Are you ready for some good big Central Illinois music news?? Well… today we are reporting the launch of a new website – MIDWEST-HARDCORE.ORG. This is a new website that is being compiled (and still being worked on) by Springfield hardcore legend Drew Kodrich (Asthma, Gazeebo, Mouthsex, Small Man, Pryss, Torture Trend, Prevention, GUSH, Final Order). Drew had this to say:

“Hello world! I made this website that’s attempting to work as a database of all the “active” hardcore bands in the midwest. I’ve gotten to about 200 bands on my own, but I could really use your help! Share this around (if you’re so inclined) and either use the submit form or just message me if you have any bands to be added. I know I’m definitely missing stuff. Thanks!”

Amazing. On the site, you can search and look at active hardcore bands by the city or state they are in. You can also submit bands, checkout featured bands and playlists each week! How fun! What do you think of this? Let us know on our underground discussion forum.

Here is your news for today! At some point kinda recently it looks like our website has hit half a million views!!! This includes “hits” that we have gotten since we launched blacksheepspringfield.com (our old domain) all the way back in 2012. We haven’t changed much with the site since, and now hold the domain dumbrecs.com. Amazing!!

That’s it.

Hi, we’d just though we would stop by this afternoon and say “hi”, also we know that a lot of you out there are thirsty for live music shows. Well, our space still isn’t quite ready for those (still waiting on a door to get replaced and a few other people to sign off on stuff), however there are still plenty of shows going on coming up around town in spaces that aren’t the new Dumb Records. This includes houses “The CFP”, The Radon Lounge, also Bar None right across the street from us, HISO Music, Free Press Coffee, and more. We updated our Springfield Shows Page which has upcoming shows listed around town the best we are able to for now. If we are forgetting anything let us know!

The Springfield Shows Page can always be accessed by hovering over the “Shows” tab right up there in our menu bar. The Dumb Records show page will be up and rolling as soon as we are approved to have shows in the new space.

It’s 2019. The lease on our brand new spaces downtown start for us today, and we’ve already hit the ground running hard. We are trying to update a lot at once, including updating the domain of this website to dumbrecs.com. Do you like it? Don’t worry, blacksheepspringfield.com still redirects to here. Also don’t worry, all of the photos, fliers, and links on this site are still all here. We fully intend on continuing to celebrate the history of The Black Sheep Cafe as an all ages space in this site and moving forward with our new downtown space. We’ll be updating more of this site to match up with what we are doing this coming week. And for those of you asking when we will be open – expect an update from us on how things are coming along to be posted here on our site tomorrow!

How else can you stay up to date on what we are doing? Hey, sign up for our weekly online newsletter! We are sending one out with an update on how things are going later tonight! Sign up for that right here. (If it still says Black Sheep Cafe sorry, we are working on it).

Look-ee here! Here at Black Sheep / Dumb Records headquarters we recently decided to launch a new Instagram page for The Black Sheep. It’s about time we get with the times, right? Before we had lumped all of our content onto the Dumb Records Insta page – and don’t worry that page isn’t going anywhere. We felt that it would be beneficial to launch a more “official” separate page for The Black Sheep to get the word out more about upcoming shows, and also have an Instagram account that is more integrated with this website (which we plan on posting a lot more regularly this month)! Give that new Black Sheep page a “follow” right here. If you are a fan of a lot of “stupid” and/or “dumb” content, don’t forget to check out the Dumb Records twitter page from time to time.

We finally got around to setting up a page for Dumb Fest 6 on our site! Now you can take a look at a breakdown of everything announced for the festival so far – including where we are at on the lineup for all six shows – happening six different locations with weekend of June 8th, 9th, and 10th – and all of the bands playing, along with clickable links to each band’s music. Check out that new page right here. You can also always find it by hovering over the “shows” tab. You can also find pages for past Dumb Fests by hovering over “Dumb Fest 6.”

You can also expect a new wave of ten bands to go up here at our site at 3:00 pm this afternoon! Lookout!

Hello, and welcome to a new year! Thank you to all who came and checked out the show that we had a hand in putting on at Kari Bedford Photography downtown last night as a part of the Springfield Area Art Council’s First Night. (Hannah Songer is pictured above performing at the studio space last night).

We want to let all of you fans out there know that we know the site has slowed down some over the past couple of months – but we plan on getting right back on track with this new year! We plan on keeping the content coming daily with news on local band going-ons, show announcements, and all of that good stuff. You can expect us to be back tomorrow with the first of our Best of Springfield Music 2017 series starting with the albums.

We will also be doing our best to get our Black Sheep Shows Page back up to date tonight! We do have some fun and exciting things lined up for this new year!