Nialler9

On this week's episode my guest is SOAK. Bridie Monds-Watson has been making music since they were a teenager in Derry, releasing their Mercury-nominated debut Before We Forgot How to Dream in 2015 at just 18, followed by Grim Town in 2019 and If I Never Know You Like This Again in 2022, all on Rough Trade. The last few years have been a strange and quiet stretch for SOAK. Vocal issues left them wondering if their time in music was coming to an end but an undiagnosed autoimmune disease was quickly discovered. Bridie talks about coming out the other side of it having "remodelled everything for joy", writing in the present tense rather than nostalgia, and only trying to make themselves laugh. There's also the full story of how 'just stand there' with Fred Again.. came about, from a lockdown spoken word piece made with Ellius Grace and Gemma Doherty to Fred texting through a finished remix unprompted, to becoming the most heard vocal of their career, racking up over 25 million plays and the surreal moment Fred and Thomas Bangalter of Daft Punk closed a show with the song segueing into 'One More Time'. SOAK is big on collaboration having recently also worked with Gordi, Niamh Regan  Katie Malco, Julien Baker and] George Fitzgerald. Fresh from an intimate tour of Ireland's small rooms, venues and bookshops, 'death valley fridge magnet' is their first solo song in over four years, a song about feeling lost and finding your way back through your friends. You can catch SOAK live this summer at The Circle by Jameson Music at All Together Now Festival, which features some Nialler9 favourites. For this conversation, SOAK picked five songs to frame the chat: Big Thief, Samia, Julia Jacklin, Mitski and Ryan Beatty. We get into all of them, along with losing your voice, writing to your younger self, and over a decade of being SOAK. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community    On the vocal issues that changed everything "I have an autoimmune disease that I didn't know about, and I only found out about it because I started to lose my voice. After one show, my voice would just become hoarse. When that started happening, I was like, well, maybe there's a reason I'm not meant to do this... In the end I did really need a moment to ask, what do I care about? Why did I want to do this in the first place? It recentered everything. I just remodelled everything for joy. It's been a big relief." On touring while losing their voice "I would play a show and then my voice would just go, or I'd be straining so hard it was painful to sing. For a lot of those last shows I would literally be on vocal rest during the day to save my voice for the show that evening, strain it again, and repeat the process. And there's a band there and everybody's getting paid. It was just so stressful." On how the writing has changed "A big difference in the stuff I've been writing is that it's very present. Before, I would have been very nostalgic in my writing... I notice a change in myself, that I'm trying a lot less. I'm only trying to make myself laugh now, to be honest. I used to punish myself a lot and seek some sort of optimisation in music, which is the worst combination of words when it comes to art." On redefining success "My aspirations have never been to headline Glastonbury. To me, success is having the freedom of time and space to actually make the next song. Nothing will stop the next song except for you. You can be an artist and it doesn't have to be your entire income. That's a big distinction I had to learn." On writing 'death valley fridge magnet' "I wrote it in the car, it was starting to snow around Christmas a couple of years back. I was driving past St Stephen's Green and it brought on all these memories of my best friend. We did a road trip in America years ago, and I was trying to take the complication of adulthood out of things and remember how it felt to be eighteen and really not care much and just want to do stupid things." On the Fred Again.. collaboration "I got a chain of texts from him and he referenced really deep cuts from my first record. So I was like, okay, respect, you actually know what's going on here... I find it so funny that what he wanted to use was my pretty intense Derry accent. Even at that level, everybody working on this stuff was so kind and genuine. He genuinely is so obsessed with music, does not stop, always singing into his phone or tapping a table. It's truly an inspirational thing to witness." On seeing Fred and Thomas Bangalter close a show with 'just stand there' "They finished that whole show with 'just stand there' going into 'One More Time' by Daft Punk. At my thirtieth birthday, my friends got it up on their phones. That was crazy. You need to talk about it more." On Irish music right now "It really feels like we're flying as a country musically. The standard of stuff coming out is ridiculous. I just listened to the new Joshua Burnside record, which I think is his best yet. How that and the last CMAT record can be so different and so brilliant, our range is pretty impressive in this country." On Big Thief's Double Infinity https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSqYsmmfbCI "All those songs are three, four chords and pretty simple song structures, and I appreciated the choice of that. 'Incomprehensible' is an all-time Big Thief song. You can hear them laughing in the background, they allow it to be a bit rusty, and that's what I like most." On Mitski "The through line through all of these artists is the honesty of it all, not trying to be a shiny happy person, just all the good, bad, beautiful, ugly. I love that in Mitski's music especially. She's not afraid to be perceived negatively or pathetically. She leans into it and I think it's great." On revisiting old songs "It freaks me out. It's literally like being face to face with your younger self. Sometimes it's too intense emotionally, why I wrote them, what I was feeling when I wrote them. I can't just pop in and out of that. It's a real deep thing." On Ryan Beatty's 'Secret Language'  

A live recording of a discussion about one of the best albums of 2025 from Rosalía. Rosalía’s Lux is the kind of album that demands to be heard properly and intently – a mountain-moving, orchestral operatic masterwork recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, sung in 13 different languages, and inspired from the writings of Simone Weil, Clarice Lispector and the lives of female saints, so that's what we did in March when we hosted two listening parties in Dublin's The Big Romance and Fidelity, as part of the Nialler9 Listen Closely album listening events. After the flamenco pop of El Mal Querer and the genre-slicing Motomami, on Lux, Rosalía made something else entirely – intimate and enormous, ancient and futuristic, deeply human in every sense. The album is so ambitious and creative – it felt right to dedicate some real time to the record in a suitable environment without distractions. So this podcast episode is a recording from night two in The Big Romance between myself Niall and guest Louise Bruton - who recently directed the short film Let Go - discussing the massive scope of Rosalía's Lux - the literary writing and saint-inspired spiritually romantic and rapturous album - which was my favourite of 2025. Lux realises an album of earth-shaking movements in four parts through orchestral spirituals, with The London Symphony Orchestra. Listen back to the chat in this episode. Our next Listening Party is Chemical Brothers – Dig Your Own Hole [1997] on July 29th.  

