Nialler9
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- Dernier épisode
- 4 Nov 2026
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Nialler9 chats to guests about new music, albums, artist deep dives and cultural issues.
Épisodes 266
What is the Sound Of Belfast?
Claire Hall and Charlotte Dryden on this year's Sound of Belfast, the local-focused city festival built around a healthier, more sustainable music scene. Sound of Belfast runs for 11 days, from Thursday …
Notes de l’épisode
Claire Hall and Charlotte Dryden on this year's Sound of Belfast, the local-focused city festival built around a healthier, more sustainable music scene.Sound of Belfast runs for 11 days, from Thursday November 5th to Sunday November 15th, with live shows, album launches, exhibitions, anniversary performances, new collaborations and industry events across the city. It's produced by the Oh Yeah Music Centre and celebrates Belfast's status as a UNESCO City of Music.
On the podcast this week I'm joined by Claire Hall, who leads the festival's programming and DJs as Venus Dupree, and Charlotte Dryden, CEO of Oh Yeah Music Centre. We talk about what the festival is trying to do this year, the anniversaries and album launches on the bill, the new generation coming through, and what a good day out in Belfast looks like.
Music credits:
Robocobra Quartet - Haha
Joshua Burnside - The Last ArmchairListen to the episode above or in your podcast app of choice.
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* Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community. Highlights from the conversation A smaller, more sustainable programmeThis year's programme is deliberately slightly smaller: 55 events across 14 venues, compared with 66 events and around 20 venues last year. The aim is to put the limited funds available where they help most. Five promoters are being spotlighted with bursary awards, there's an album launch strand, and the festival has doubled its sponsorship through Arts & Business, with Budvar and Nori Spears on board. That has made possible the first Budvar Music Trail, a run of free and affordable gigs featuring emerging artists who have been given higher bursaries and are paid to play.
Punk at 50 and other anniversariesFifty years of punk opens the festival with Alter Your Native Land, an exhibition by Stuart Bailie, and a launch gig that mixes the originals with newer acts such as Tramp and Problem Patterns. On Friday, Eyes Open marks 20 years of Snow Patrol's album, with younger Northern Irish artists, including Jack Devlin and James Guitari (Tribal Ting), giving the songs their own treatment. Duke Special's Songs From The Deep Forest turns 20 and Bap Kennedy is remembered ten years on.
Album launches and a five-hour listening partyAlana Henderson and Ryan Vail both launch albums on the same night, and Robocobra Quartet are holding a listening party for Hundred Pieces, a new 100-track, five-hour album, inspired by the durational art of Marina Abramović. It's a natural fit for a listening-party fan like me.
The new generationScratch My Progress, Oh Yeah's talent development programme, showcases its latest acts on Tuesday November 10th: Pinsleep, Lord Jane, The Thing Is and Gush. Each act receives mentoring, a professionally recorded track, rehearsal time and about £5,000 of investment, and this year's mentor is Ben McGee, who works with Chalk and Joshua Burnside. It doubles as a pre-party for the NI Music Prize at the Ulster Hall the following night, Wednesday November 11th.
Trad, reimagined, and a very black nightClaire is especially excited about The New Wave, which closes the festival on Sunday November 15th. It's an immersive reimagining of the trad session led by Hana Abri Smith's Atóg, a group of trad and folk musicians that includes Joshua Burnside, alongside harpist Gráinne Meyer. Before that, on Saturday November 14th, VANTA returns for a second year, an audio-visual collaboration between Timmy Stewart and Johnny Delaney (The Fully Automatic Model), who have been given the festival's highest bursary this year.
Nights out and a perfect Belfast dayWe also talk about the city's club scene, the work of Free The Night on licensing and late-night transport, and the North-South connections between scenes. And, to finish, we ask for a perfect Belfast day out: Vietnamese egg coffee at Phin on the Ormeau Road, pints at the Sunflower, a browse around Sound Advice record shop, a stop at Boundary Brewery and pizza at BullHouse.
The full programme is at soundofbelfast.com.
Smashing Pumpkins' Siamese Dream, the album that nearly broke the band
A live podcast recording from The Big Romance about the Smashing Pumpkins' second album, the 1993 record that was made in hard mode. Nialler9 is joined by guest Mark O'Brien (Royal Yellow, Enemies) for this …
Notes de l’épisode
A live podcast recording from The Big Romance about the Smashing Pumpkins' second album, the 1993 record that was made in hard mode.Nialler9 is joined by guest Mark O'Brien (Royal Yellow, Enemies) for this live album listening party / podcast episode.
