For our latest Live Listen Closely album listening party chat podcast, we are chiming in with My Bloody Valentine fever as the band prepare to play Dublin for the first time in 33 years this week.

Their seminal and definite album Loveless is considered a classic of shoegaze, a totem of the genre. If shoegaze is about building sonic cathedrals, Loveless is the La Sagrada Família of shoegaze.

Nialler and Aoife Barry discuss the album's fraught recording process that involved 19 studios, up to 45 engineers, two and a half years and approximately £250,000 of Creation Records for 48 minutes of music.

But what music! Kevin Shields glide guitar and open tunings added an otherness to the record, as did the mono mix and the Enforced Method Acting of getting Belinda Butcher to sing after immediately waking up. 

Loveless is a nebulous thing - it's more of an ambient wall-of-sound than a guitar rock record at times, that nearly bankrupted the label and turned one label exec's hair white. We discuss it all.

This is an addendum podcast to our original 2022 episode about the album.

Our next listening party event  is Outkast's Stankonia on Wednesday November 26th.

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We discuss the album of the month with the most chatter around it - Lily Allen's new direct diaristic divorce album West End Girl, along with records from Irish music scene stalwart Maykay with her long awaited debut solo album, the new sixth album from Florence + The Machine, Katie & Allison Crutchfield's Snocaps record, the supernaturally-inspired Old Earth from Dublin producer Rory Sweeney and friends, the Philadelphia shoegaze band They Are Gutting A Body Of Water and the new PinkPantheress remix album.

Along with spotlights for previous guest Ailbhe Reddy and short king hater Alex Cameron.

Plus some TV, film and books we've enjoyed.

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One of the '90s most revered albums, Grace is an astonishing debut LP from the American singer-songwriter Jeff Buckley. Sadly, it was to be his only album as he tragically died three years later but the album is considered a classic for its wide-ranging, reaching vocals (Buckley's voice spanned four octaves), its resonant melding of rock, folk, soul and jazz and songs of intensity, beauty and grandeur including of course, the definitive cover of Leonard Cohen's 'Hallelujah', along with songs like 'Lover, You Should’ve Come Over', 'Mojo Pin', and 'Grace'.

Baroque, sweeping, poetic, soul–baring, biblical, elemental and melodramatic Grace is considered one of the best debut albums of all time, and generally just one of the best records of all time.

The high drama of his life imbues Buckley’s songs with a level of intensity and singular weight It’s no wonder that it’s an album that teenagers are still discovering today.

We discuss the record in front of a live Listen Closely audience.

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This is a repeat episode from 2021, ahead of our My Bloody Valentine's Loveless listening parties on Tuesday October 28th and Wednesday October 29th (this night is SOLD OUT).

We revisit the classic 1991 record Loveless by the Irish/English shoegaze band My Bloody Valentine, ahead of their upcoming 3Arena show.

On this podcast hour, you'll hear all the album's expensive gestation that took in countless engineers and many studios, the thousand of pounds that Creation Records boss Alan McGee sunk into for the recording without hearing a note, how Kevin Shields' perfectionism lead him to both his Glide Guitar technique and a near mental breakdown, why the album was recorded in mono, why the vocals sound like that, and the reaction to the album at the time. Plus, are MBV really that loud live?

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It's Andrea Cleary's final Nialler9 Podcast as the cohost!

Since 2018, and nearly 300 episodes, Andrea has been a big big part of the Nialler9 Podcast and episode 300 is her final episode as she goes off to spend time in academia and finish her PhD. She will be back as a guest in the future but in the meantime:

Her final episode is a chance to talk about all the big music things in our world at the moment..

Taylor Swift's 12th album The Life of a Showgirl is a certified stinker according to fans and critics alike. We get Andrea's take on why.

Taylor Swift's 12th album The Life of a Showgirl is a certified stinker according to fans and critics alike. We get Andrea's always-insightful take on why.

CMAT's Euro-Country - the CMAT stans put on their review stetson and discuss CMAT's third album which Niall thinks is her best. We enthuse about her songwriting once more. 

Geese - the explosive rise of the Brooklyn band has people calling them Gen Z's  first great American rock band but they also sound a lot like the indie era Brooklyn-centric bands of the 2000s era - Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Wolf Parade, TV On The Radio and more.

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The third album from the New York band of Karen O, Nick Zinner and Brian Chase marked out the trio from the scrappy garage guitar of their debut (Fever To Tell) and its restrained followup (Show Your Bones) to a glorious reinvention of synthesised art-rock filled with ecstatic and anthemic heights.

Featuring two of their biggest hits in Heads Will Roll and Zero, the album brought disco and dance energy to their widescreen rock music, and was full of confidence and bolder sounds with sacrificing the YYYs identity.