This is a repost ahead of the release of the new Boards Of Canada album Inferno this friady. The Scottish duo's 1998 debut album is the subject of this month's Listen Closely podcast. Boards Of Canada's debut album Music Has The Right To Children on Warp Records/SKAM is a modern classic, a highly evocative collection of music, operating like a fading childhood memory, a creeping nostalgic collage of analogue electronic music, samples from public service broadcasting programming, with inspirations from to hip-hop beats, ambient techno and psychedelia.   Join Niall and Andrea to discuss the liminal legacy of Music Has The Right To Children, and discover how library music, Sesame Street and nature documentaries all inform the album, and we chat about the album’s childhood nostalgia, and its preoccupation with a retrofuturistic nostalgia and memory.     * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community   Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed   Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We gathered to listen through one of the most singular debut albums ever made. Here's the recording of the chat. Niall is joined at our live listening event Listen Closely in the Big Romance by Cian Galvin aka Irish hip-hop producer and crate digger The Expert to discuss... DJ Shadow - Endtroducing (1996) A towering achievement in sample-based plunderphonics, music arrangements and turntablist-lead production techniques, DJ Shadow's 1996's debut album Endtroducing remains one of the most evocative and singular classic albums of recent times. Entirely built of obscure crate-dug samples using an Akai MPC60 sampler, Endtroducing's cinematic soundscapes finds a transportive space where emotionally resonant electronica and hip-hop meet - the middle ground between light and shadow. It is considered one of the best albums of all-time, and is certainly one of mine. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link The third instalment of our loosely titled Plunderphonics series for the Nialler9 Listening Party brought us to a record that, thirty years on, still doesn't quite sound like anything else. DJ Shadow's Endtroducing, released September 16th 1996 on Mo' Wax, is a record built entirely from other records - and yet it sounds like nothing any of those records ever sounded like. If you missed the night, the podcast recording is above. What follows is a bit of context and some of what we got into. The trilogy so far We've now done The Avalanches' Since I Left You and J Dilla's Donuts as part of this loose series. All three are sample-based records. All three feel like complete worlds unto themselves. There's something about the constraint of working entirely within found sound that produces a particular kind of magic - you're hearing music that was already forgotten being given an entirely new life, filtered through the taste and instincts of one person with a singular obsession. Endtroducing is the most melancholic of the three. It's not a party record or a rap record in any conventional sense. It's a cinematic, introspective piece of work - breakbeats, jazz, psychedelia, hip-hop, all of it dissolved into something that feels like its own atmosphere. The kid from Davis, California Josh Davis grew up in Davis, California, then San Jose - both outside the main cultural centres, which is something he and Mo' Wax founder James Lavelle bonded over immediately when they first spoke by phone. Lavelle had grown up in Oxford. Both felt like outsiders to the scenes they were drawn to. Shadow was experimenting with a four-track recorder in high school and DJing on the campus radio station KDVS at UC Davis before he'd made a single release. By 1993 he was part of the Solesides underground hip-hop collective alongside Blackalicious, Lateef, and Lyrics Born. Lavelle found him through a B-side remix on a forgotten hip-hop promo, tracked him down through a friend at Tommy Boy Records, and told him: "Don't worry about choruses and verses, just push your sound further." That's more or less what he did. The equipment The entire album was made on an Akai MPC60 II, a pair of turntables, and an Alesis ADAT tape recorder that belonged to Dan the Automator. Shadow was 23 years old. The MPC could sample 2.5 seconds of stereo and store 13 seconds total. Everything on the record - the beats, the melodies, the percussion - had to be constructed within those limits. Self-imposed limitation producing something that infinite digital possibilities probably couldn't. There's a reason we don't really get records like this anymore, and it's partly because the tools have become too open-ended. The seams and the constraints are part of what gives Endtroducing its particular texture. The crates Shadow spent his days in the basement of Rare Records in Sacramento, a shop with records piled to the ceiling. He found a mummified bat down there once. The cover photograph, taken by B+, shows producer Chief Xcel and Lyrics Born (in a wig) in that same basement. It's as good a visual summary of the album's ethos as you'll find anywhere. He made it a rule to avoid sampling obvious or well-known material. The samples he pulled were largely from forgotten funk, soul, jazz, experimental, and sound library records - music that had no audience left and no commercial future. He rescued them. The liner notes credit everything, including the big clearance cases: Metallica, Björk, and the David Axelrod piano loop that anchors 'Midnight in a Perfect World'. Lavelle handled the clearances. "The samples were pretty easy to clear," he said. "It's different when you're sampling some Swedish drum break from 1970 than sampling James Brown." The album itself Endtroducing feels like a place. Not a collection of tracks but a world you enter at the start and leave at the end, slightly altered. The drums on 'Building Steam with a Grain of Salt', the disorienting loop of 'Changeling', the controlled chaos of the second half of 'Scatter Brain', the three-part sweep of 'Stem/Long Stem', the ache of 'Midnight in a Perfect World'. It's not a happy record. Shadow said himself that feelings of self-doubt and depression came through in the music during production. You can hear it. The Wire's first ever review called it "a debut of melancholic mediocrity." Melody Maker said "you need this record. You are incomplete without it." The bigger question There's a clip of Shadow in the Rare Records basement that gets used a lot in discussions about Endtroducing. He gestures around at the records and says: "Almost none of these artists still have a career. Ten years down the line, you'll be in here." It's a bleak thought, but also the central one. Sampling asks us to reckon with music's ephemerality - but it also offers a counter-argument. These records survived because Shadow found them. Their sounds are in the album. They're still being heard.

