Comments will be updated (big thanks to Conor) so please keep talking amongst yourselves. You can use this post to connect with your favourite randomers, discuss Tom Waits or work out just why there are as many gigs happening in June as in May.

Normal service resumes on May 15. Or May 16. Depends on the weather.

Yacht “Platinum” (Marriage)
MIA “Paper Planes (DFA Remix)” (XL)
LCD Soundsystem “Big Ideas” (Columbia)
Santogold “You’ll Find A Way” (Lizard King/Atlantic)
Crystal Castles “Alice Practice” (Last Gang)
Duchess Says “Rabies” (Alien8)
Simian Mobile Disco “Clock” (Wichita)
Dan Le Sac vs Scroobius Pip “Look for the Woman” (Sunday Best)
Flying Lotus “Riot” (Warp)
Oppenheimer “Take the Whole Midrange And Boost It” (Fantastic Plastic)
Born Ruffians “Hummingbird” (Warp)
Magic Wands “Black Magic” (Ark)
Holy Fuck “Royal Gregory” (Young Turk/XL)
Von Sudenfed “Fledermaus Can’t Get It” (Domino)
Gil Scott-Heron “The Bottle” (Strata-East)
Kylie Auldist “That’s Why” (Tru Thoughts)
Goldfrapp “Happiness (Metromony remix)” (Mute)
The Notwist “Alphabet” (City Slang)
David Holmes “McCready Rides Again” (Oh Yeah)
Portishead “Hunter” (Island)
Nick Cave “Into My Arms” (Mute)
Halves “The Lamp Dies….” (Hate Is The Enemy)
Chequerboard “Toy WInds” (Lazybird)
Essie Jain “Haze” (Leaf)
Mara Carlyle “Vietnamerie” (EMI)
Dorothy Ashby “Wine” (Cadet)
Gil Evans Orchestra “Bilboa Song” (Impulse)

Thursday June 12 - Matmos and Si Schroeder - Andrew’s Lane Theatre

Friday June 13 - Low, Atlas Sound and The Holy Roman Army - Andrew’s Lane Theatre

Saturday June 14 - Dan Deacon, Jape, White Williams, High Places and more - Vicar Street

Sunday June 15 - Bonnie Prince Billy, Baby Dee and Paul Curreri - Vicar Street

Sunday June 15 - Metronomy and Spilly Walker - Andrew’s Lane Theatre (late)

Info on tickets to come. And as if we needed an excuse for this….

The good news: digital formats now account for nearly a quarter of all US music sales, with a headline figure of 809.9 million paid-for song downloads, a whopping 38 per cent increase on 2006.

The bad news: CD sales continue to slip and slide, down 17.5 per cent on 2006’s figures.

The really bad news: while sales volumes may be up, revenue is down 11.8 per cent on the previous year. That means less money in the pot, less money to invest in new bands and less money to pay the wages.

Holmes has contributed a new track, McCready Rides Again, to the Oh Yeah Sessions ‘08 release.

The compilation also features tunes from the hotly tipped In Case of Fire, The Jane Bradfords, Kowalski, Panama Kings and others. Eight of the tracks were recorded at Oh Yeah’s in-house studio.

This year’s FeileAfrica fest in Cork runs from May 22nd-25th with shows from Gregory Isaacs, Afrocelt Sound System’s N’faly Kouyate and many others.

Master At Work Kenny Dope will spend the June bank holiday weekend in Ireland with shows at Dublin’s Tivoli (May 31st) and Limerick’s Baker Place (June 1st

Granted, it was a fairly odd concept for a show: take two redundant Irish workers to eastern Europe to meet the people who had taken their jobs when their respective factories closed and moved east. But what this No P45 Frontiers brought home to both participants and audience was that multinational companies like Dell will always move to the country which offers the lowest wages and cheapest costs. And that no longer is Ireland.

The two Irish workers visited Poland and the Czech Republic to find countries and people who resembled Ireland and themselves 15 years ago. There’s an abundance of young, bright well-educated people ready to work, government agencies willing to do whatever has to be done to bring those jobs to town and cheap costs all round from rent to transport. The Poles and Czechs probably also have an aspiring Bertie Ahern waiting in the wings - or maybe they could take our one off our hands when he finishes his various laps of honour.

But unlike Ireland, those Polish and Czech workers know that these multinational companies are the geese that will lay golden eggs for only so long. There’s no talk of jobs for life here, like there was in Ireland when companies began moving in to IDA facilities to avail of our cead mile failte and low tax rates. There’ll be no Bosch job waiting for their kids when they leave school.

In eastern Europe, they already know those jobs will go elsewhere when costs go up. Indeed, Poland and the Czech Republic are now facing competition from Romania and the Ukraine and you can sure the costs are even lower as you go further and further east. One of the Czech inward investment executives said the test now was to work out what would happen in five or 10 years when those companies left. It made you wonder if any Irish investment agency folks had been so prescient a decade ago.