The Sigla Blog

“Each member of Dry County has their own individual recording space with a computer running Cubase SX or Ableton Live and filled with various noise making bits and pieces and most likely prefer to work in these spaces. But as a band, during the recording of Unexpected Falls, our favourite recording space was actually […]

That’s the question the folk at the Man Booker Prize are asking. Just as they did with the ‘Booker of Bookers’ when the prize was 25 years old, now they’re asking the public to vote for their favourite* to mark the 40th anniversary in a ‘Best of the Booker’ competition. One of my all time […]

Back in December, in her Nobel Prize acceptance speech, Doris Lessing recalled visiting a friend in Zimbabwe who was working as a teacher. The visit opened her eyes to a lot of things, including the dearth of books available in schools. The people she met had very little of anything, but they had a hunger […]

“The place Kíla have been using to make music for the past few years has been in Celbridge in Marina Guinness’s house. It is a wonderful space; we can make as much noise as possible, we can allow our imaginations run wild and it has been very kind to us in terms of music […]

Above is ‘Spiegal Im Spiegal’, a piece of music I have adored for years, by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. Tonight, I’m off to see the Hilliard Ensemble and The National Chamber Choir of Ireland performing Pärt’s, ‘Passio’ from his 24 Preludes for a Fugue. It’s being performed in Christchurch Cathedral, so it should be […]

Back in college, English was one half of my degree and like everyone who first grapples with critical ways of looking at texts, you get a tad carried away. Some theories pan out and you pick up marks : the correlation between flowers and death (or something similar) in Virginia Woolf, drawing parallels between Angela […]

Thanks so much to everyone who mails, the bloggers who say nice things about it, gets in touch via Facebook, or tells me in person how much they love the Musical Rooms series. It’s great to hear that it strikes a chord (honestly no pun intended) and that it interests people who are not just […]

“The creation of our music takes place in a lot of separate places - with seven members contributing equally, the basis of different songs can be formulated in loads of spaces! But the one I think that ties us all together is the kitchen in the house in Terenure where we did most, if […]

Further to UnValentine’s Day, Great Loves and doing something different on February 14th, here’s a plan: go and see two electronic legends instead. Former Kraftwerk robot Wolfgang Flur plays the Tivoli on Thursday night. Flur was a member of the German electronic pioneers for nearly 25 years and now DJs regularly around the world. He […]

The Sigla Blog is delighted to have made two shortlists in this year’s Irish Blog Awards. First up is Best Post, but this category is due another cull and there are too many fantastic posts up for it, including the jaw-dropping brilliance of Fatmammycat’s Fox hunting, horses and a girl’s awakening (go read it). […]

Far be it from me to encourage anyone to buy into the state-sanctioned day of romance that is Valentine’s Day (I’m with Charlie Brooker on this one), but if you really must, The Book People have it all sown up. They’re selling all 20 books in the Great Loves series by Penguin (which I […]

“Our place in Portrane is my favourite place to make music. We have a small apartment that we converted to a practice room in Portrane in North Dublin, on a peninsula, with an estuary on one side and the Irish sea on the other. Portrane is a quiet place because it doesn’t lead anywhere, […]