This month's music selector guest is the NYC and Ireland music fan Lauren Kennedy, who went viral for her Track Star video last year. Lauren Kennedy is the Athlone woman who has lived in New York for the last six years and is known for the viral video on the Track Star Youtube channel where she won $20,500 for correctly guessing all of the Irish bands selected for her on the show. Lauren very soundly donated all the money to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund. It was her second time on the show, after her first appearance where she was surprised by Bon Iver. You may, like me have been following her gig escapades in recent months in NYC where she went to see a load of Irish bands who were over to play. Lauren just moved back to Ireland for the summer so a perfect time to welcome this legend back to the country by catching up with the music she's loving at the moment. Music discussed and chosen on the episode from Dove Ellis, Florence Road, David Kitt, Rua Rí, Shamrock Showband, The Last Dinner Party, Getdown Services, Crying Loser, Lemoncello and Fundido. My Best albums of April piece. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.

Kate Nash is one of the most interesting artists working in British and Irish music right now.   You might know her from 'Foundations', the debut single that went to number one in the UK in 2007, or maybe winning a BRIT Award for Best Female Artist in 2008 or the excellent Netflix TV show GLOW on Netflix about female wrestlers.  But the Kate Nash of the last few years is an advocate for artists who kicks against the pricks of the music industry and the world at large.  In the last couple of years alone she has given testimony before a UK parliamentary select committee about the economics of touring, losing £26,000 on a European tour leg and covering those losses by selling photos of her arse on OnlyFans. She's travelled around London on a fire engine visiting the offices of Live Nation and Spotify as part of her Butts for Tour Buses campaign. She is a patron of the Music Venue Trust speaking up for grassroots venues. She's been one of the founding members of the Featured Artists Coalition since 2009.  She played the Trans Mission show at Wembley. She's been to Leinster House. She also released trans ally anthem 'GERM'. Nash  grew up in North Harrow going to Irish dancing at weekends, listening to Christy Moore and the Dubliners at home, spending summers in Ireland. Last month, Nialler9 debuted her cover of Sinead O’Connor’s Famine - a song that serves as an introduction to her dual Irish English heritage. So there is a lot to talk to Kate Nash about. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink   * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.

This month's best of the month podcast guest is Manchester-based Irish BBC 6 Music presenter Deb Grant. Deb started out  with Jazz FM in Dublin before moving to the UK at 19 where now based in Manchester, she has been a regular BBC Radio 6 Music presenter since 2023, currently presenting the New Music Daily Fix show with Nathan Shepherd from Monday to Thursday from 7pm to 9pm. Deb will be in Ireland over the coming months in her role as ambassador for Heineken Greenlight. Music discussed and chosen on the episode from Angine De Poitrine, Wax Head, Avalon Emerson, Shortstraw, Baalti and Lapgan, Hannah Peel and Beibei Wang, Isa Gordon, Carol Maia and Jeremy Gustin, The Scratch and Rua Rí. Plus Deb talks about being a judge on the Choice Music Prize, seeing Madra Salach in a tiny venue, and David Byrne's live Who Is The Sky? tour. My Best albums of March piece. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.

The 1998 album marked a turn for the trip-hop visionary band's to the dark side. Niall is joined by Craig Fitzpatrick discuss the record in front of a live audience at at Listen Closely, our series of monthly album listening parties in the Big Romance. Massive Attack - Mezzanine (1998) The third album from the British pioneers radically reshaped the band's own bright trip-hop, soul and hip-hop with darker tones of electronic, industrial, and gothic distorted guitars.  Mezzanine eschews the band's trademark warmth for magnified atmospheres drawing on paranoia, negative space, and whispered vocals to create a mood that mirrored the anxieties of the digital age. The album caused internal drama. The dark, guitar-heavy vibe of Mezzanine pushed the band into new territory, but it also led to major tension. We revisit the record and talk about the band's career's highs, lows and live shows in The Big Romance with a live audience.   Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community

The debut album from Bloc Party remains a seminal record of a key time in UK guitar music. Niall is joined by author and writer Dean Van Nguyen discuss the record in front of a live audience at Listen Closely, our series of monthly album listening parties. Bloc Party – Silent Alarm (2005) Bloc Party’s debut album quickly became a seminal indie record of the 2000s with big frenetic indie zeitgeist hits like ‘Helicopter’, ‘Banquet’, ‘This Modern Love’ and ‘Like Eating Glass’. Silent Alarm presented a poppy spin on taut post-punk, edgy pop and alternative ballads, with Kele Okereke’s lyrical explorations of matters of the heart, modern anxieties, intimacy and alienation. Silent Alarm felt like a manifesto. It bridged rock and dance culture before LCD Soundsystem and others made that fusion mainstream. We discuss its beginnings, its impact, what came after for the band and some recommended further listening. We revisit the record in The Big Romance with a live audience. Dean's book about Tupac is recommended.    * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

This month's best of guest is Cork pop culture writer Mia Tobin Power who joins Niall for episode #309. In the recommendations corner this month are albums from Mitski, Cardinals, Charli XCX, Archive, Jill Scott, Vegas Water Taxi, Puma Blue, Nashpaints and David DeBarra. Plus a song from new Cork band Maicín. Plus some chat about the phenomenal Industry Season 4 and some other films and TV we've enjoyed this past month. I wrote about my choices here this week. Follow Mia on Substack.   Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.

