Welcome to Balloon Machine, a blog that helps me share my obsession with alternative and DIY music. Hopefully in time Balloon Machine can become somewhere you can rely on for music discovery.

I’m Patrick Kinsella, a 26-year-old music writer from Manchester. I write features and album reviews for Line of Best Fit. While I love writing for them, over the past year I’ve found myself wanting to go beyond the confines they understandably set and establish a place where I can share new music, no matter the size of the act or label, with other listeners. This is it. 

While I want to use this as a space to promote bands and labels I don’t think enough people know about, there will still be artists on this page you may regard as ‘big’ – the only criteria for the music on this page is it’s quality, I don’t care who made it, where it comes from or who it’s backed by.

Music is mystery. I know there are answers out there but I have no clue why this thing is so essential to our being on this planet. I don’t know how music makes us feel so much, I don’t know how music allows me to relate to people in a way that no other art form can, I don’t know how artists came up with that lyric, I don’t know why that line sang in that way means so much to me. I don’t ever want to find out these answers but I can’t think of anything more I enjoy than submerging myself in music’s mystery. Join me.