I don't indulge it often, but it's really nice when these listening parties speak to the inner teenager in us, and that's certainly the case with Siamese Dream.
It wasn't my first Smashing Pumpkins record. That was 1995's double album Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness, which I bought on cassette from Eddie O'Connor's shop in Newbridge on the way to school at the age of 14, in 1996 or thereabouts. I was already paying attention to the band because of MTV and "Bullet with Butterfly Wings", "1979" and "Tonight, Tonight", but I knew of them before that because my sister had a cassette of Siamese Dream that fascinated me. I didn't know what the music was called, but I was thrilled by it, and I loved the artwork and the font.
Siamese Dream is one of defining alt-rock albums of the '90s but it almost didn't happen. The Pumpkins were barely functioning: Corgan was depressed and in ribbons; Jimmy Chamberlin was deep in heroin; Iha and D'arcy's romance had ended. Corgan eventually played nearly everything himself apart from the drums vowing to end the band if the album flopped. Somehow, this strife and tension helped make Siamese Dream one of the finest alt-rock albums of all time.
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* Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community. 5 Things You Might Not Know About Siamese Dream 1. Billy Corgan played most of it himselfCorgan overdubbed most of Iha's and Wretzky's guitar and bass parts, a decision he has since said cut away the gut of his band, even if the album sounds the way he heard it in his head. Chamberlin, who was sent to rehab at Corgan's urging, still played every drum part on the record, and it's his drumming that gives the album its air.
2. They went to Georgia to escape temptationThe band left Chicago to get away from friends, hangers-on and the media, and to get Chamberlin away from his drug connections. According to Butch Vig, it took the drummer about 24 hours to find every dealer in Atlanta. The sessions ran 12-hour days, six days a week, for around three months, and finished four months over schedule and $250,000 over budget.
3. "Soma" has a special guestCorgan says the song has up to forty overdubbed guitar parts, and Vig had to draw a literal map of the tracks, then flip the track sheet over to carry on. R.E.M.'s Mike Mills plays the piano, credited on the sleeve as appearing courtesy of Warner Bros, a detail plenty of people who've owned the album for 30 years still don't know.
4. The girls on the cover aren't conjoinedGiven the title and the lyric in 'Geek U.S.A.', everyone assumed the two girls in white dresses and fairy wings were twins. They were California child models, Ali Laenger and Lysandra Roberts, who had never met before the shoot.
5. The mix came from the Loveless manBy the end, Corgan and Vig were too headwrecked to mix the record, so Corgan asked for Alan Moulder specifically because of his work on My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, the famous shoegaze band formed in Dublin in 1983. Moulder booked two weeks and it took him 36 days.
Siamese Dream was our vinyl listening party in the Listen Closely series, and the next one is Burial's Untrue.
Revisiting The Chemical Brothers psychedelic dance classic Dig Your Own Hole with Mango (live Podcast)
A podcast live recording from The Big Romance about the Chemical Brothers second album, - a 1997 dance record classic with guest Mango. When I think of The Chemical Brothers, I think of Irish summer festivals …
Notes de l’épisode
A podcast live recording from The Big Romance about the Chemical Brothers second album, - a 1997 dance record classic with guest Mango.When I think of The Chemical Brothers, I think of Irish summer festivals and big nights out. The pure, kinetic energy of thousands of people losing their minds in a field or a packed arena.
Released in April 1997, Dig Your Own Hole was the album that cemented Tom Rowlands and Ed Simons as electronic music’s first true rock stars. Coming up to its 30th anniversary, it remains a landmark achievement: a psychedelic, acid-drenched dance record built out of hip-hop breaks, sirens, samplers, and raw punk attitude.
With crossover chart hits like ‘Block Rockin’ Beats’, ‘Electrobank’, ‘Setting Sun’ and the euphoric closer ‘Private Psychedelic Reel' the album balances dancefloor power with adventurous studio experimentation.
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* Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community. My Gateway into Dance MusicFor me, this album was the gateway. I bought it on CD while on holiday with my parents in Boston in 1999. Before that, my exposure to electronic music was strictly Scooter, along with hearing 'Life Is Sweet' on those iconic Best Album in the World... Ever! compilation CDs.
