The first group of acts have been announced for Body & Soul 2016!

The summer festival season continues to take shape with Body & Soul 2016 adding its first batch of acts.

Body & Soul 2016 returns to Ballinlough Castle in County Westmeath from Friday, June 17th to Sunday, June 19th at Ballinlough Castle in County Westmeath and the first group of acts have been revealed!

Santigold, St Germain, Floating Points & Mercury Rev have all been added to the line-up for this years festival!

Santigold is one of the hottest acts in electronic and dance music. An intoxicating, left-of-mainstream artiste who perfectly blends candy-coated basslines, technicolor electronic pop, brooding R&B and noisy arena-rock. Guided equally by tradition and the shining future, her joyfully danceable, globally influenced and shape-shifting set will explode onto the Body&Soul Main Stage, a natural amphitheatre with unparalleled outdoor acoustics.

St Germain is back and more unpredictable than ever before.  Twenty years after ‘Boulevard’, fifteen years after the multi-platinum album ‘Tourist’ (over 3 million copies sold worldwide) and a world tour spanning several continents, Ludovic Navarre finally found his way back into the studio.  An uncontested figure in the world of electronic music for the past two decades, a pioneer of the “French Touch” and a creator of intelligent, sensual and original deep house, St Germain  has always stood out.  

His consummate art thrives on a subtle mixture of machines and instruments, of authentic roots and modern influences.
His music is a complex blend, reflecting his love of the blues, jazz and music of all kinds, with hypnotic electronic loops and harmoniously intertwined vocal samples.  Who can forget the renowned “Alabama Blues” or “Rose Rouge”, the hit single played all around the world… even during Rolling Stones’ concerts!

Floating Points wildly ambitious and encyclopedic sounds reference disparate influences, from jazz, electronic, rock, disco, soul, to classical, creating music that is at once precise and serendipitous.

While studying for a PhD in Neuroscience, he performed live sets in underground clubs around London. It was at his five year residency in the underground renowned club Plastic People where his spiritual relationship with music was established. Self described as a “transcendental experience”, that sacred energy can be heard in his latest work.

‘Elaenia’, his debut album, was released in 2015 to wide acclaim, with The Guardian calling it one of the best albums of the year and calling it “calm, warm, meditative music to lose yourself in”. Intrinsically involved in all aspects of the production, Sheppard plays almost a dozen instruments on the record, including the Oberheim OB8, Arp Odyssey and the vibraphone.

Mercury Rev will make their Body&Soul debut, showcasing their wondrous and voluminous kaleidoscope of calm, shivery comedowns entwined with ecstatic highs. Their new album ‘The Light In You’, contains arguably some of the best tracks of this notable band.

As they began recording their eighth studio album in autumn 2013, when asked what people could expect, co-pilot Grasshopper responded, “Steel Resonator Mandolin. Timpani. Sleigh Bells. All sorts of electric guitars…..” He subsequently added, “It is the best stuff we have done in a long, long time. Gonna be big sounding!”

Three  years on, ‘The Light In You’ more than lives up to its billing. The record is filled with wondrous and voluminous kaleidoscopic detail, but also intimate moments of calm, and altogether stands up to the very best that this notable band of maverick explorers has ever created. Its ecstatic highs and shivery comedowns also reflect a particularly turbulent era in the lives of Grasshopper and fellow co-founder Jonathan Donahue, of calamities both personal and physical, but also rebirths and real births (Grasshopper became a father for the first time in 2014). There’s a reason for the seven-year gap since the band’s last album, Snowflake Midnight.

Here's the line-up so far. More acts will be added to the Body & Soul 2016 line-up in coming weeks. For more information on this year’s festival visit bodyandsoul.ie.