SOAK on finding joy, collaborating with friends and Fred Again..

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

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 t

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.