In his seminal book Energy Flash, critic Simon Reynolds described the Chemical Brothers' signature sound as "Britpop-with-breakbeats." They brought a punk-like assault to techno by emphasizing the same blaring mid-frequencies supplied by distorted rock guitars
While the American press tried to brand it as the "electronica" revolution, calling Tom and Ed the "Beavis and Butt-head of techno", the duo pushed back, citing US hip-hop and Chicago house pioneers like Frankie Knuckles, Juan Atkins, and The Bomb Squad as their true north stars.
5 Things You Might Not Know About Dig Your Own Hole 1. Built for the Sunday SocialBefore they were headlining arenas, Tom and Ed were "The Three Blind Mice" at Manchester University—studying medieval history by day and hitting the Haçienda four nights a week. Their legendary 13-week residency at Heavenly’s Sunday Social in London transformed UK club culture, with regulars like Oasis, Blur, Primal Scream, and the Manics coming to watch them blend hip-hop, acid house, and psych-rock.
2. "Setting Sun" Broke BBC Radio 1Noel Gallagher wrote and recorded his vocal in 20 minutes after hearing the duo spin The Beatles' 'Tomorrow Never Knows' in a sweaty basement set. When the single dropped, BBC Radio 1’s Breakfast Show famously pulled it off air halfway through because it was too intense for morning radio—which only helped propel it to UK #1.
3. Recorded in a 10x10 Room at Orinoco StudiosRecorded in Elephant & Castle (the same studio complex where Enya's "Orinoco Flow" got its name and Gaye Bykers on Acid recorded Drill Your Own Hole), the album was field-tested in clubs using white-label promos (Electronic Battle Weapons 1 & 2) before the final tracking.
4. A Pencil and Sellotape Created the Phase Effect on "The Private Psychedelic Reel"To get the sweeping phase effect on the 9-minute closer, Tom and Ed sellotaped a pencil across a bank of mixing desk faders to move them simultaneously by hand into a Mu-Tron Bi-Phase processor.
5. Mercury Rev’s Unexpected CameoJonathan Donahue played clarinet on 'The Private Psychedelic Reel.' He later credited the Chemical Brothers' invitation as the lifeline that kept him making music right before Mercury Rev wrote their breakthrough album, Deserter's Songs.
Phoebe Bridgers, Pulp and 300 Dilla beats: the best music of the month with Vanessa Roulston Mooney
This month's guest returns after her January visit — it's music writer Vanessa Roulston Mooney, fresh from Jack White, Primavera and Féile na Gréine. We start with the big one: Phoebe Bridgers' Lost Weekend …
Notes de l’épisode
This month's guest returns after her January visit — it's music writer Vanessa Roulston Mooney, fresh from Jack White, Primavera and Féile na Gréine.We start with the big one: Phoebe Bridgers' Lost Weekend, her first solo album in six years, and whether an hour of cosmic, string-drenched, banjo-flecked ambition is too much of a good thing.
Then James Ellis Ford's Lost In Another World, written and recorded alone from a hospital bed in two weeks during leukaemia treatment, and somehow the most accessible thing he's made referencing OMD and Blue Nile. That leads us to J Dilla, who made much of Donuts the same way, and to Dilligence 2, where Busta Rhymes finally uses some of the 300 beats Dilla handed him before he died in 2006, with D'Angelo, Lil Wayne, T3, Talib Kweli, Ludacris and Jon Batiste along for it.
Also: GB's Heirsprung, its lyrics cut up from free copies of the London Metro and funded by a Jaguar ad; Never-Never's Colour Form, and the Copenhagen music school quietly producing half the artists Vanessa loves - Erika de Casier, ML Buch, Fine, Snuggle and GB all came through the same place; Cornelius' eighth album; Pulp's first ever live album, somehow; the short, sharp MF DOOM vibes of Denzel Curry and Kenneth Blume's 2; the debut from scuzzy, fizzy Dublin rockers Really Good Time; and the electro-clashing, indie-sleazing EP from Mischa And The Bear.
Plus Erykah Badu and the Alchemist, Dolly, Jack White's phone pouches, what we're reading, and the gigs ahead.
Plus Dolly, Jack White's phone pouches, what we're reading, and the gigs ahead.
Follow Vanessa on Substack.
