Selections: Shampain

Earlier this year, Shampain took us on a tour of Galway, the city on Ireland’s west coast where he first cut his teeth as a DJ, and where he still lives (and runs a barber shop) to this day. Located about a 45-minute drive from his homeplace in the Irish-speaking village of Inverin, Connemara, it’s also the city that gives his and KETTAMA’s G-Town Records label its name, and where the pair first started running nights in 2016 under the VSN banner. Last year, the duo hosted one of biggest dance music events in the city’s history, taking over the Galway International Arts Festival’s Big Top for a serious knees-up featuring DJ Heartstring and Pretty Girl. 

Shampain will descend on another iconic Galway venue in December for his biggest show to date. AISÉIRÍ – meaning ‘resurrection’ – will take over the Leisureland centre in Salthill on 21st December, boasting an all-star line-up of Irish underground talent that leans into the eclecticism of his own tastes. On the night, he’ll be joined by the Dundalk post-punk and shoegaze outfit Just Mustard, and fellow Inverin native Olan Monk, who’s industrial electronic pop brims with melancholy and distortion. There will also be a set from One Leg One Eye, the experimental solo project of Ian Lynch from the peerless doom folk band Lankum, whose music Shampain has been known to blend with techno and sizzling ambient electronics in his DJ sets. 

It’s a fitting bill to accompany the DJ’s own headline set. Here’s a guy who can – and has – mixed Sinead O’Connor with thundering breakbeats in a Boiler Room, and live mixed an atmospheric ambient soundtrack to the 1926 silent film Faust for the Bram Stoker Festival. In the venn diagram of dance, experimental and Irish music, Shampain’s happiest smack bang in the centre, and AISÉIRÍ looks set to demonstrate all three at their finest. Tickets are on sale here.

To give you a taste of what’s to come, Shampain has chosen some highlights from artists on the AISÉIRÍ line-up as part of his Selections, alongside a raft of high-energy bangers from the likes of Regal 86, TSVI and DJ Something. Dive in below.