It's been a whirlwind of a week for Dublin nightlife enjoyers. Last Friday, it was reported that newly refurbished Dublin hotel The Hoxton (formerly The Central Hotel) sought an High Court injunction over noise bleed issues against its adjoining late night restaurant and night club space Yamamori Izakaya while it plans to open its own nightclub. Both parties are in disagreement over what has taken place in attempts at dialogue. In the meantime, a protest took place last night outside the hotel, which showed people's clear frustration with the threats put upon Dublin's cultural and arts spaces. Dublin folk musician and People Before Profit Dublin Central candidate Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin spoke at the protest last night, and was part of a Stand Up For The Arts public meeting in The Cobblestone afterwards. Eoghan spoke to me about the broader implications of government policies that prioritise corporate interests over cultural preservation, he emphasises the need for grassroots movements to protect and advocate for the arts. The chat highlights the importance of community engagement, the untapped potential of publicly funded cultural venues and the recent failure of the government to save The Complex. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.

The Best of the Month episode is Patreon-only. This is a  preview on the public feed. This month's best of the month guest is music writer Vanessa Roulston Mooney. We pick our favourite music of the first month of the year, from midwest desert post rock of Winged Wheel, new releases from Irish artists Maria Somerville, Madra Salach, Ailbhe Reddy, Ye Vagabonds and Caitlin Orla Eve, the cosmic collab between Julianna Barwick and Mary Lattimore, the Norwegian artist Sassy 009, the "Britainicana" band Westside Cowboy and Chicago experimental trio Bitch Bajas. We also talk recent gig experiences and the Choice Music Prize Irish album of the year. Follow Vanessa on Substack. The These New Puritans interview Vanessa did for us.

A catchup with the Limerick rapper, poet, thinker, writer and actor Denise Chaila. Denise Chaila has been working on her own artist development in recent years. The Limerick artist has spent time away from the spotlight surfacing only to offer a glimpse of what's preoccupying her eloquent mind. A lot has happened in the five and half years (!) since Denise and I sat down with pals to have a chat for the Podcast. This time around, it's just the two of us, with Denise sharing the journey that took her from Ed Sheeran remixes and support slots to an artistic and creative re-evaluation that prompted her to put the breaks on her career as it barrelled ever higher and forward. In this episode, Denise tells us why she shunned the limelight, and the machinations of the music industry around her, and illuminates on recent times that have taken her to visit the childhood homes of J Dilla (Detroit) and Michael Jackson (Indiana), making a film with Limerick-born LA photographer and director Brian Cross aka B+ about the Supremes performing in Limerick, meeting Erykah Badu and her recent experiences exploring traditional Irish music and sessions. On Friday, Denise Chaila performs a rare hometown show as part of All We Have Are Days, with the show at billed as an in conversation and performance, which as Denise told me will aim to tear down the barriers of performer and audience.   * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

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. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

The Best of the Month episode is normally Patreon-only. We are making this one fully public. This month's best of the month guest is Nialler9 Podcast regular Louise Bruton. 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.   Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.

A live recording and chat with Aoife Barry from our recent Listening Party for Jeff Buckley's Grace (1994) at the Big Romance in Dublin. 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.   Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

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?   Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

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. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community   Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link  

A live recording from our recent Listening Party for Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz! (2009) at the Big Romance in Dublin. 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. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community   Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link  

This live episode of the Nialler9 Podcast was recorded in Segotia in Rathmines Dublin on September 27th as part of their one-day festival Me Au Segotia. 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 Siún Moriarty is the marketing manager in Button Factory, venue manager in the newly launched Curveball and founder of blankbar, an artist development & management agency working with artists Rory Sweeney and Vaticanjail.

A trip into Trance - the dance music genre that launched a thousand cheesy synth lines and Euphoria compilations. 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. What is trance music? 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. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link  

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. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community

This live episode was recorded over July in The Big Romance on Parnell Street with a live audience at our latest album listening party Listen Closely. 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. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community

This week’s special guest is  the multifaceted Cóilí Collins aka DJ Shampain. 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. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community  

It's always a good time to talk to God Knows, the Irish-Zimbabwean rapper based in Shannon. 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. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community

This live episode was recorded over two nights in June in The Big Romance on Parnell Street in front of an attentive live audience (and some people overheard on the recording from the main bar) 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. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community

The Best of the Month episode is now 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 €5 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 Eoin Murray, the music writer behind the Irish Substack monthly newsletter Anois Os Ard which digs up Irish music of the underground and experimental variety. Eoin brings a variety of mostly-Irish releases to discuss with music from Throwing Shapes, Amanda Feery, the Efa O'Neill curated Place: Ireland compilation, Days Of Heaven the new album from Belfast band Junk Drawer and the new album from London band Caroline. I pick my favourite albums from the month of June and discuss including Turnstile's Never Enough, Little Simz' Lotus, Loyle Carner's hopefully ! along with underground cloud rap from deathtoricky and the psych-folk style of Poor Creature. We chat about recent gigs attended, Glasto, books we're reading and films and TV shows we are watching. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Albums and tracks mentioned Throwing Shapes - Chosen Talk Loyle Carner - hopefully ! (album) - in my mind / about time Junk Drawer - Days Of Heaven (album) - Nids Niteca Little Simz - Lotus (album) - Flood / Enough deathtoricky - motives deathtoricky - praying for u Ó-Pax - Bell Dent Turnstile - NEVER ENOUGH (album) - Never Enough / Sole caroline; Caroline Polachek - Tell me I never knew that Poor Creature - All Smiles Tonight Cocteau Twins - Watchlar

