RA Podcast

A new studio set from one of the foundational icons of drum & bass. Few names in drum & bass carry as much history as Peshay. Paul Pesce came up in the crucible of early rave and left fingerprints on labels like Mo' Wax, Good Looking and, most obviously, Metalheadz. By the time drum & bass was surging in the mid-'90s, he was bolted as one of the scene's most distinctive voices. Where others were pushing clinical austerity or waves of dark pressure, Pesce's ear drew him to featherlight, jazzy chords instead. The atmospheric drum & bass movement—or intelligent, as it's sometimes known today—cohered in his hands with timeless staples like "The Piano Tune" and "Miles From Home." To a contemporary generation, he may now be best known for Studio Set, which caught alight as a prime slice of algorithm fodder on YouTube in the late 2010s, racking up millions of plays. Alongside Bailey’s Intelligent Drum & Bass, the mix has taken on a second life as a seminal document of a genre in flux. All of which made its remov

A rare club mix from the ever-evolving artist, with 90 minutes of shadowy, atmospheric pressure. Music's therapeutic value is often linked to relaxation—gongs, singing bowls and the like. Dense passages of foggy droning and eerie static aren't traditionally considered restorative, but Laurel Halo makes a pretty good case for it. The Detroit-born, Los Angeles-based musician's abstract, often improvised productions are heavy on sound design and emotional climax. Driven by atmosphere rather than rhythm, they push listeners to grapple with their innermost insecurities, fears and dreams. "I'm lucky my music has helped people through crises," Halo once told Discwoman. It's easy to see why. Since her 2010 debut King Felix, Halo has built a stunningly diverse catalogue of classically-informed records. A multi-instrumentalist—piano, violin, guitar, keys—her sharpest instrument is arrangement. Inspired by the surrealism of Italo Calvino and Apichatpong Weerasethakul, her releases, from Atlas to Behind The Green Door

Club futurism and a stack of new material from one of São Paulo's boldest shapeshifters. BADSISTA doesn't do stasis. In fact, he prefers to be in a constant state of motion. It was immediately obvious when the São Paulo artist broke out with his 2016 self-titled EP, in which a bass-heavy melange of baile funk, dembow and trap demonstrated an ability to satiate almost any dance floor. But BADSISTA continued to evolve through the different moods and textures of the club: from experimental compositions with Brazilian trans icon Linn Da Quebrada to ballroom bass and heads-down funk shellers for TraTraTrax. This RA Podcast finds BADSISTA in a fluid place once more. The mood starts out slow and moody—one of a slew of unreleased BADSISTA tracks—before seamlessly morphing into the soul-stirring synthwork of Al Lover Meets Cairo Liberation Front. Then he gets playful: tasteful, techy house morphs into smutty baile funk. (And as for the guests, look out for Sully's "XT" and a spicy Batu rework.) BADSISTA's style is

One hour of resolutely DIY club workouts, from one of the West Coast's most exciting producers. If you've been in the club recently, chances are you've heard the work of Julian Edwards, AKA bastiengoat. Maybe it was the standout 2022 track "Tell Me If You Like It," which blends jungle breaks with a slinky sample from Cassie's R&B anthem "Me & U" to create a 130 banger perfect for modern dance floors. The Oakland-based producer has become a go-to name for party cuts that bounce, favoured by the likes of Bianca Oblivion and fellow Bay Area artist—and frequent back-to-back partner—Bored Lord. Born and raised in the Bay Area, Edwards is deeply connected to Oakland's underground rave scene. Reflecting on his early experiences, he explained how the region's unique blend of crowds—from "raw hardcore sound to hyphy house parties"—and legacy of DIY warehouse raves has always shaped his music. While gentrification in the region has limited opportunities to throw parties in those spaces, Edwards, as part of the la

"My mission is to explore the boundaries of psychedelic music." The revered techno artist talks about expanding consciousness, breaking the rules and his new album on Tresor. There has always been a strain of dance music that has leant psychedelic, from the leftfield psychoacoustics of pioneers like La Monte Young to the proggy techno taking over today's dance floors. One artist who embodies the spirit of psychedelia is Anthony Child, AKA Surgeon, a revered DJ and producer who has historically been placed in the world of industrial techno, but whose output over the years has consistently flirted with altered states of consciousness and a strong opposition to the mainstream. Child is originally from Birmingham, where he and Karl O'Connor, AKA Regis, helped birth a style of powerful, loop-driven techno. Together, they're British Murder Boys and have released music on O'Connor's seminal label Downwards. But they've also ploughed successful solo careers, with Child putting out several releases on Tresor and pe

