Mentioned In The Ticket - Now, Let Me Add….

We were mentioned on Friday amongst some fantastic Irish music blogs in The Ticket supplement of The Irish Times today but I’ve got to add to something in that article.

The original, and its just a snip, reads

An online community centre for Kilkenny music fans covering local gigs, radio sessions, releases and much more. Interestingly, this blog has received funding from the Arts Council.

I think I’ll really have to elaborate what goes on around here or just get better at what goes on around KilkennyMusic.com online. Really, its just to clarify about our funding - and to clear up things about the statement. Reason being is that someone I’m developing a blog for came to me this morning wondering how a blog can get Arts Council funding.

Well - it doesn’t. KilkennyMusic.com has been running as an organisation actively promoting the music arts in Kilkenny since September 2005. The blog is a bi-product of what we do and allows us to extend coverage of everything we do offline to the online world. Since the blog awards at the beginning of March, I’ve had two or three of the core sections of site disabled to allow us rebuild profiles on all the bands we work with, a new gallery for the hundreds of photos we have and the featured articles area which holds seven months worth of articles and interviews with bands.

The reason, I believe why we received funding and hope that we may continue to do so in the future, is because we (we being four people with full time jobs and studies) work every weekend and every spare hour with bands, helping them develop websites, publish videos, record demos, promote gigs, book venues meet and greet other bands and thats only for starters.

The radio sessions that the snip above refers to are presumably podcasts of the One Take Sessions, a free music night we run every three weeks and have been doing so quite successfully for a few months now. For those of you unfamiliar with the One Take Sessions, we received an equipment grant from the Arts Office (through the Arts Council) in 2006 to fund live equipment, allowing us to facilitate bands of all genres. When we’re not putting on rock bands, metal, trad, punk or otherwise on the weekends, we’re working every third Thursday in Kilkenny with up to four acts each night in an intimate acoustic environment.

Some people think of it as an open mic night, but having been booked up to the summer, it isn’t exactly open in the sense of ‘come in and you’ll be guaranteed to play’. We promote each of the acts, showcase their videos and MP3s prior to the gig, provide them with a full sound engineer, checks, and a produced CD copy of their entire performance, mixed and mastered to a professional level by professional people - all for free.

Then there’s the weekend gigs, which are now booked up until November, leaving us one date between there and our end of year Christmas party. We aim to give visiting and local bands the greatest of platforms from which they can boost their fanbase, reach, abilities onstage and offstage, all the time looking to better the services, whether spending sleepless nights developing for the site and working on recordings, fundraising at Christmas or investing in new equipment to give everyone a better experience of music in Kilkenny in general.

We’re not doing it because we’re mad - we’re doing it because we genuinely love it and believe that people deserve to be seen and heard and we try every way to make that possible. Give it a few days and you’ll see the rest of the site restored and things ticking along a lot smoother online but for the uninitiated, KilkennyMusic.com isn’t just a blog - it is slowly becoming a way of life!

There was that other one, ‘Kilkenny Music - not just a place, its a name’ but thats just too cheesy. Either way, I thought some of that needed to be cleared up… Just in case…

I should also thank, once again, The Arts Office and Arts Council who were extremely supportive of KilkennyMusic.com during our first full year and now as we near our second birthday (well, its not for a few months yet) we’re going stronger than ever and without their assistance might not be in the position we are now. Guess this is one for the next ‘State Of The Nation’ article…

Oxegen Vs Electric Picnic - What’s Your Cup Of Tea?

So is it going to be tent burning at Oxegen or will you wait and pack the basket for the picnic on the first weekend of September?

The lineup is gradually being announced over the week for Oxegen and already we’ve seen The Killers will be headlining the Sunday night, Daft Punk and Bloc Party on the cards for the same day along with Arcade Fire. Saturday sees Muse, Snow Patrol, Kings Of Leon, Interpol (bringing tears to some members eyes! ), Tori Amos and more.

But what about the picnic? Will you stay loyal and head to Stradbally, pack the bags instead for the racecourse, or do both festivals this summer? Both ticket prices have gone up, Oxegen now going to cost you around 200 bucks for a weekend ticket before you made a run to Lidl for extra toilet roll and packets of Mars bars or whatever the equivalent might be. Rumour has it that Radiohead were going to be making an appearance at Oxegen - but rumour ALSO has it that the Beastie Boys and possibly Bjork are going to represent at Electric Picnic.

Decisions, decisions! What’s yours going to be?