We’re not here for a long time, but we are here for a smooooooooooth time. Grab your linen shirt and deck shoes as we will be taking to the gentle seas for some smooth sailing, daiquiri in hand, and with love on our mind, we are heading to the private island of Yacht Rock. You can be a passenger on this ship. Yacht Rock is the subgenre of music largely made by West Coast American artists The Doobie Brothers, Michael McDonald, Kenny Loggins, Christopher Cross and their ilk with some of the best session players of the mid-70s to early-80s era. Just why did music this smooth and melodic become so dominant? Why did they all love electric pianos so much? Did these progenitors all go sailing as their pastime? Drippy keyboards, bright summery melodies, melancholic lyrics, impassioned sentiment, it’s the concerns of a heartbroken gentleman, it’s time to take a splash in the cool waters of Yacht Rock.

The Best of the Month episode is now Patreon-only. Public subscribers get the first 20 minutes or so of the episode as a free preview. Members get to hear the whole episode on Patreon as part of a €5 a month subscription so come join us! It's the return of our monthly Patreon episode, but this time with a special guest. Andrea is taking the summer off the podcast and listening parties, so I asked Mo Cultivation's Bekah Molony to join me in enthusing about our favourite music of the past month. Bekah joins us to talk about Tyler, The Creator's recent Dublin gig, Forbidden Fruit, Lovely Days at Guinness Storehouse and more. Then we discuss our favourite music from PinkPantheress, Khamari, Baxter Dury, Evan Miles, Mhaol, Billy Woods, Sammy Virji and Skepta, For Those I Love, Katie Phelan, Loyle Carner and Erika De Casier. Plus some song of the summer contenders and chats about Sinners the film and TV shows we're catching. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Albums and tracks mentioned For Those I Love - Of The Sorrows Sammy Virji; Skepta - Cops & Robbers billy woods - Golliwog (album) Khamari - Head in a Jar Baxter Dury, JGrrey - Allbarone katie phelan - nothing stays the same Erika de Casier - Lifetime (album) Evan Miles - It's On Me Mhaol - Something Soft (album) PinkPantheress - Stateside PinkPantheress - Illegal Sofia Kourtesis; Daphni - Unidos Selena Gomez; benny blanco - Bluest Flame Loyle Carner - all i need

Today's episode is a discussion with writer and journalist Una Mullally about artist boycotts, solidarity, Palestine, Israel, protest, cancellation, capitalism and the music industry. We talk about how Israel's genocide of the Palestinian people has become a flashpoint of awareness about how modern music festivals work, specifically how private equity which invests in Israel operates in the live music industry. We chat about why Kneecap's recent actions have drawn so much ire and anger in the US and  the UK, leading to the expedited terror charge of Mo Chara on June 18th, and calls (often successful) for cancellation of their shows. Festivals owned by global events company Superstruct who own 80 festivals and brands like Sonar, Sziget, Boiler Room, Oya, Field Day and Mighty Hoopla have had artists cancel in boycott of Superstruct's owner KKR, the second largest private equity firm in the world, who  have documented ties to both weapons manufacturers and Israeli companies developing data centres and advertising real estate on illegally occupied land. It feels like an unprecedented time for the visibility of protest and boycott by artists in recent years. A generational shift is happening -  Artists and DJs are showing moral opposition in this complicity in the face of political inaction. Lines are being drawn.  

K.Dot's first masterpiece album is a coming-of-age story with Kendrick navigating life in Compton, resisting peer pressure, destructive behaviour and trying to stay righteous in a corrupted world. Ahead of our listening party at the Big Romance, Andrea takes us on the Hero's Journey of Kendrick Lamar's breakthrough 2012 second album good kid, m.A.A.d city. Subtitled A Short Film, this cinematic rap masterpiece was a huge mainstream success, and crowned Kendrick as the voice of modern hip-hop (Dr. Dre literally appears to do so on the coronation track 'Compton') and it's narrative storytelling tells the story of a 17-year-old Lamar on a quest for a girl before being sidetracked by homie peer pressure and the more dangerous elements of his surrounding landscape. It features the songs 'Bitch Dont' Kill My Vibe', 'Money Trees', 'Backseat Freestyle', and the accidental frat anthem 'Swimming Pools (Drank)'. We revisit this modern rap masterpiece, Kendrick's first of many.

The avant-electronic and experimental Irish music festival Open Ear returns to Sherkin Island on the June Bank Holiday weekend. Open Ear is known for its preoccupation with illuminating music operating on the fringes, and the remote island setting of Sherkin Island off the coast of Baltimore in West Cork reflects this outsider ethos. The varied programme is drawn from electronic, techno, experimental folk and trad, jazz EBM, bass music and art rock, and this year features the likes of Irish techno legend Sunil Sharpe, Scottish piper Brìghde Chaimbeul, Cork sean nos rockers I Dreamed I Dream, Belfast Sound Advice record shop owner Marion Hawkes, Limerick rap and production duo Citrus Fresh and 40Hurtz, Catalan/Italian EBM duo Dame Area, Autechre collaborator Rob Hall, and lots more. The programme features one artist at a time across various stages on Sherkin including the infamous Banger Cliff. I spoke to Open Ear head of programming Dion Doherty aka Belacqua about the challenges and uniqueness of putting on an experimentally-minded festival on an island and as it approaches its 10th year, how its planning to grow its European partnerships and unearths Irish music of the underground.   * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link      

