BraAgas is a predominantly female band interpreting folk songs from all over Europe in original arrangements. A significant part of BraAgas' repertoire consists of Sephardic songs, Scandinavian and Balkan folklore, and they enjoy odd rhythms and melodies. On their last album ‘O Ptácích A Rybách’, the band also focused on folk songs from Moravia. In their arrangements of folk music, BraAgas try to use the diversity of the origin of the individual songs and the interesting sounds provided by ethnic and historical instruments, over which great female vocals are soaring. They have performed at leading festivals such as Colors of Ostrava, MFT Zlatá Praha, Rainforest World Music festival, EBU Folk Festival in Cologne, and Sur Jahan festival in India. From: http://www.folkworld.de/73/e/braagas.html
BalconyTV was a wheeze cooked up by three friends living on Dame St. in central Dublin, and then improbably became a global online phenomenon, before a peculiar and confused descent back to something like obscurity. The story is now the focus of a three-part podcast, allowing those involved to have their say, with the series also showcasing the vagaries of the music industry. BalconyTV was the brainchild of friends Stephen O’Regan, Tom Millett and Pauline Freeman. The podcast is by Mark Graham, a lecturer in the Department of Arts at SETU (South-East Technical University) in Waterford, also a musician himself. In fact, his former band, the highly regarded King Kong Company, turned down the opportunity to appear on BalconyTV - unlike sundry others, such as Ed Sheeran, Kaiser Chiefs, and Mumford and Sons.
According to Graham, the trio who first set up BalconyTV in 2006 were hungover when the idea first came to them. One of the group, Tom, was a musician and was practicing double bass on the balcony. The others thought it looked good and so BalconyTV was born.
“It started a little bit before YouTube,” explains Graham. “They had their own website first, with a Flash media player, then YouTube came on stream so in the very early days of YouTube they were early adopters. It is de rigeur now to video performances but they were the first to do it, not just in Ireland but maybe in the world.” At first the trio recorded a magician doing his act on the balcony, or someone juggling a football, but it was music performances in this incongruous settings complete with background traffic noises, which caught the imagination of people online. For Graham, BalconyTV formed the template for enduring online music shows such as the Tiny Desk series by US broadcaster NPR. From: https://www.irishexaminer.com/lifestyle/artsandculture/arid-41057474.html