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* Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.The many musical sides of Dolly Parton
It's a deep dive episode into an absolute legend of music this week - the one, the only Dolly Parton. The country pop musician and entertainer has written over 5,000 songs since she wrote her first song in …
Notes de l’épisode
It's a deep dive episode into an absolute legend of music this week - the one, the only Dolly Parton.The country pop musician and entertainer has written over 5,000 songs since she wrote her first song in 1959, and her status as a songwriter and artist has only grown since.
Andrea and Niall look back at the early years of Dolly, the hits, the pop crossovers, the songs, the legacy, the feminism, the collaborations. It's Dolly the homemaker, heartbreaker, socially progressive, champion of the working class, philanthropist and political tightrope walker.
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The best music of the month & All Together Now with Mags The Frog Report
Mags Mullaney is the Instagram and Tik Tok music influencer known as Totally Frogaret or now called The Frog Report. Mags joins us this week to talk about her All Together Now experience and Niall talks about …
Notes de l’épisode
Mags Mullaney is the Instagram and Tik Tok music influencer known as Totally Frogaret or now called The Frog Report.Mags joins us this week to talk about her All Together Now experience and Niall talks about the problematic side of Glen Hansard before we dive into music we are loving at the moment.
Music discussed and chosen on the episode from Kelela, Nirosta Steel, Chanel Beads, Goldbug, Jack White, Mary In The Junkyard, Shy One, Swapmeet and new tracks from Mike D and Trá Pháidín.
Plus, we talk about what we're reading, watching and more.
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* Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.Revisiting Fleet Foxes' sparkling landmark folk debut album with Aoife Barry
A live recording from The Big Romance about a 2008 Sub Pop-released classic album of the 2000s. Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink Step into a …
Notes de l’épisode
A live recording from The Big Romance about a 2008 Sub Pop-released classic album of the 2000s.Listen on Apple | Android | Patreon | Pocketcasts | CastBox | Stitcher | Spotify | RSS Feed | Podlink
Step into a world of misty melodies and cavernous echoes with Seattle band Fleet Foxes’ landmark debut – a defining record of the late-2000s indie folk revival. Led by Robin Pecknold, the album blends the lush, pastoral harmonies of the 1960s with a haunting baroque-pop sensibility and lyrical themes rooted in nature, tradition, and introspection. Like the Bruegel painting on its cover, every track reveals a dense, beautiful world that evokes a timeless – almost mythic Americana sound.
This podcast episode is a live recording from our listening party in The Big Romance in April, with guest journalist and Fleet Foxes fan Aoife Barry.
Our next Listening Party is Smashing Pumpkins later this month and it's sold out.
Listen Closely: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes (2008)A Nialler9 listening party, hosted by Niall Byrne with guest Aoife Barry.
Before the albumNiall: Hello everyone, how are you? Welcome to the Listen Closely album listening party. I'm Niall, and this is Aoife Barry.
Aoife: Hello.
Niall: We're here tonight because Aoife picked this album, as she has before. You picked Jeff Buckley last year.
Aoife: Yeah, and we ended up doing three of them.
Niall: We did, we went to Cork. We did two here and then we went to Cork to talk about Jeff Buckley. And you were at the My Bloody Valentine listening party last year as well, back in October.
Aoife: It must have been October, yeah.
Niall: Well, obviously we're here for a very different album tonight: Fleet Foxes by Fleet Foxes, from 2008. As you heard there, we played a bit of the Sun Giant EP by the band, which came out a few months before this album, because we want to give the album its full due. They're a little different, and we'll talk about that. But yeah, you picked the record.
Aoife: I did. I obviously must like it. And it's such an incredible record. Is there anybody here who hasn't heard it? That's really exciting, if so. I'm excited for you to hear it. You got a sneak peek there of what the vibe is going to be.
I picked it because I love this record, but I also had a funny story about how I first heard them. Back in 2008, when this record came out, I'd read about this band called Fleet Foxes in a music magazine. I don't even think I'd heard a song yet, this is back in the day. And I was on holidays in Berlin, and in the tiny little hostel we were staying in, they had a sign up on the wall: "Who's playing tonight? Fleet Foxes, Café Zapata." I said to my boyfriend, "I think that's a band I read about in the magazine, will we go see them?" And he was like, "Grand." So we went, and they were unbelievable. It was so good. Beach House were supporting them. So it was 2008 smacking you in the face.
Niall: Come on.