Our monthly Patreon episode in which Andrea Cleary and Niall share our favourite music of the past month.   The Best of the Month episode is now Patreon-only. Public subscribers get the first 20 minutes or so of the episode as a free preview. Members get to hear the whole episode on Patreon for a €5 a month so come join us! This month, we are discussing new albums from Torres and Julien Baker, Daughter Of Swords, Bon Iver, Maria Somerville and songs from The Hives, Turnstile, mischa and the bear, Frankie Cosmos, Morgana, Myles Manley and a Crossed Wires NTS show recommendation. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Albums and tracks mentioned Marika Hackman; Laura Marling - Skin Daughter of Swords - Alex LP The Hives - Enough Is Enough mischa and the bear - Deny Maria Somerville - Luster LP Turnstile - NEVER ENOUGH Julien Baker; TORRES - Say A Prayer For Me LP Bon Iver - SAble, Fable LP Bon Iver - I'll Be There Morgana - Power Cuts Myles Manley - Indieboys of Dublin Myles Manley - Di Fontaines Frankie Cosmos - Vanity Dame Area - La Danza Del Ferro    

The Irish-Palestinian singer and filmmaker speaks about embracing her Arabic heritage in her music, and the resurgence of interest in keening and Irish folklore. The Irish-Palestinian artist Róisín El Cherif has spent 18 months advocating for the people of Palestine, speaking out on the injustice and genocide in Gaza. El Cherif has begun singing in Arabic on stage, noting the connections between Irish and Arabic folk music and culture. It's best encapsulated in the Róisín El Cherif live show, which debuted at the Fringe Festival and was given a Fringe award for Astounding Performance of Political and Cultural Significance. The next live show takes place at the Button Factory in Dublin next week, Wednesday April 30th, which will be a blend of live music, poetry and film visuals featuring clips from Arabic films, Palestinian folk music and drawing parallels with Irish mythology and folklore - the cailleach, banshees and keening which is also found in Arabic culture as wailing, and further represents and celebrates the oppressed people of Palestine. El Cherif recently accepted the Choice Music Prize award on behalf of Fontaines D.C. by reciting part of a poem from Palestinian poet Samih al-Qasim written in 1971 called Enemy of the Sun which speaks of Palestinian resistance against Israel. We also talk about the reaction to Kneecap's recent Pro-Palestine statements at Coachella.

It’s DILLA TIME This month's special is about Jay Dee aka J Dilla, a Detroit hip-hop producer’s whose work is so prolific and influential his MPC sampler is in the Smithsonian. Dilla worked with hip-hop and R&B greats - Q-Tip, A Tribe Called Quest, Busta Rhymes, The Roots, The Pharcyde, D'Angelo, Common, Madlib and made his own signature rhythm that others copied - he used a sampler like no one had before. Through his unique methods of playing with layered timing, rhythmic expectation, polyrhythm, samples stretching and feel and his ability to bend time-signatures to his will, Dilla changed how music moves, and made Dilla Time (a term coined in the 2022 book of the same name by Dan Charnas). We explore his production work, solo music and the legacy of his final album from 2006, released three days before he died - Donuts - a sample psychedelic beat tape of melancholic beauty and a magic trick of sampling that serves as a towering and influential creative statement. The accompanying Dilla playlist. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link  

Our monthly  episode in which Andrea Cleary and Niall share our favourite music of the past month. The Best of the Month episode is now Patreon-only. Public subscribers get the first 15 minutes or so of the episode as a free preview. Members get to hear the whole episode on their member feeds or on Patreon direct. Discussing music from Lonnie Holley, Bon Iver, Adebisi Shank, Chappell Roan, Avalon Emerson, Niamh Bury, Brighde Chaimbeul, Selena Gomez & Benny Blanco, Paddy Hanna, MJ Lenderman and an old choice from Cornelius. We also chat about what we've been watching lately including Adolescence, Severance, Last One Laughing UK (which I erroneously called Laugh Out Loud), 

Jamal Sul has been making Irish Arabic electronic music as Moving Still since 2016. His productions link his Arabic heritage, with his love of synthesizers, dance music and buzzy bangers. Moving Still’s music is unique in how it brings together styles of music from the  SWANA region (Southwest Asia and North Africa) with European and American club genres like Italo, electro, acid, breakbeats, house and more. Jamal's project has been in the ascendancy with releases on Cooking with Palms Trax, Orange Tree Edits, Dar Disku and his latest Close To The Shams EP on the Bordello A Parigi label. His 2022 Boiler Room set from London is an all-timer for me, and his Ouddy Bangers series has seen him put a club edit spin on pop, disco and dance classics from Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and Kuwait. I talk to Jamal about all of it: his big gigs, productions, edits, influences, heritage and how Ireland has been slow to catch up on Moving Still until recently. And he picks a selection of songs that has inspired his music (listed below). Up next on the DJ front for Moving Still is the latest edition of Klub Sukar at Yamamori Tengu on Saturday April 19th.  Tracks played: Moving Still - Al Disco Haram Cheick Madani - Laya Habibi Ragheb Alama - El hob al Kabir Marvellous Melodicos - sing oh (zagalo mix) Moving Still -La Titasil Feeya Haruomi Hosono - Laugh Gas Omar Souleyman  - Warni Warni Moving Still - Bang of Luban Ahmed Fakroun - Soleil Soleil Ihsan Al Munzer - Jamilah Ettab - Ghorba Wa Moghtaribin (Exile and Exiled) Chaba Yamina - Sidi Mansour (Moving Still Edit) * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

