20/08/2026
🎧 NEOS Essential Listening
Dave Clarke – The Ormond Multimedia Centre, Dublin, 9 June 1996
Welcome back to NEOS Essential Listening, our fortnightly feature from North East Old Skool, revisiting the albums, DJ mixes and live recordings that helped shape the old skool dance scene.
This time we're heading for a recording of Dave Clarke at The Ormond Multimedia Centre in Dublin on 9 June 1996. The recording runs for just under 80 minutes, with a surviving tracklist giving us a fascinating look at the music Clarke was playing at the time.
The Ormond Multimedia Centre was one of Dublin's important underground venues of the 1990s. Opened in 1993 in an old printworks, it was much more than a club, incorporating arts and media spaces, rehearsal rooms, a gallery, café and restaurant, alongside an event space capable of holding around 1,000 people. It became an important part of Dublin's developing club culture before closing in June 1997.
And this was a particularly interesting moment in Dave Clarke's career. His influential Red series had already established his reputation in techno, while his debut album Archive One had been released earlier in 1996. The Ormond recording features tracks from Clarke alongside artists including Jeff Mills, Robert Hood, Planetary Assault Systems, Surgeon, Underground Resistance, Cari Lekebusch and Robert Armani, giving a good indication of the hard-edged techno direction of his sets during this period.
For anyone interested in mid-'90s techno, this is a fascinating recording—not because we can claim it tells us exactly what being in The Ormond that night felt like, but because it preserves a real Dave Clarke set from a significant period in both his career and Dublin's club history.
Were you at The Ormond in the '90s? Did you ever see Dave Clarke there? We'd love to hear your memories in the comments.
Full set in the link below
https://on.soundcloud.com/reykcj0n0lhjFqAPRb