Aoife: And I took photos, which I found. I have photos. Artifacts. One is terrible, the other one's not so terrible, taken on one of those little Canon digital cameras. And I still have the ticket, I kept the ticket, I'm one of those hoarders who keeps all their gig tickets. But it was so good: the venue they played in had a dragon that breathed fire out every fifteen minutes.
Niall: So they'd be playing and this dragon…
Aoife: I'm not even exaggerating. Fire would just shoot out of this mechanical dragon. It was so Berlin. And Fleet Foxes were so stunning, and Beach House were so stunning. I love Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, I love all those harmony vibes, I wish I was born in the seventies, sadly I was not. So I fell in love with them immediately, and I've been a big fan ever since. Although I'll say I probably dipped a little bit around the Crack-Up era, their third album, but then I saw them when Shore came out, their most recent album, and fell right back in love with them.
Niall: We're going to talk about all the albums that come afterwards, but we'll start with this one, because this is presumably your favourite, or one of them.
Aoife: Shore is up there as well for me, but yeah.
Niall: So what was it about Fleet Foxes at the time? For context: in 2008 there was quite a lot of this kind of music around. We previously did Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago as a listening party, and the funny thing, which I only found out when we did this, is that they have the same origin story in a way. Both songwriters went to a cabin in the woods to pour their heart out and write the songs.
Aoife: I think Justin Vernon just got there first in terms of the marketing.
Niall: So they must have pulled back on talking about it too much, because it's basically the same thing. They never really talked about Robin Pecknold's writing process in those terms.
Aoife: For Emma was such a massive moment, everybody was obsessed with this guy who broke up with a girl and went to a cabin and wrote a record about it. It was the ur indie-folk album.
Niall: What was really appealing about Fleet Foxes is that they were so young, between about twenty-two and twenty-seven, and Robin Pecknold was twenty-one when he wrote the record. Which is frankly offensive, you shouldn't be allowed to be so talented at twenty-one.
Aoife: I know. And they were clearly these people from Seattle, which we associate with grunge, and then it becomes this place where they're bringing out all the pastoral, outdoorsy, mountain-and-sea vibes of the Washington area. They're obviously really influenced by the seventies too, by Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, by Laurel Canyon, but also by Appalachian folk. There's a real purity to what they're doing. The harmonies are unbelievable, there's even a bit of a gospel feeling. So these young guys made this album that was being called an iconic American record on release. The Guardian called it a landmark American album, something like that. And that's special, because you don't get that many records immediately being called landmark.
Niall: It was a very exciting time for music around then. I actually brought some records. We mentioned Beach House and Teen Dream earlier, that's a bit later, 2010. I wanted to do a listening party for that at some point, that'd be good craic. Around that time you had Animal Collective and Panda Bear, Person Pitch was right there, that was the apex for that very experimental scene. A few years later we had Sufjan, our very first listening party. And Bon Iver, of course. There's also stuff like Neutral Milk Hotel very much of that vibe.
Aoife: I've noticed people covering Neutral Milk Hotel more now.
Niall: I think when we got to it, it was on its second go-round, and now it's getting a third, which is great. It's a great record. So, the band were from Seattle, they had a bit of the scruffy flannel-shirt look, but obviously didn't sound like that. The album was written in the woods, in the cabin, brought to the band, and recorded with Phil Ek.
Aoife: Who did a lot of stuff with Built to Spill.
Niall: Yeah, and he worked with The Shins, and Modest Mouse, a really long history.
Aoife: Are The Shins from Seattle as well?
Niall: I think they might be. Band of Horses is another one. So they recorded it themselves with Phil Ek, paid for it all themselves, and then the local major independent label Sub Pop came calling. Obviously known for a lot of grunge traditionally, but they'd clearly been releasing this kind of music around then too, The Shins had been on the label for a few years, Band of Horses. When it came to it, they signed to Sub Pop. Apparently there was a bidding war.
Aoife: They'd become quite popular on MySpace. Anybody remember MySpace? Every time I do one of these I feel older and older, mentioning the top eight, the randomers you'd put in your top eight. Word could spread quite quickly once you got popular on MySpace.
Niall: What I thought was really interesting, that I discovered when I was researching, is that recording the album was actually a total pain for them. They didn't have much money, so they ended up recording a lot of it in their houses, or in Robin Pecknold's family home. And he re-did all the vocals right before they mastered the record, because he'd been sick during the initial sessions and his voice wasn't in great shape. They recorded it all in one go, scrapped that, did another version, and kept moving the running order around. I'm always fascinated by albums where the creation was a total pain and they had no idea it would even work out. Robin Pecknold actually said, "I hope nobody cares about this album, because I just want to move on to the next one." And then it becomes this iconic record.