Would you identify an AI song if you pressed play on one? Colm Cahalane and Niall explore what's happening in AI and music now, with an example drawn from the Irish music scene in recent months. Echoing the early Wild Wild West streaming era that we discussed last week with Liz Pelly that gave rise to Spotify's dominance, our chat this week with Colm Cahalane of Irish music Substack blog Fourth Best / Cork label Hausu finds parallels with what's happening with AI and music right now. AI is breaking new ground, and creating new problems and moral issues in doing so. Colm recently posted a ruminating article on AI on Fourth Best, which talks to an artist called Kawaii Hoe who inadvertently, and relatively innocently duped me into covering their energetic AI-generated hyperpop music on the site - Like I said it's the Wild Wild West. We talk about this scary new world of not knowing whether an artist is making music entirely with AI or not, and the implications and creative quandary of generated art. Because you can now make a full music project with AI, does that mean you should? Are AI musicians just really gifted at prompts? Are the outputs music? As AI music flooded streaming platforms, social media and we cannot put the genie back in the bottle, what’s next? As Liz Pelly’s book shows, Spotify will do what it can to reduce royalty rates so what’s to stop it from replacing real artist’s music with AI-generated music? Isn’t this already happening whether they allow it or not?    * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android  | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

The music and cultural critic Liz Pelly's new book Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Cost of the Perfect Playlist is a deep dive into Spotify's often contentious position in music today. Liz has been a philosophising on issues brought about by the streaming era's cultural impact for about 10 years now so the book collates a lot of work, thoughts, research and investigative reporting on Spotify and the way it operates. We talk to Liz about the Swedish streaming giant's outsized influence on the music industry, its gatekeeper effect on trends in music, and how Spotify has emphasised mood and passive listening above discovery and initiative. We talk about the vast collection of user behaviour on the platform that has lead to artists chasing a more homogenous "streambait pop" sound, how Spotify uses  fake "ghost" artists and their Perfect Fit Content system to reduce royalty rates and squeeze out real artists on the platform's popular algorithmic and editorial playlists. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community   Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link  

Our monthly episode in which Nialler and Andrea Cleary talk about their favourite music of the month. The Best of the Month episode is now Patreon-only. Public subscribers get the first 20-25 minutes or so of the episode as a free preview. Members get to hear the whole episode on their member feeds or on Patreon direct. Discussing new albums from Oklou, Horsegirl, Maria Kelly, Puma Blue and songs from Djo, Car Seat Headrest, Deep Thrills and breaking news - nepobaby Lola Kirke. We also chat about films we've seen lately including A Complete Unknown, Civil War, Companion and pick an Italo Disco classic that featured in The Brutalist and an even better song from the same act.   Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord communit

The composer and producer, and multi-instrumentalist Ólafur Arnalds met the Cork singer-songwriter Eoin French aka Talos after he ran a marathon in Iceland. A friendship was struck, that quickly developed into a musical partnership, as seen at Sounds From A Safe Harbour in Cork in 2023, when the festival director Mary Hickson put the pair together for a collaboration. Now six months after Eoin's death,  Arnalds and French's family, friends and collaborators have been celebrating the artist's creativity and legacy with the stunning song they wrote together 'We Didn't Know We Were Ready'. The song was performed on The Tommy Tiernan show on RTÉ in January under Arnalds' Opia community banner with vocals from Niamh Regan, Ye Vagabonds, JFDR, The Staves, Sandrayati Fay, Dermot Kennedy, Laoise Leahy, Memorial, Christof Van Der Ven and most poignantly of all, Eoin’s wife Steph French. In our chat with Ólafur today, he recounts meeting Eoin, their creative time spent together and the instructions he received from Eoin before he died to finish the record they made together, which will be released later this year.   * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Songs referenced on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist   Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link  

    Niall and Andrea are running our mouths over what's been happening in mainstream music to this year.   Episode #276 is a grab bag of topics and events in music so far from Kendrick Lamar's Superbowl Half-Time Show, the Grammys to the music highlights of 50 years of Saturday Night Live.   We talk about Doechii's live performance at the Grammys, Robyn and David Byrne performing together and Lauryn Hill and Wyclef coming back together on stage at Radio City Music Hall to perform some Fugees and Lauryn Hill classics.   Then we delve into the archive of SNL's musical performances, prompted by Questlove and Oz Rodriguez' Ladies & Gentlemen… 50 Years of SNL Music documentary and come up with notorious SNL moments like Ashlee Simpson's lipsync farce, Sinead O'Connor's Pope-ripping a capella, Rage Against The Machine getting kicked out of the show for upsetting the advertisers and Republicans, Elvis Costello switching it up live without telling the producers.   Then we highlight some of our favourite performances on the show from The White Stripes / Jack White, Chance The Rapper on Kanye's 'Ultralight Beam', Janis Ian and Billy Preston on the 1975 debut of the show and more.   * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist       Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link

