Monthly Archive for February, 2006

The new Ballagroove blog section!

Published on 2 February 2006 in News. 1 Comment

Well, what do you think?

We've been struggling slightly with the website for a while now, trying to see how we can improve things. It's been a bit difficult 'cause some of us have wanted to post stuff up that's not really got anything to do with Ballagroove, we just think it's cool, but have felt we couldn't as it'd detract from the important main page news & general info on the label. So this is the solution:

The Ballagroove Blog

All the random musings, links to bands we like, rants on the state of the music industry and assorted general weirdness go onto the blog while all the Ballagroove-related stuff goes onto the front page. Easy! In effect nothing's really changed -- I just renamed the "latest news" page to "blog" ;) -- but hopefully it'll motivate the rest of the crew to start using it as a place to put their thoughts.

We will see... :)

Chris T-T every Tuesday night on PhoenixFM

Published on 3 February 2006 in News. Closed

Phoenixfm LogoChris T-T, an immensely talented (and thoroughly sound) singer-songwriter who we've had over a few times, is hosting his own radio show on PhoenixFM every Tuesday night from 10pm till midnight for the next month.

The first show was last week and featured a cracking selection of music -- he even played a tune from our BGK02 compilation! -- as well as a really good session from Emmy the Great.

Next week he's getting Stuffy and the Fuses in so it's bound to be be good, tune in to the live internet stream and give him a listen!

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The Cloud Appreciation Society

Published on 3 February 2006 in News. Closed

To kick off on the cool links front, let's start with a real gem. I found this while browsing the Yahoo's Finds of the Year 2005 awards about a week ago, wrote a nice submission to Boing Boing and they ignored it. Ah well, looks like just about everyone else covered it: the Times; BBC; Sky News; hell, even Richard & Judy! So, without further ado:

The Cloud Appreciation Society

It's a fantastic site with all sorts of crazy information on clouds, though most people will probably jump straight to the gallery and I wouldn't blame them! They've even got a section on clouds that look like things, brilliant!

Few new tracks from Dreamfish & the Scope

Published on 3 February 2006 in News. Closed

Christian just e-mailed to tell us that there are a few new songs to download from Dreamfish (of Audio-wok fame) and the Scope (as featured on BGK01). Get them here:

Martin Carr Interview over at SVC

Published on 4 February 2006 in News. Closed

Ballagroove pals Spoilt Victorian Child have a great interview of bravecaptain / Martin Carr, former guitarist & songwriter from the Boo Radleys, check it out:

Spoilt Victorian Child interviews bravecaptain / Martin Carr

As they point out he's just released his new album "Distractions" which is available as a complete download from his website. Great!

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Feedle – Leave Now For Adventure

Published on 6 February 2006 in News. Closed

Spoilt Victorian Child:

'Leave Now For Adventure' by Feedle is released today on SVC Records and has already been getting quite a bit of attention, not least from BBC Radio 1's Huw Stephens who described it as "An outstanding piece of music..." when he recently played 'Song For Dogs' on his wonderfully eclectic show.I completely agree with him.

Some absolutely lovely tracks on SVC there, go give them a listen and then buy the record!

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That was my year that was

Published on 7 February 2006 in News. Closed

Thought it was about time I joined in on the "New Blog Action"!

Not really one for Top 10 lists and that type of thing but just thought I'd make mention of some of my highlights of 2005 and things I'm looking forward to in 2006.

Most memorable moments of 2005:

  • The Earlies - Twisted Folk Tour. I'd been looking forward to seeing them so much, and they were even better than I expected!
  • Super Furry Animals - The Liverpool gig was insane, thought that the Douglas one would be a let down but it was amazing, took a while to recover!!
  • Green Man Festival - So many memories of this, King Creosote, Lone Pigeon, Joanne Newsome, Domino Records DJ's, The Earlies, Adem, Absentee, bumping into lots of friends, has to be the friendliest festival in the world. If you like rolling around in mud and getting bladdered on lager then this one definitely isn't for you!
  • Shambala Festival - The fancy dress party on the Saturday night, completely insane!!! The Bees were ace too!
  • Chris T-T - Returned to the Isle of Man for another ace gig.
  • Broken Social Scene - Ibi Dreams of Pavement. My favourite song of the year
  • Chas Fest - A great end to a fabulous summer.
  • Wickerman Festival - Bumping into Chas and the boys down the front for Neville Staples. SKA!
  • Sigur Rós - Live in Liverpool. I hate sit down gigs generally, and I would have preferred to have been able to get close / encompassed, but it was still ace!
  • Tighten Up - Xmas party at the Rovers. Quality sounds and Star Wars fancy dress, madness!!
  • Grant and Sue's wedding - What a lovely day and a crackin' gig from the Keepers great to see them again.

Looking forward to 2006, so far:

  • Broken Social Scene tour.
  • The festival season. So many bands I'm hoping will be playing at some I go to, but I'm not going to tempt fate!
  • Finishing the new Rhysical Pheck album - must do it this year!!!
  • New King Creosote Album hopefully.
  • New Grandaddy album, their last :-(
  • Super Furry Animals - return to the IoM :-)
  • Future Ballagroove releases from 'Ingie, Gratiz 3, Tholtan Builders and Cocahiba.
  • More Shameless and My Name is Earle :-)

and finally...

  • Getting our house sorted (been in ten years its about time it was done !)

and most importantly...

  • The world calming down a bit, please!!

Songbird – an open-source iTunes-like music player

Published on 9 February 2006 in News. Closed

SongbirdDownload | Songbirdnest.com:

Songbird is a Web player built from Firefox's browser engine. It's is open source, will run on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and supports user contributed, cross-platform extensions.

Ars Technica have some great coverage, as ever. It'll be interesting to see how it turns out, think they're trying to pitch it as a competitor to the iTunes monopoly. I agree with what Ars say about the difficulties of multiple online stores, though perhaps a well-written plugin for stores to share a common payment gateway such as PayPal may overcome this, or, as Ars suggest, someone may step up and create a new one. At any rate, it's worth keeping an eye on Songbird, she might well grow up and sing?

Bon Voyage Dave and Sandra

Published on 10 February 2006 in News. Closed

Sad to see that our friends Dave Metaxas and Sandra will be leaving the Island next week, they are moving to Prague to live after some travelling, sure everyone who knows them (who could forget Teccy's fine Lobster Boy costume from the Ballagroove party at the Creg Malin some years ago !!) will join us in wishing them all the best for the future, have fun folks !!

Sonic Cathedral Tour

Published on 15 February 2006 in News. Closed

The lovely people over at Sonic Cathedral, who some of you may know from their Rock n Roll Soul summer specials on the Island over the last couple of years, are out on a small tour with Mark Gardner, who used to sing for the very wonderful Ride back in the day. There are three dates but of particular interest to us is the Liverpool gig as Paperlung are playing, which is Sice from the very wonderful and sadly lamented Boo Radleys' new band. You can download their demos from Paperlung website, it starts at 10pm goes on till 3am and it's at Korova, a very nice new bar/venue co-owned by Ladytron.