Aoife: Isn't every artist sick of their album by the time it's done? You're like, "my paintings." Yeah.
Niall: 2008 was an interesting time for it to land. The album draws on the Beach Boys and Brian Wilson, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, Nick Drake, Simon & Garfunkel, Fairport Convention, Judee Sill, very much old-timey or sixties folk and pastoral stuff. And in 2008 there's a financial crash. The album was worked on before that, but it was released into that environment, and a lot of this music seemed to catch. When things go bad, we retreat, we dream, we listen to music that's maybe the opposite of what we're feeling. There was a gentleness, an unhurriedness to it that resonated.
Aoife: Grizzly Bear is another band from that time. When Jay-Z and Beyoncé went to see Grizzly Bear in Brooklyn, that was kind of where all the indie music peaked.
Niall: And the other part of it, which I was involved in, was the MP3 blogs, that's where you'd hear this music. Especially the American and Canadian stuff, no one was promoting it over here yet, so you'd be months ahead. You'd hear Fleet Foxes in these MP3 formats. That was a mad period, it showed how the internet could collapse geography, a song could spread really quickly on the blogs.
And in an American context, this came out post-Bush, with the Obama era coming in, a more hopeful tone. You had the Lehman Brothers crash, these global pressures, and then these hopeful times too. It's interesting to wonder whether these albums are a reaction to it, or whether they appeal to us because we want nice, happy things. I feel like Fleet Foxes have so much emotional depth: there's yearning, sadness, hope, nostalgia.
Aoife: I loved Yellow House by Grizzly Bear, their first record, a complex, complicated, almost jazzy thing that sounded beautiful but had a lot going on. We weren't going for simplistic music, but we wanted music that gave us depth and beauty. Is art a solution to the world collapsing?
Niall: We could be answering that in 2026. We live in a cursed timeline, as I keep saying. That's all I'm going to say. But what else happened in 2008 in the wider circle of music? Portishead returned with Third. TV on the Radio released Dear Science. MGMT released Oracular Spectacular, 'Kids' and all that. Cut Copy released In Ghost Colours, Indie Sleaze night on Saturday, folks, come on. Kanye put out 808s & Heartbreak, that was November that year. Rihanna was at the peak of her powers.
Aoife: Katy Perry appeared that year. And 'American Boy'.
Niall: 'American Boy', still one of the best pop songs, fire. Iron & Wine was the other one I forgot to mention. So it was a really vibrant, varied year. As you heard, there's the Sun Giant EP too.
Aoife: The thing about that is it came out before the album, but was recorded after. The album was done, in the bag.
Niall: They decided to go into the studio and record Sun Giant, a collection of songs intended to sell on tour. It ended up being quite popular, and for a lot of people it was their first time discovering Fleet Foxes.
Aoife: It wasn't like The Coronas' 'San Diego Song', their summer-holiday anthem, or anything like that. But it came out before the album, and then the album arrives.
Niall: So what was the reaction at the time? Was it immediate?
Aoife: Things happened really quickly. In January that year they got all the MySpace attention, and by June the album was coming out. Really, really quick. There was so much chatter about them, which is partly why I'd seen the name, and a music blog like yours would have seen it too, and known they were one of the big bands. In a way that's harder now.
Niall: These days you see bands like Geese getting a lot of attention because they use companies that help them go viral. You didn't really have that then. Now you'd dress yourself up in some gimmick, polka dots, whatever, and go viral all over the internet for it. I couldn't imagine these lads doing that.
Aoife: No. But maybe in a way they were cosplaying living in the forest, on the Puget Sound.
Niall: Anyway, when the album came out, people loved them, and it really hit it off. Because they sound so seventies, your parents would love the records and you'd love the records. There's almost a lullaby quality to the folk stuff too. The music is applicable to anybody of any generation, and there's something lovely about nostalgic music that reminds you of a better time.
To finish on that point: I think there's something very mysterious about Fleet Foxes, they feel out of time. They're these young, scruffy lads with the beards, but there's a mystery to them. They didn't come across as the hipster end of things, they weren't leaning into anything. They were presented as the kind of band that wouldn't have had phones, would have lived off-grid, which is funny because they were a MySpace band. They're the most un-MySpace band you can imagine. Surprise people, do something a bit different, don't be exactly what people want you to be, and they'll love you for it. And then your songs are unbelievable too, soaring and stunning.