Three hours of high drama, recorded live at Nowadays in New York. We know what you're thinking: why did it take so long to get Binh on the RA Podcast? There's no easy answer, especially given that he's been a favourite of ours for over a decade now. So to make up for lost time, the revered digger lands on the series with a tantalising three-hour mix, recorded live at Nowadays in New York earlier this year. Crammed with rare and unreleased gems spanning house, techno, and electro, RA.989 is heavy on drama, catching the Düsseldorf native in unbridled performance mode. This is Binh in 2025. But rewind across the past two decades and you'll find a DJ who excels in pretty much any situation, whether warming up for Zip or Margaret Dygas, going back-to-back with masters like Nicolas Lutz or rolling out solo sets that stretch across ten or even 12 hours. He's acted out all these scenarios most often at Berlin institution Club der Visionaere, the cosy canalside club that became a kind-of spiritual home. (He'd some

A clinic in minimal from the elusive Acting Press boss. Why do certain sounds cultivate a cult following? Simply put, it's often because they resist easy consumption. PLO Man and his imprint Acting Press lean into this. Searching for the Berlin-based DJ and producer, you won’t find much online presence, interviews or conventional PR. What you will find, if you look hard enough, is a catalogue of records and mixes with a kind of tape hiss charm (a spiritual successor to Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, but scuzzier and lighter on its feet). Founded in 2015, Acting Press once seemed to belong to the short-lived "outsider house" trend, but is now synonymous with a certain strain of modern minimal, one that is analogue, spacious and pointedly opaque. PLO Man's output is equally sparse by design: this week, he joins the RA Podcast with a characteristically elusive style, accompanying the near two-hour mix is a one-answer Q&A that gives almost nothing away. Stripped-back, ever-so-slightly sleazy and coated i

Kinetic club energy generated by one of the sharpest talents in drum & bass and beyond. Much of the best electronic music rests along the axes of versatility and curiosity: being able to a pull a broad array of influences into your orbit and alchemise it into something distinctive and fresh. That's gyrofield to a tee. Kiana Li began making waves in drum & bass as a teenager, years before setting foot in a club or experiencing the sound on a proper rig. That's a key factor which helps explain how the deeply-considered, Hong Kong-born producer arrived at a style that eludes easy description. Li, one of the foremost trans women working in drum & bass today, marshals complex rhythms like a sluice and has a knack for detailed bass programming that floods the stereo field without ever dominating it. 2024's spellbinding These Heavens was the apotheosis of an already quietly prolific catalogue; we named it the seventh best record of last year, but in truth, it could have actually nudged up a bit higher. Li's RA P

Deep house with heaps of soul to guide spring into summer. "House music to me is about emotion… it's about how it moves you," says Suze Phaff, better known as Suze Ijó. Emerging from a thriving Dutch scene, Ijó belongs to a generation of DJs reshaping dance culture from the ground up, restoring soul and musicality to the centre of house music. It's a conversation happening not just in her home town of Rotterdam, but globally, among kindred spirits like MUSCLECARS and Dee Diggs in New York, Errol and Alex Rita of Touching Bass in London, and OMOLOKO in Belo Horizonte. You could call Ijó a deep house DJ, but it's much deeper than that. Her sets embody house music in its most musical sense, rich in nimble percussion, woodwinds, calypso drums, gospel vocals, and romantic string sections. They channel the jazz-inflected heartbeat of the East Coast, the breeze of Balearic shores, and the light-footed rhythms of the Caribbean. As Ijó explains in her Q&A, her RA Podcast "hopefully feels like a loving embrace." Ope

Relentless rhythms and Latin dance history from one of TraTraTrax's finest. Percussion is, at the root, a conversation. It's about different instruments meeting each other, and interacting to form something bigger than the sum of its parts. Few engage in this dialogue as boldly as Pablo De Vargas, AKA Uruguayan experimentalist Lechuga Zafiro, who draws from tradition, to make sounds like candombe and clave feel, well, completely new. De Vargas' music reaches outward, building bridges between Montevideo and Bogotá, Tijuana, Berlin and beyond. He's a key figure in the hybridisation of Latin American club music, with releases on labels like NAAFI and an album on TraTraTrax. His RA Podcast plays like a manifesto in motion. RA.985 opens with a recording of Jorginho Gularte, a Uruguayan composer, playing a jazz rhythm, from there, it expands: cuban guaguancó, Venezuelan drums, batida, tribal, techno—it's all here, stitched together with precision and intention. De Vargas is also, crucially, reckoning with the