Episode 275 is an interview with Kittser about his electronic project New Jackson. It may have felt like a side project when it debuted with The Night Mail EP in 2011, but over the last 14 years, the New Jackson releases have been so consistent across a multitude of EPs on Permanent Vacation, Hivern, All City, Maeve and more, with last year's second album Oops!... Pop softened the lines into a more techno pop songwriting style. Ahead of the New Jackson live show in Dublin on Saturday March 28th with support from Rory Sweeney and The Outside, his forthcoming album project with Efa O'Neill, we talk that collaboration, his new release as MMOTTORR with TR One , what he's learned from 30 years of DJing, living in Kerry, Spotify and Bandcamp discourse, and bucking the zeitgeist trends in dance music in 2025. David also picks some key influential New Jackson tracks from Joy Orbison, Wham!, Pépé Bradock, Carl Craig and The Egyptian Lover. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Best of the Month episode is now 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 their member feeds or on Patreon direct. Welcome back. Kicking off season 5 of the Nialler9 Podcast with the return of our regular series in which Nialler and Andrea Cleary share their favourite music of the month. Discussing new albums from The Weather Station, MIKE, Pink Siifu, FKA Twigs among others; and songs from Lucy Dacus, Doechii, Niamh Regan, Japanese Breakfast, Olafur Arnalds, Talos and friends. We also chat the Choice Music Prize album nominations, Bluesky, The Traitors and films we've seen lately including Nosferatu, Blue Velvet/Lost Highway (RIP David Lynch) and The Substance [Nialler's Letterboxd]. * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Pod.Link Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Our final podcast of the year is the fifth annual Nialler9 Podcast Awards. Niall and Andrea hand out gongs in categories: Best live TV and web video performances, sax solo of the year, the Andre 3000 award for best guest verse, best film soundtrack, song featured in a TV show, duds of the year, the heroes and villains of 2024 (Irish artists at SXSW, Drake, Spotify and more), best rap beat, trend of the year, the award for best music with annoying vocalist (hi Geordie Greep), sample, disappointments, pop artist, single released after critically-acclaimed album that was better than the album (hi Mk.Gee), quote of the year, funniest moment of the year (hi Grimes at Coachelly), club track of the year, best song about Palestine, favourite song that sounds like Bernard Herrman’s Psycho score and best cover song of 2024. Dig in, and talk to you next year. Niall and Andrea x Show notes: Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 272, the second of our Best of 2024 trilogy of podcasts is all about the albums of the year. Andrea and Niall share a selection of their favourite albums of the year. Featuring discussion and reasons for best albums from Charli XCX, Jessica Pratt, Mabe Fratti, MJ Lenderman, Adrienne Lenker, Cindy Lee, Bricknasty, Father John Misty and Curtisy. Show notes: Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Episode 271 kicks off our Best of 2024 trilogy of podcasts with a look at the songs that defined our year. Andrea and Niall pick a selection box of their songs of the year and talk about them. Featuring songs from Charli XCX, MJ Lenderman, Waxahatchee, Burial, Baby Rose, Laura Marling, Beyoncé, Kendrick Lamar, Fontaines D.C., Róis and more. Show notes: Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Best of the Month episode is now Patreon-only. Public subscribers get the first 25 minutes or so. Episode 270 is partly a review of our favourite music of the month, and partly a chat about what's happening with Kendrick (new album) and Drake (lawsuits lol) in November. Andrea tells us why Drake is suing UMG, the label both him and Kendrick are on, and why he is also suing the label for defamation for things said in a rap beef with Lamar (you couldn't make it up) . Then we review Kendrick's new surprise album GNX, with its West Coast focus and hyphy vibe adding up to a victory lap for the rapper. After our recent deep dive into his seminal album, it's the return of Andrea’s Cool Big Guy Father John Misty and his new album Mahashmashana who as we found out is on the same release schedule as K.Dot. Andrea reviews the album and we talk an endorsement from Cher? Then it's recommendation corner with music from Bolis Pupul, Ahmed, With Love., Oisin Leech, single men in their twenties and the Doechii & Tyler, The Creator performance at Camp Flog Gnaw. Show notes: Nialler9 on Patreon - event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes & join our Discord Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Playlist Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Podcast 269 is all about the 23rd edition of Other Voices in Dingle and some of the acts playing the Jameson Music Trail from November 29th to December 1st. The Jameson Music Trail will present 100 live sets from dozens of Irish artists we love, with many acts playing twice in the town’s 16 venues, including a Jameson Connects stage at The Dingle Bridge House for the first time. For this episode, I spoke to Kerry musician and OV regular Junior Brother about playing in Dingle, recording his soon-to-be-released third album with John "Spud" Murphy, and playing with The Pogues. Then we chat to Juno King, events producer with the OV family, literally in that her dad Philip started the show 23 years go and Juno along with triplet sisters Molly and Ellen grew up in and around the show. Juno talks to us about the limitations and magic of putting on the festival every year and what's exciting her this year on the lineup. Then, we beam in Dan and Paul from Silverbacks, the indie-rock band who have just released their third album Easy Being A Winner, and we discuss making the album with GIlla Band's Dan Fox, what success looks like for the band and what they're looking forward at Other Voices this year. Show notes: Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist Other Voices Jameson Music Trail Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Earlier this year, the Tallaght rapper Curtisy released the debut album What Was The Question? one of the finest Irish rap albums, nay, Irish albums of the year. With a Deluxe version of the album out now, I spoke to Gavin Curtis aka Curtisy about starting out rapping in 2021 and meeting Ahmed, With Love and making their first song 'Men On A Mission' in 2022 with Rory Sweeney. Curtisy has a prolific output, and we discuss his many collaborators (Ahmed, With Love makes a brief appearance too), valuing vulnerability and authenticity in your music and discuss the Irish music he loves including music from Sloucho, Lil Skag, EFÉ, Bricknasty, Rory Sweeney / Carlos Danger and of course, Ahmed, With Love; plus what comes next in 2025. Curtisy Tour dates: Saturday 16th November – The Black Box, Belfast Wednesday 20th November – The Workman’s Club, Dublin * Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and join our Discord community Show notes: Curtisy on the Jobstown spots that influenced his new album What Was The Question Songs played on the Nialler9 Podcast Spotify Playlist Listen on Apple | Android | ACAST | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.