Ballinlough Castle set for Body&Soul;

Body&Soul’s final cards are being upturned in the exciting lead up to its annual festival this month, with the team behind the event recently revealing another handful of new acts for the bill for the summer solstice weekend at Ballinlough Castle, in Clonmellon (21st-22nd June).
Added to the Main Stage running order is one of Jamaica’s best and provocative lyricists the legendary Max Romeo – best known for his two milestone albums from the so-called golden era of Jamaican Music thirty years ago: ‘Revelation Time’ and the Lee Perry-produced ‘War In A Babylon’, ‘Let The Power Fall On I’, ‘Chase The Devil’, and ‘Public Enemy Number One’, are just a few of his best known tracks which merely scratch the surface of his vast catalogue of well-loved hits.
Joining the programme on the Midnight Circus is universally lauded British techno sorcerer and psychedelic shaman James Holden, the man of many talents who counts amongst his accolades: zeitgeist-defining label boss, trend-setting producer, and monster re-mixer known for his unparalleled musical ear.
London’s eclectic one-man band Tom Vek will also be descending on Ballinlough for the first time, combining his new wave and garage influences with electronic music indie rock, punk and dance. Seattle based experimental hip-hop collective Shabazz Palaces will be flying in along with Tokimonsta (AKA Jennifer Lee) an electronic music producer and DJ making big noise across the water.
Returning to the fold for 2014 is Body&Soul’s very first year performer – the much-loved Berlin DJ and music producer Alle Farben (Aka Frans Zimmer) while young Icelandic Hermigivill is set to bring his delightful cocktail of dusty vinyl samples from his bottomless crates of rare records, mixed innovatively with weird synth melodies and scratched vocal samples.
Up-and-coming Irish favourites who will be taking to the Body&Soul Main Stage include: September Girls, Laser Tom, Booka Brass Band Ireland’s first (and currently only) New Orleans style Brass Band, and Dublin-based SKA band Interskalactic. Festival-goers can catch performances across the dotted landscape of the Walled Gardens from acts including Dublin Bluegrass and Country band Prison Love, Jerry Fish, The Irish National Clown Orchestra, the inimitable Ryan Vail and The Frames member, the ephemeral violinist Colm Mac An Iomaire.
Of course the peripheral parts of Body&Soul are its set apart factor and 2014 welcomes a whole spectrum of new additions and souped-up regular favourite areas to the festival landscape including a Bathhouse and Sauna in the Lakeside Sanctuary and Spa, highly imaginative Soul Kids entertainment in the Walled Garden; artisan food yurts, the Radioshack in the Orangerie; the Wonderlust Stage championing spoken word, music and debate; the raucous late-night woodlands epicentre of mischief ‘My House’ and the return of the velvet lounge cocktail bar beside the late night Midnight Circus. Decadent dinning at the Woodlands Banquet Feast and humorous happenings at the Good Times Comedy Lounge are new nuggets for this year’s Summer Solstice celebration.
Previous Body&Soulers will know that its annual open-air Masquerade Ball is the Saturday Night “must-attend” event with revelers donning full costume to its ever-changing themes. This year’s flavour is ‘The Wild Card’ in tune with their bespoke series of beautiful tarot cards designed by Dublin illustrator Alan Clarke. See www.bodyandsoul.ie