I've just come across a rather cool video put together by the Canadian Space Agency (Yes, they have one!) of a music link up between a load of Canadian kids and the ISS. The current ISS commander is a Canadian, and he's been doing loads of interesting stuff for kids while he's been up there.

Anyway, I thought this was rather cool... The next time your music group can't stay in time, just tell them that an astronaut in space travelling at about 2,000 mph, speaking via video link and playing without the aid of gravity managed it!

The new album from Matt Maher, All The People Said Amen, will be released next Tuesday. Before that though, you can have a sneaky listen here.

The album includes some great new tracks, as well as an awesome live version of Alive Again, which I'm listening to quite loud as I type!!

Ooberfuse - the brilliant UK Catholic group - have released a single about North Korea. Have a look...

More info about Ooberfuse on their website here...

It seems to me that music is the magic bullet so much of the time in youth ministry. Picking the right song or hymn for a programme can so often be something which young people look to as the thing that made all the difference for them.

CatholicYouthMinistry.com has a great article about the importance music plays on retreats, together with some practical advice for planning music. Have a look...

The awesome Ooberfuse have a new album coming out later this month.

Full details here.

Ooberfuse wrote the brilliant anthem for the 2010 Papal Visit, and they also wrote brilliant songs to remember Shabhaz Bhatti and to accompany a recent vocations drive. They are one of the best Catholic acts around, and their music always seems to capture the mood perfectly. 

I was lucky enough to meet them a few months back, and even film them singing Hearts Cry.

If you're looking for some new music for those Chapel sessions, meditations and so on, you might be interested in knowing that the good folks at Taize have released a new CD.

The new CD is called Ô toi l'au-delà de tout which I think means O you, beyond everything, or something like that!

More details on the Taize site here. 

If you're part of the iPod generation (which you probably are) you can get most of the Taize music in iTunes, including this latest album.

CatholicYouthMinistry.com has a great piece about the music from the (US) 2012 Catholic Youth Ministry Training Convention which has just finished. It looks awesome. Take a look...

One of our site members was over there in the US for the Convention and I'm going to try and get a report out of her once she's got back and got over the jetlag!! Watch this space...

A few days ago while watching Euro 2012 (big football championship) I saw something rather wonderful. Ireland were playing Spain and, rather predictably, Ireland were losing. In fact, they were on the wrong end of a 4-0 drubbing.

Toward the end of the match it became clear to the Irish fans that they weren't going to win, so they decided to make the best of it. They started singing 'the Fields of Athenry' and within minutes is was filling the stadium.

Football fans singing isn't so unusual, but what happened next was. The Spanish fans knew that the Irish were no threat to them, and so they tried to join in. Some of them added their own songs as harmonies, but most just clapped in time to the Irish singing. It was all rather cool. Take a look...

(N.B. If the video above gets taken down, just go to Youtube and to a search...)

This reinforces a point I always make to young people when I'm trying to get them to sing: when you have a group of people sitting together in a confined space singing their hearts out, it creates something special. Part of me suspects that it takes two very Catholic countries to understand this!

Music has always been used to express human emotion and connections in a way that words along just can't!