Can we talk for a second about the cover? It's an original painting from 1559 by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Netherlandish Proverbs. It depicts a densely populated Flemish village scene illustrating 126 folk proverbs. There's a lot there. Some on this side are cut off, but for example, this woman here, she's putting the blue cloak on her husband, meaning she deceives him. This guy is casting roses before swine, wasting effort on the unworthy. And right at the top there's a man running through a field with his arse on fire, chasing pigs, "he who eats fire craps sparks," do not be surprised at the outcome if you attempt a dangerous venture. There are 126 of those.
Aoife: The interesting thing is that the band managed to get permission to use it. Really unusual to be allowed use it as commercial artwork.
Niall: And apparently the museum that holds the artwork were delighted. A lot of stars aligned for them. It's an iconic cover because it's so different from what anybody else was doing, clearly of a particular period, and it has that Where's Wally quality. I have a quote about it. Robin said: "We were trying to figure out what we wanted to do, and my brother had been working some stuff out, when I saw this Bruegel painting in a book my girlfriend had. I liked that it had a really intriguing meaning, there's a story to each little scene, which felt fitting for the record. It was dense but unified, not a collage. It has a Where's Waldo quality, something you could look at for a long time on a vinyl sleeve and keep finding new little things. It was very easy to get the museum in Berlin that has it to say yes, they were super excited the band wanted to use it, and put it in their newsletter. When you open it up, on the inside there's a Paisley pattern traced from the back of a book that Skyler's mum got me. We wanted two very different feelings."
So, what to look out for when we press play very shortly?
Aoife: When I was going back to this, I had it in my head that every song was one of these big songs, because there are so many big moments. But actually there are two tracks that are pretty much acoustic, so it's interesting to notice how they go from the big sound to the small. And for me they're a real emotion-and-feeling band, so notice how you feel listening to it. I always feel this swell of emotion with Fleet Foxes, I was walking down the road listening to Shore and I was like, my God. So lean back and feel into the emotions they're bringing you. And listen to the lyrics if you can make them out, because they're so out of time, all about pack horses and this amazing imagery. Robin Pecknold said he didn't write about a lot of personal stuff because he didn't have enough life experience yet, so instead he wrote these beautifully poetic narratives about pastoral and rural life. So I'd say the lyrics and the feelings are the two things.
Niall: Track two, 'White Winter Hymnal', is probably the biggest one, watch out for that. And a few other people thanked and cited as influences, for some extra context: Brian Wilson, Joanna Newsom, Bob Dylan, Noah Lennox and all the lads from Animal Collective, Levon Helm and Robbie Robertson of The Band, Blitzen Trapper, who they toured with at the time and who were bigger than them then. For some reason Joni Mitchell and Neil Young are listed together, which is fair enough. Marvin Gaye, Damien Jurado, Paul Simon and John Lennon listed together. Townes Van Zandt, a legend. Vashti Bunyan, and Van Morrison.
There's a nice quote from Robin Pecknold I'll read afterwards. Let's just open it up and listen. I'll play it at full volume, it's about thirty-nine minutes, two sides. Close your eyes, whatever you want to do, vibe away in your own way.
[The album plays: Fleet Foxes – Fleet Foxes, 39 minutes.]
After the albumNiall: It's quite an economical album, isn't it? It doesn't stick around long, thirty-nine minutes.
Aoife: I like an economical album. It's also one of the first fairly short records we've done here.
Niall: That's part of why I was thinking about Sun Giant in that context too. I'm going to read a bit from the liner notes, because for an album that's very much about feelings, with only a few direct songs, some of what's written here is interesting:
"My first memory has always been of me and my mom on a cold grey day down at some beach in Washington, along the Puget Sound somewhere near Seattle. I would be around two or three years old, and we were with a friend of mine from the neighbourhood and his mom, walking among the driftwood looking for crabs. Even now I can remember the smell and temperature of the air, the feeling of the sand and the swaying tall grass. I can even remember looking over at my friend and how his face looked when he smiled back at me.
