yes or no

On the eve of the Lisbon referendum, as the eyes of the world focus on Ireland and as the future of the treaty hangs in the balance its nice to be able to think about far more serious things like what has Matt Vinyl been bagging this weather.

In fairness it's been pretty quiet. Some bloke sold a load of his record collection to All City recently and as a result I picked up two pristine Plaid albums on vinyl, Rest Proof Clockwork and Not for Threes. These have great significance in my life as i bought both of them on CD for my now wife when we was courting back in the old days. I'm not sure how much she liked them but once we moved in together I got to hear a lot more of them. I've a bucket of Plaid albums but these two are by far my favourites. They're twenty years making music together this year. Well done Ed & Andy.

I also picked up the third Divine Styler album the other day. Its from 1998 and is called Word Power Vol 2. Although Divine Styler has been knocking around on the hip-hop scene for donkeys I only came across him through the fairly short-lived DeFocus label. He featured on one of the John Tejada 12 inch releases. I think it was Genetical Love. As it turns out Divine Styler first came to notice in Ice T's Rhyme Syndicate, the posse of rappers, Dj's and hangers on that also gave name to the label. Incidentally, John Tejada releases his eleventh album next week.

In other news I brought the kids to see the David O'Doherty and Maeve Higgins play that I was banging on about. I thought it was great but it seemed to go over the kids heads. Pity that, as it was meant for kids. Later that night I hooked up with Barry from the Reach crew to catch up on the happenings in the world of Dublin jungle. With him was DJ Equinox who'd been playing a gig here the night before. Those unaware of Equinox will not know that he's a Uk based producer and DJ who has released some tunes on the Irish labels Bassbin and Breakin. Of course he's released stuff on other labels too but my mates don't run those labels. Barry and Equinox and the rest of the crew were off down to Crawdaddy for the launch of a new album from Subtle Audio Recordings, a Limerick based drum and bass label run by a nice fella who goes by the name of Code. I'm sure that's not his real name. The album is Subtle Audio Vol 1 and its available in all good record stores and probably some not so good record stores. Alternatively you can buy it straight from Code if you go to his myspace site. Its available on CD and vinyl.