a person.

I think this might be one of my favourite things about what I do with my project Mitxoda.

And this week, it feels particularly real.

Tomorrow Saturday I will also be joining the 2d edition of the Indiependence Day, 2026, in Köln/Cologne, Germany! I will be meeting with so many indie empowered people, and we will probably come back with some surprises… stay tuned 🙂

Enjoy the read, and see you today in my Salon!

Love,
Mitxoda

The submissions haven't stopped.

Which means that while I was writing, building, broadcasting, disappearing on holiday and generally pretending there are more than 24 hours in a day, new music kept arriving.

I've picked a few recent tracks I wanted to put in front of you. Not as another enormous list, but just a few doors worth opening.

🇳🇿 Vanessa Tottle — Invisible Rose
🎛️ Electronic / Trip-Hop • August 21, 2026
Born alone at a Wellington hotel bar, complete with real field recordings of cocktails being shaken and poured, Invisible Rose turns distance and longing into a wonderfully cinematic trip-hop landscape.

🇬🇧 The Sanctity Of Crows feat. Across The Frostlands — Arrival
🎹 Experimental • August 27, 2026
First came a strange long-exposure photograph. Then came the music. Arrival embraces that accidental inspiration with a wonderfully unpredictable stylistic mashup, no apologies required.

🇫🇷 Marla Fredonne — Figer le soleil
🎸 Rock • April 4, 2026
That impossible wish to freeze a perfect moment before it disappears. Figer le soleil captures happiness at its brightest and most fragile.

🇮🇹 J&M Band — Italian Job
🎛️ Electronic / Dance • August 24, 2026
Dark, bitter and deliberately provocative, Italian Job opens the door to the band's new album with a bleak look at the world around us, and little interest in sugar-coating it.

I've gathered these new arrivals, with the music, artwork and a little more about each one, on Mitxoda.

[MEET THIS SUMMER'S NEW ARRIVALS →]

And then there is the other side of this story.

The moment when those names stop living inside a screen.

This weekend, I'm heading to Germany.

More precisely: Cologne, for the second edition of INDIEpendence Day.

Last year was the first one, in Münster.

This year, we're doing it again.

And I'll be there from Saturday.

Not because I need another music industry event. Not because somebody promised me an algorithmic growth opportunity. No no.

I just need to see friends. True indie friends. Real life. 😂

I'm going because there will be people there I actually want to see.

To Die In Beauty.

Hollow Words.

The Kind Machine.

Gengvej.

Joe Baldi.

And many others.

Some are artists whose music has travelled through the Mitxoda universe.

Some have become regular names around here.

Some have become friends.

And that difference matters.

Streams are useful. Listeners are useful. Followers are useful.

Numbers tell us that something happened.

But they don't necessarily tell us what happened between people.

There is no Spotify metric for: "We started talking because of your song two years ago and now I'm taking a train to come and see you."

No dashboard for friendship. No conversion funnel for the ridiculous messages exchanged between musicians at midnight.

No monthly listener statistic that tells you someone genuinely cares about what you're making.

And perhaps this is also why I remain so attached to independent music.

The scale is smaller.

But sometimes the connections are much bigger.

Sometimes music discovery ends with a song in a playlist.

Sometimes it ends with a train ticket to Cologne.

And I know which version interests me the most.

I've put a little more about this weekend on Mitxoda.be, including the people I'm looking forward to meeting, links to their music, this week's new discoveries and the strange little path connecting all of it.

And because this story doesn't really end when I hit “Send”, I'll also have somewhere to bring back a little piece of Cologne.

[COME WITH ME TO INDIEPENDENCE DAY →]

I'm deliberately changing something.

I don't want this newsletter to become a container into which I squeeze absolutely everything.

The Weekly should give you the story.

Mitxoda.be should give you somewhere to explore it.

So the complete #102 lives there too: the new tracks, the artists, INDIEpendence Day and all the links that would make this email ridiculously long.

[CONTINUE WEEKLY #102 ON MITXODA →]

🎲 SOUNDCHECK

One word. A few clues. Your indie vocabulary against mine.

[Play today's Soundcheck →]

And perhaps this Weekly is a good reminder of what happens when you do.

Sometimes you send a song.

Sometimes I play it.

Sometimes we start talking.

And apparently, sometimes I eventually end up in Germany.

[SUBMIT A SONG →]

Read what other indie people answered, and add yours.

One word. A few clues. Your indie brain against the clock.

Play Soundcheck →

One word. A few clues. Your indie brain against the clock.

Vote in the Weekly 100 →

Help independent songs climb the community ranking.

Listen to Le Salon Indie →

Two hours inside the independent music world.

Submit a Song →

Making music yourself? Send it to Mitxoda.

Until next week,

Keep sending songs.

You never quite know where they might take you.

With love, always,
🖤 Mitxoda

Every Friday at 4:00 PM (Brussels time) a new episode of Le Salon Indie de Mitxoda will take place on salon.mitxoda.be, don’t miss it. (and this time I m sending this weekly AFTER the show) - Do you prefer that way?

END 😆