Another memory I'll
Why are gig tickets getting more expensive? Toutless on fees, fraud and Ticketmaster (
Ireland's face-value ticket forum Toutless reopens to the public on Monday August 3rd after a scam attack forced it to shut its doors to the public. Toutless co-founder Gary Devitt is this week's guest on the …
Notes de l’épisode
Ireland's face-value ticket forum Toutless reopens to the public on Monday August 3rd after a scam attack forced it to shut its doors to the public.Toutless co-founder Gary Devitt is this week's guest on the podcast, and we talk about where the Irish music live ticketing industry is at in the face of increased pricing, extra deluxe and platinum tiers and an Americanisation of buying tickets. It's becoming a concert caste system. Toutless' face-value fan-to-fan resale is a fundamentally different worldview to what is developing in the industry.
Song played during episode: POSER - Summerhill
For Those I Love on building his own worlds for All Together Now
Today’s podcast guest For Those I Love has just been announced for The Circle by Jameson Music stage at this weekend’s All Together Now Festival. While I’ve written extensively about Dave Balfe’s For Those I …
Notes de l’épisode
Today’s podcast guest For Those I Love has just been announced for The Circle by Jameson Music stage at this weekend’s All Together Now Festival.
While I’ve written extensively about Dave Balfe’s For Those I Love project, right up to last year’s second album Carving The Stone, it’s been seven years since we chatted on the podcast.
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You may remember the original 2019 podcast - which was the first time that Dave talked deeply and intensely about the loss of his friend Paul Curran, a catalyst for making a devastatingly emotional album about love, loss, grief and friendship.
On his return to the podcast this time around, the topics are a less weighty but no less interesting - a year after album two - Balfe can't stop building props, remixing his own work and creating films for the upcoming live shows at All Together Now, and he reveals he has been working on two distinct ATN live sets, and they couldn't be more different from each other.
The Friday show at Some Kind Of Wonderful leans on the props Balfe has spent the last few weeks building himself, including a giant grass mound housing a surprise constructed by hand in his back garden.
The Saturday show at The Circle by Jameson Music stage is something else entirely: a full club reworking of Carving the Stone, 60 minutes of fresh material remixing the album into a dancefloor club set, that allowed Balfe to acknowledge another strand of his musical talent.
In between we talk about the evolution of his live visuals, and the importance of nostalgia and album listening in a digital age.
The Circle by Jameson Music has consistently offered one of the most varied lineups at the festival in a secluded setting in the trees on the grounds of Curraghmore and its fifth year is no different.
Along with FTIL, you can catch sets from last week’s podcast guest SOAK, the rapper Mike, Miss Dynamite, One Leg One Eye, Delivery Service, Pebbledash, Rory Sweeney (live), Jamz Supernova, Or:la, Mango, Ahmed With Love and the Mabfield Live Podcast among others.
SOAK on finding joy, collaborating with friends and Fred Again..
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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'
The religious and romantic rapture of Rosalía's Lux
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Boards Of Canada - Music Has The Right To Children - A deep dive
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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Why DJ Shadow's Endtroducing is a crate-digging cinematic masterpiece
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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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.
Lauren Kennedy on NYC gigs, Irish music, going viral and moving back to Ireland for the summer (Podcast)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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* Support Nialler9 on Patreon, get event discounts, playlists, ad-free episodes and access our Discord community.Kate Nash on Sinead O'Connor, Irish heritage & kicking against the pricks of the music industry
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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Deb Grant on the best music of March
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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How Massive Attack's classic album Mezzanine nearly broke the band
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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Bloc Party's Silent Alarm: Revisiting a spiky 2005 indie classic (Live Podcast)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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The best music of February with Mia Tobin Power
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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Izakaya, The Hoxton and Dublin's cultural spaces with Eoghan Ó Ceannabháin
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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The best music of January with Vanessa Roulston Mooney
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
Denise Chaila on new routes and journeys
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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My Bloody Valentine's Loveless (Live Podcast)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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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Lily Allen, Florence and the best albums of the month with Louise Bruton
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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Jeff Buckley's Grace - an astonishing classic 90s singer-songwriter album (Live Podcast)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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My Bloody Valentine - Loveless: A classic album revisit
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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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Andrea's last episode: Taylor's Showgirl, CMAT's Euro-Country, the rise of Geese
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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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Yeah Yeah Yeahs' It's Blitz marked the end of an indie era (Live Podcast)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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How to build independent music communities in Dublin (Live Podcast)
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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 history of Trance
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 …
Notes de l’épisode
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.
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