For Andrea Cleary's last listening party for the foreseeable, she posits the theory that the album marked the end of the  indie era of the 2000s where indie music was practically mainstream and  Beyoncé and Jay-Z were attended Grizzly Bear shows and New York rock bands were known to all.

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Segotia is a community space for yoga classes, creative courses, art classes, exhibitions and events in Dublin.

Our panel was about how to sustain independent music communities in Dublin.

As music grows ever more entangled with unethical platforms and increased corporate interests –  artists, organisers, and fans are rethinking their roles in the ecosystem, and building alternatives.

This live episode of the Nialler9 Podcast explores how to build and sustain independent music communities in Dublin and what they look like.

We look at how artist, collectives, and grassroots organisers are cultivating alternative networks — through co-operative communities, music collectives, community-run festivals to local independent venue spaces and more.

Nialler9 and Andrea Cleary host with guests:

Alba Molina

Dublin Digital Radio, Synthesize_Her, Dublin Modular, Dublin Alternative Latin Night Inpar and curator/organiser of Alternating Current – Dublin Digital Radio’s annual of the experimental and grassroots currents in contemporary Irish music.

Oisín Klinkenberg

Oisín is an environmental researcher and project worker who hosts the show ‘amach anseo’ on Dublin Digital Radio. He now sits on the Steering Committee where he has been Project Coordinator.

Siún Moriarty

Music journalist Niamh O'Connor (DJ Mag, AlphaTheta, Mixmag, Resident Advisor, Discogs) joins us to discuss how trance music is the sound of an Irish summer, and hyperlocally in Dun Laoghaire specifically.

Trance music was primarily formed by producers in Germany, Netherlands and the Benelux countries in the early 90s where producers like German DJ Sven Väth fused techno-style beats with euphoric melodies, inspired by his time in Goa in india and listening to psychedelia. Paul van Dyk, Armin van Buuren, Tiësto and Ferry Corsten are some of the producers who were at the beginning of the genre.

Trance is hypnotic, euphoric, bombastic and bright – making use of repetitive overpoweringly melodic arpeggio synth lines paired with percussive builds, drops and trance gates to induce – the trance state – a musical attempt to replicate the altered euphoric state of mind, and the feeling of being high in the club a aided by ecstasy and mind-altering drugs.

Darude’s ‘Sandstorm’ is trance. Tiesto’s ‘Adagio For Strings’ is trance, Alice Deejay’s ‘Better Off Alone’ is trance. Robert Miles’ ‘Children’ is trance. Gigi D’Agostino’s ‘L’Amour Toujours’ is trance. The Big Brother theme song is trance.

Niamh joins us to enthuse about her favourite trance tunes, and talk to us about the DJs who are dropping trance in their sets these days.

We go on a history of trance music, trance in an Irish context, leading through the ’90’s to the chart poptrance, psytrance and recent music influenced by Trance from FKA Twigs, Burial, Oklou and Danny L Harle.

Are you ready? Let’s open the trance gate!

Niamh O’Connor’s Substack / Instagram

The Trance songs played on this episode.

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The Best of the Month episode is Patreon-only. Public subscribers get the first 25 minutes or so of the episode as a free preview. Members get to hear the whole episode on Patreon as part of a €6 a month subscription so come join us!

Andrea is taking the summer off the podcast and listening parties, so this month's special guest is Ailbhe Reddy, the Irish musician, songwriter and soon to be book author.

Ailbhe has recently started a really good Substack, and is working on novel and has a new album on the way, with new music coming in September.

Myself and Ailbhe discuss CMAT's gargantuan 'Eurocountry', Carving The Stone, the new album from For Those I Love, new tracks from Sprints, Chappell Roan, Laura Groves, Nuovo Testamento and Iona Zajac.

Plus we chat the new Clipse album Let God Sort Em Out, dip into the Irish underground with C2 and Beddyminaj and discuss is there a song of the summer this year? I put forward a contender.

We chat about All Together Now Festival, and some TV and films we have watched.

Ailbhe plays the National Concert Hall in Dublin on September 20th.

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The rapper, DJ and Dublin Don Mango joined us to discuss a rave-to-your-grave 90s UK dance music classic album - The Prodigy – Music For the Jilted Generation.

A classic ’90s rebellious rave album and sonic riposte to the crackdown on outdoor rave parites as a result of the 1994’s Criminal Justice Bill in the UK. Music For the Jilted Generation features Prodigy classics ‘Voodoo People’, ‘Poison’, ‘No Good (Start the Dance’, and ‘One Love’ and set the band off on a path of longterm rave and chart crossover that over 30 years later sees them as one of the premiere live dance acts in the world.

Listen to our chat about the album's background, the rave era of "toytown techno", the samples or are they samples and all things that lead to Vice call the album “dumb-fuck rock-raving”, and the album certainly opened the pit between rock and rave.

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