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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ing in Galway nearly 10 years ago as a duo with Evan Campbell KETTAMA as VSN. The pair went on to form G-Town Records, and brought Galway to the world stages of dance music, with Shampain playing everything from Boiler Room to tours of China.

Shampain and Kettama’s Galway influence on the scene culminated in the pair taking over The Big Top marquee outdoors during the Galway Arts Festival in 2023, and putting on an eclectic night with drag artists and drone artists in Salthill.

But DJing is not the be all and end all for Cóilí.

Shampain is a creative fella who doesn’t rest - that means presenting Éire Eile, a TV show on TG4 about subcultures, jointly running a barber shop called Poblacht in Galway city, doing alternative silent film soundtracks with Slaughterhouse, running a mixed media / magazine and label called Freak and this year, finally releasing his own original music, with more to come.

The night after our chat, Shampain plays the Big Top again with Interplanetary Criminal and Tommy Holohan and next week you can catch him at Jameson Connects The Circle Stage at All Together Now closing the stage after David Holmes.

The Jameson Connects: The Circle stage at All Together Now features some Nialler9 favourites including Dry Cleaning, David Holmes, Maria Somerville, God Knows, DUG, Sloucho, Curtisy, Róis, Shampain, Adore and more.

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God Knows is a favourite returning guest, one of the nicest men in Irish music, one of the finest rappers in Ireland, a man who always has time for others, has an open heart, who puts collaboration, creativity and lifting people up to their rightful place.

It's a great time to talk to God Knows because on September 26th this year, he will release a long-awaited debut album The Future Of The Past, featuring production by his close collaborator MuRli (we also get to hear where they first met which is a fun bit of trivia) and featuring the singles 'The Observer', 'The Art Of Alienation' and next week's forthcoming single 'Misplaced Empathy'.

GK played Cork the night before we chat at a  Jameson Connects The Circle event at Crane Lane, ahead of the rapper's live set at Jameson Connects The Circle stage at All Together Now, this August bank holiday weekend.

So we talk about this new music and its deep ancestral familial inspirations which have surprisingly links to an West Cork venue, growing up in a multi-cultural Shannon, DJing and pleasing the crowd (or not), our excitement about the new Clipse album and the weird stuff going on with AI in music at the moment.

The Jameson Connects: The Circle stage at All Together Now features some Nialler9 favourites including Dry Cleaning, David Holmes, Maria Somerville, God Knows, DUG, Sloucho, Curtisy, Róis, Shampain, Adore and more.

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I'm sure why it took me 18 editions of the Listen Closely live listening parties for me to think about recording them and putting them out on the Patreon feed but I finally had the idea last month.

And sure, when we had two sold out parties of people coming to hear some chat and a full-volume listen in The Big Romance of LCD Soundsystem's second album Sound Of Silver (2007), then it was a great opportunity to stitch together chats I had with two guests DJ Kelly-Anne Byrne and Eoghan O'Sullivan (The Point Of Everything), all about James Murphy, Losing your Edge, loving and hating new York, gout and more

The second album from record nerd James Murphy and company, cemented LCD's status as a defining band of an alternative generation, elevating and building on the wry wink-wink-reference debut album with a second record that felt less like Murphy play pretending his heroes but joining them with a record filled with vastly superior alternative dance and rock music that takes its influences and turns them into something greater, and more singularly LCD Soundystem with songs of the age - 'Someone Great', 'Get Innocuous', 'All My Friends', 'Us vs Them' and more.

We discuss the record first with Eoghan and then play the record (not broadcast of course) before coming back after with Kelly-Anne Byrne to post-mortem what we've heard.

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