A mix beamed in from the future by singeli's young star. If singeli has a new era, DJ Travella is its leading light. At just 23 years old, the Tanzanian producer is pushing the genre into fast, frenetic and unmistakably futuristic territory. And while there aren't too many entries in the RA Podcast's 20-year history where you can say, "this has no parallel whatsoever," RA.984 shatters that assumption in style. Singeli emerged from Dar es Salaam's underground in the early '00s, forged from limited resources and unlimited creativity. Producers looped and sped up taarab instrumentals using basic software like Virtual DJ, creating a sound that was chaotic, witty and lightning fast. With support from local studios like Sisso and Pamoja, singeli took root as the breakneck pulse of Tanzanian youth culture. Travella—real name Hamadi Hassani—came up outside that infrastructure. He began producing music aged ten, self-taught and internet-savvy. By 2022, he was touring Europe with Kampala-based collective Nyege Nyege

Tripped-out excursions through percussive club music with the Nowadays resident. Ayesha Chugh, AKA Ayesha, makes club music that activates the body. The Brooklyn-based artist has spent the last few years carving out a distinct lane in modern club music. Her fusion of dubstep, techno and essential '90s rave elements into dynamite club tools that test and support dancers in equal measure. This time though, for her RA Podcast, Chugh purposefully tilts in a "more colorful wonky direction." Since first turning heads with releases on labels like Fever AM and Kindergarten Records, she’s continued to refine a sound that feels both playful and punishing, marked by writhing basslines, rumbling drums and an innate ability to make bodies move. Her productions capture a kind of kinetic precision—tracks that are slippery yet forceful, balancing psychedelic textures with dubstep-like physicality and club-focused power. As Andrew Ryce wrote of her debut, Rhythm is Memory, her skill is "full of textures that wrap around the

Another Barker masterclass. Sam Barker asks more from techno. The artist known simply as Barker is one of electronic music's most consistently conscientious and curious producers, challenging listeners to question the norms we accept about our shared culture—whether it's the music that fills the room, the process behind it, or the purpose of the space itself. British-born yet based in Berlin since 2007, Barker forged a connection to many of the city's leading institutions, including Ostgut Ton, and over the course of a long and fruitful relationship, he carved out one of the more singular paths on the club and label's roster. Not one for orthodoxy, Barker challenged four-to-the-floor techno framework in favor of melodic experimentation. By decentering or completely stripping away the typical trappings of kick drums and claps, his productions are both light and immersive, buoyant in low-end presence and shimmering in weightless space. Six years after Utility, his sophomore album Stochastic Drift arrives th

Big feelings for big rooms with the Club Heart Broken founder. Club Heart Broken is perhaps a misnomer. The party and label, founded in Cologne by MALUGI, may take its name from one of life's tougher emotions, but the vibe is all about unfettered, unadulterated joy. It's a state of mind its founder fully embodies—he's called himself the "happiest man in dance music." (We tried fact-checking this, but watching him perform seems proof enough.) Club Heart Broken's motto is simple: a party should be fun. A "party for lovers, loners and losers," the crew also made up of ferrari rot, SURF 2 GLORY and fellow maximalist Marlon Hoffstadt, represent the sound of young Berlin in the 2020s, notorious as they are beloved. Since relocating from Cologne, the party has snapped the German's capital infamously serious techno stereotype with its anything-goes, unpretentious music policy. It's made him and Hoffstadt especially in-demand worldwide—queues used to extend out of the door of Watergate and across Oberbaumbrücke.

Modern hypnotics from a new techno star. It's a tale as old as time: techno DJ moves to Berlin to chase a dream. Philippa Pacho is part of the latest wave of talent to tread that familiar path. But don't let that fool you. She's one of the classiest artists around—no TikTok gimmicks here. Pacho's formative years were spent in her native Stockholm, navigating a vibrant DIY party scene that included warehouse raves and illegal parties. She eventually took up a long-standing residency at beloved local club Under Bron and the experience, as she details in this week's Q&A, sharpened her technical skills, teaching her to handle every type of set—whether opening with patience, supporting a headliner or closing with finesse. She also played with countless touring DJs, from Answer Code Request to Antony Parasole, which ultimately inspired her move to Berlin. That relocation has firmly paid off. It's a testament to Pacho's talent that you'll find her playing pretty much every big club and festival across Europe, fro

