Ace! This week Andy Kershaw played another track off our BGK02 compilation on his BBC World of Music show, with Audio-Wok's "Fry2Stir" getting the honours. Audio-Wok is comprised of Christian "Dreamfish" Clague and Lee "Leif" Lamont, both legendary Isle of Man (Manx) DJs in their own right, who teamed up in Port St. Mary in the south of the island to produce this rather funky dance tune. They got themselves a website recently, you can find more information on them over at AtomikHotdog.com. Click here to listen again to Andy's show (available online till next Sunday's show)-- this time it's 43 minutes in.

Unfortunately we only produced a very limited edition of BGK02, we only got one box of bubblewrap and it was regrettably too expensive to get another, so as such it's now sold out, sorry! Don't fret, though, in keeping with the Ballagroove tradition where we try to promote the artists as best we can we'll be making the entire compilation available as a free MP3 download within the next couple of days, so keep an eye on the download page or subscribe to our newsletter and we'll let you know the minute it's out. In the meantime you can check out BGK01, the first in the series, by downloading it here, please let us know what you think by leaving a comment or sending us an e-mail. Thanks!

It'd probably be a good idea to explain the ethos of the Black Label compilations: they're a way for us to release music from Manx artists that normally wouldn't get heard. People that make music in their bedrooms, folks that don't gig, or artists that just don't have an outlet, there's a lot of talent hidden away on the island and we'd like it to be heard. So that's how it works: if we like the music it goes on the compilation, simple as that. We then arrange this music in with tracks from the regular Ballagroove artists and compile the CD, then spend a little while assembling some special handmade packaging and put it out for a reasonable price -- we just try to cover the material costs as we're not in it for the money. This time it was black bubblewrap sleeves with a gold sticker and velcro seal, along with a pin-badge, tracklisting and two pieces of bespoke artwork by local artist David Maddrell (who's part of Ballagroove). Oh, and the CD is black on both sides, which is kinda how the name evolved. (Or was it the other way around, I forget!) Then, once we've sold them all, we put the entire thing up on our website so it can be heard by as many people as possible and hopefully encourage the artists to make more amazing music

I finally got around to updating the Boing Boing search plugin for Firefox that I wrote sometime last year, sorry it took so long! (To all the five or so people that used it.)

UPDATE! Now hosted at the official Firefox location (Mycroft). I've updated the local source so it'll auto-update to use Mycroft in 7 days so you don't need to do anything, it'll switch over automatically.

Boing Boing Firefox plug-in - Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things (click the link to install).

If you're interested in taking a look at its source, open the following up in your favourite text editor:
Source for the Boing Boing Firefox plug-in

(Updated as they switched from their blogging software's slightly feeble search to using Google's site search facilities a while back.)

Oh, for anyone visiting from Boing Boing please feel free to check out our MP3 downloads, they're all full tracks and are free We'll also be putting up our latest compilation "BGK02" (as featured on the BBC) up in a few days as we've sold all the CDs, so please come back and hammer our bandwidth

Wow! We weren't really prepared for that one Thanks to the great Andy Kershaw last night's BBC Radio 3 World of Music show featured a song off our BGK02 compilation. He played Wire Is Not Wool's "Electronic Brains", track 11 off the compilation and a bit David Holmes-esque in its electronic-trickery, it comes off of Simon Kilgannon's debut album which he released a good few years ago. Hopefully this'll inspire him to dig out any copies he still has, we'll put them up in our online shop if he does! Speaking of which, now'd be a good time to mention that BGK02 has almost now sold out, sorry!, so if you want a great CD chock full of Manx musical goodness with some rather fancy "tension sheet" style packaging, along with beautiful artwork and a badge, all for a bargain £5GBP with a quid for postage, go and grab yourself a copy in our shop.
To hear the track as it appeared on the show you can listen via the BBC's internet streaming player. Please feel free to send an e-mail to andy.kershaw@bbc.co.uk and thank him for playing Manx artists, he's doing great things for the Isle of Man scene by give us a much needed outlet to the UK and we really do appreciate it. Oh yeah, the Radio 3 site keeps his show online for a week after broadcast so you can listen again if you missed it, like we did!
NOTE: To skip directly to the Wire Is Not Wool track, get the stand-alone Realplayer if you don't have it already (you need it to listen to BBC radio online) and run it. Go to "File, Open..." and enter the following:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/shows/rpms/radio3/andykershaw.rpm
(If it pops up with a message asking you to Open or Save, choose Open, then pick RealPlayer from the Open With choices.)
Go to 0:06:12 and listen
Cheers again Andy, much appreciated!