Filter Mag Online Interviews Awesome New Republic

​First, the Pitchfork TV love, and now, an interview in another national indie taste-maker mag. Awesome New Republic is (finally!) properly on the verge of a breakout beyond this peninsula. Starting yesterday, Filter magazine began posting a three-part Q&A with ANR on its web site. (The third part is dated July 31, but, um, it's already online and you can see it here.) In it, writer Lynn Lieu asks Michael-John Hancock about the Miami scene, offering music for free download, and, of course, that Leighton Meester cover of ANR's song "Birthday."

Here's an excerpt:

What was the deciding factor that brought you and Honor Roll Music to partner with isoHunt in the free release of Rational Geographic Vol. 1? Is there common ground between P2P or sharing sites and musicians?

Michael-John Hancock: It was our friends Colin and Jared--who are a marine biology team based down here called Coral Morphologic--who had the idea and got the ball rolling on that. It seemed like a logical step, since we were planning on giving it away as a free download anyway, to have it available as a torrent as well, where people who download it could make it more widely available through seeding it themselves whenever they're logged on to that kind of a program. It seems that nowadays, whether you sell it or give it away, your music is going to wind up on torrent sites and other file-sharing applications.

The magazine's home page is super information-rich, so just click here to go directly to the first part of the Q&A. You'll see links to parts two and three under the text.