Mesmerising dance floor tapestries from a singular experimental musician. Can you reinvent the human voice? The oldest musical instrument in existence, our voices are the foundation of music as we know it, and few push its limits in electronic music today like Lyra Pramuk. On her masterful debut, Fountain the Berlin-based, US-born artist's voice was the only instrument. No drums, no synths—just her voice warped, synthesized and layered to achieve orchestral-like electronics. Five years on from her breakout, Pramuk's practice has steadily evolved, with a continued interest in ideas of folk and futurism, and how technology can enable us to build community beyond boundaries of time and space. There’s a holistic nature to her artistry, one that extends seamlessly into her DJing (she's also a quantum physicist by training). As she explains in the Q&A accompanying this week's RA Podcast, she sees her work as "part of a continuum of sacred, folkloric, and communal music represented by many different subcultures a

Regis and Function's first mix in over 10 years is a unique paean to Silent Servant, heavy on unreleased material. When it came time for RA to compile our Albums of the 2010s, one record with a tauntingly limited availability of 500 copies was never in doubt: Sandwell District's era-defining 'Feed-Forward'. Encompassing Karl O'Connor (Regis), Peter Sutton (Female), David Sumner (Function) and Juan Mendez (Silent Servant), Sandwell District had the underground in a vice grip for over a decade. The collective imploded in 2013, with Sumner and O'Connor's relationship appearing beyond repair. And yet, an unlikely second phase is here, featuring imminent comeback LP 'End Beginnings' and their return to the RA Podcast after 16 years. In 2023, the trio of Function, Regis and Silent Servant had been performing and laying down new material before the latter's shock death last January. It's in the shadow of loss that this unique mix was forged. Founded in 2002 as a spiritual sister to seminal Downwards, Sandwell tru

Raucous club jams from the trio setting pace for a new generation of electronic fans: Dazegxd, gum.mp3 & Swami Sound, AKA EldiaNYC. Something exciting is happening on the margins of online club music. As one generation ages out, another, predominantly made up of Zoomers and Zillennials who fell into rave music mid-pandemic or arrived via gaming, is on the rise. Some of the most dialled-in electronic fans out there have threadbare connection to formalised nightlife, filling their diet instead with DJ Ess, Jane Remover, Jet Set Radio and a thriving ecosystem of global splinter styles that would draw stares from anyone who settled into their preferences pre-2019. Leading the charge—while pointedly reaffirming the value of connection as they go—are EldiaNYC, whose combination of jungle, garage, vintage Black American dance music, regional rap and screen-glued splinter styles hits like a shot of adrenaline. Swami Sound broke first with sexy drill-laced 2-step edits, and last year we named gum.mp3's "Black Life,

21st century electro-futurism, Helsinki style. Sometime around a decade ago, electro started to surge onto dance floors again. A new generation of DJs, from Helena Hauff and DJ Stingray, brought the sci-fi, cyborg funk to new audiences, as a modern retool of the style began enjoying the ubiquity of its four-to-the-floor cousins. And few embody its future for our current decade like Sunny Seppä, AKA Sansibar. Cutting his teeth in Helsinki's underground with residencies at Kaiku and Post Bar, Seppä's sound draws from a broad range of influences far from the Finnish capital. His first releases channeled the high-definition Motor City school of electro, but he has since evolved. Not one to be confined by the narrow confines of any genre, the Finnish producer and DJ's discography has steadily begun to encompass a wider palette of influences, including releases with fellow new-gen electro artist Reptant. It's no wonder Seppä has found a home on Kalahari Oyster Cult. Sans Musique was released by Rey Colino's la

The in-demand US DJ unfurls dubby, dance floor poetry. Where does sentimentality fit on the dance floor? For Liv Klutse, AKA livwutang, the answer is everywhere. The New York-based DJ is guided by a deep desire to stir connection, finding themes and points of correspondence across an impressively broad range of sounds, tempos and eras. This emotional intuition lends Klutse's sets a depth few others can match. Her selections can seem unpredictable, rooted in an appreciation for feeling over genre—hard and soft sounds are carefully balanced with surrealism and bursts of nostalgia (for instance, the Lazy Dog bootleg edit of Everything But The Girl's "Tracey In My Room"). But as versatile as she is, a few signature traits colour her style, such as a love for dubwise music and rhythms from across the Black diaspora, alongside a refreshingly introspective energy that invites dancers to find moments of meditation—even during peak time. A former staffer at our New York office, Klutse has long merited an RA Podca