Speaking of the Desperate Bicycles...

... I think it's time I posted something about my influences. Although I only heard about the Desperate Bicycles long after I had begun my own adventures in DIY music-making, their raw enthusiasm and true punk spirit helped renew my own commitment to, and joy in, making my own music regardless of circumstance. You can read a bit about them here. The point here is don't wait for x, y, or z to fall into place; create with whatever you have, right now. It's the same spirit that moved Toasted Heretic to record brilliant albums on a portastudio and self-release them on cassette. Toasted Heretic, in case you didn't know, were extant in Galway in the late 80s and early 90s. When I heard about them as a secondary school student, I was floored by their priceless name and inspired by their DIY approach. "Wait," I thought, "You can just go and make an album yourself for almost no money? I want to do that." And I did: Toasted Heretic's guitarist, Declan Collins, engineered and co-produced my first album, "Blank Melodies." (Recorded on portastudio, of course!) I'll post more about that some other time.

Homemade Recycled Paper

This weekend also marked my first foray into the messy and fun world of making one's own recycled paper. As the Desperate Bicycles once said, "It was easy, it was cheap: go and do it!"
There are loads of places online where you can find instructions. It is a lot more fun and rewarding than shredding, I can tell you. Now it is all drying in the sunshine on big pieces of parchment paper.
I'm thinking of doing a (very) limited edition physical CD next time I do an album-- which should be over the summer-- and I'm going to do the packaging on homemade recycled paper.

Happy Pride

Happy Pride to all on the 40th anniversary of Stonewall. In spite of torrential rain, I had a great time participating in the 17th annual Dyke March, which tends to be my personal Pride highlight. The Dyke March is a non-corporate political event in which queer women march-- without a permit!-- down Fifth Avenue, celebrating our diverse and powerful community and basically telling the world that, if it doesn't like that, it can feck off. To me, it's truer than the other Pride events to the original spirit of Stonewall and Pride generally.

Forthcoming blog items

In the near future, expect full upload of The Pomegranate Heart with commentary; more individual tracks; some thoughts about my influences; and a bit of history, but not too much, probably.
In the medium term, I'll be working on a bunch of new tracks over the summer. I'll be writing about the recording here, and eventually, of course, you can hear the results here too.

Review at DIY culture blog

Here's a review of two songs from The Pomegranate Heart EP at the Try This At Home blog. It's an excellent read for anyone into DIY culture. (Not just because I'm featured!)
The songs are Leaving Town and Tidying.

Video of my song and a dog...

Someone's put a video of their dog on Youtube to the accompaniment of "One December Day." Incongruous, but I like it. You can watch it over on the video bar to your right as well. The song isn't on any EP or album, and is from 2007.

Five to Four at Burning World

"Five to Four" is featured on the current podcast over at Burning World. You can download the podcast here.

Hello, and a song

Here's a song from my 2006 E.P. The Pomegranate Heart. It's called Five to Four. Enjoy! You can find all the mp3s for free, but if you would like to pay for the E.P., you can do that too-- see the soundclick link at the side of the page.