RA Podcast

Name a genre, and you can bet that Luis Garban has tried his hand at it once or twice. Once a staple of the mid-'00s IDM and breakcore scene—think Tigerbeat6—as Cardopusher, Garban found a temporary home in the dubstep scene afterwards, before shooting off in what felt like a million directions. He might be the only artist to release on both Hyperdub and Boysnoize Records. He makes music that can...

Roughly ten years ago—if we pretend the peak pandemic year-and-a-half doesn't count—Lars Dales and Maarten Smeets first came together as Detroit Swindle, before changing their name to Dam Swindle towards the end of 2020. The original name was meant as a tribute to one of their favorite musical legacies, but recognizing that it didn't come across how they meant it, the duo changed their name to pay...

When it comes to the sound of modern-day techno—fast, melodic and polyglot, working in genres like trance and gabber—it's hard to find an artist more clearly representative than Anetha. The French DJ encompasses all these influences with style, landing on a lithe sound that's both heavy and nimble, earning her a first residency at Paris party Blocaus (and, currently, Awakenings and Fuse, among oth...

Skee Mask is one of dance music's greatest crossover stories of the past decade, with new albums greeted with the attention usually reserved for an Aphex Twin or a Caribou. ("Loved seeing this on r/indieheads," said one Reddit user, on the release of the 2021 LP Pool.) It's not hard to understand why: albums like Compro, he blends well-worn dance music tropes with incredible, detailed soundscapes...

You might have first heard of Earth Trax under his original alias, The Phantom. Or maybe his given name, Bartosz Kruczyński, which he uses for gorgeous ambient music. Or Pejzaż, where he cuts up Polish records from his vast collection. Or as part of Ptaki, another sample-based project he did with fellow Warsaw resident Jaromir Kamiński. You get the idea—dude makes a lot of music. And a lot of it i...

Yazzus is one of the most exciting DJs out of the UK right now. But she doesn't play the usual UK stuff. Instead, her work—her productions and her DJing—is both a historiography and a dialogue of the Black Atlantic connection, taking in dance music genres from both sides of the pond. Her work, encompassing techno, electro and sometimes house, is an Afrofuturist project that combines past, present...

Being named a resident at Berghain is likely an unattainable dream for so many DJs, but for Sedef Adasi, it all happened naturally. The Turkish producer grew up in the mid-sized Bavarian city of Augsburg, where a lack of spaces she felt comfortable with—she's mentioned DJing in shoe stores—led her to start her own party, HAMAM Nights. From there she made her name with a vibrant, diverse sound that...

This month, UK duo Mount Kimbie put out a double-album that is essentially two solo records welded together. It's not terribly surprising: each member lives in different countries (the hip-hop inspired Dom Maker in LA, techno head Kai Campos in London) and they've talked about their differences and what each brings to the table in past interviews. MK 3.5: Die Cuts | City Planning splits the duo's...

As part of our celebration of 21 years of club culture, we're featuring some of our favourite DJs from around the world, highlighting the parties and clubs most important to their lives in dance music. The Loft is one of the most storied and sacred spaces in dance music history. Founded in Manhattan in 1970 by the late David Mancuso, The Loft was a party unlike any other: relaxed and gently psyche...

As part of RA2122, our ongoing celebration of 21 years of club culture, we'll be featuring some of our favourite DJs from around the world, highlighting the parties or clubs most important to their lives in dance music. DJ Voices will be playing our RA2122 party in New York this Saturday, November 29th. DJ Voices is a prime example of an artist that really can do it all. The New York-based artist,...

For our RA2122 series, we've been focusing on dyed-in-the-wool DJs paying tribute to the places that were most important to them. But what if you're an electronic music superstar and you didn't necessarily get your musical education in a club? That's how we come to Marie Davidson, a Canadian artist who counts among the world's most engaging and electrifying live performers, mixing techno with elec...

As part of RA2122, our ongoing celebration of 21 years of club culture, we'll be featuring some of our favourite DJs from around the world, highlighting the parties or clubs most important to their lives in dance music. Chris Clayton, AKA Karizma, takes DJing seriously. But he also knows that it's about having fun, or at least helping other people to have fun. This is the formula that makes him su...

As part of RA2122, our ongoing celebration of 21 years of club culture, we'll be featuring some of our favourite DJs from around the world, highlighting the parties or clubs most important to their lives in dance music. The first time we featured DJ Nobu on the RA Podcast, over ten years ago, we called him "one of Japan's best DJs." In hindsight, i think we can all agree that the country qualifier...

As part of RA2122, our ongoing celebration of 21 years of club culture, we'll be featuring some of our favourite DJs from around the world, highlighting the parties or clubs most important to their lives in dance music. It's safe to say that there would be no house music, and no dance music as we know it, without François Kevorkian. The French-born, New York-based DJ started remixing disco records...

As part of RA2122, our ongoing celebration of 21 years of club culture, we'll be featuring some of our favourite DJs from around the world, highlighting the parties or clubs most important to their lives in dance music. First up we have Tama Sumo and Lakuti, both residents at Berlin's Panorama Bar, the house-focused room upstairs at Berghain. Panorama Bar has played host to thousands—if not millio...

This week's RA Podcast marks something of a debut for Infinity Division, the new solo project from Canadian artist Ash Luk, best known as one half of EBM-techno duo Minimal Violence. (Minimal Violence had itself been a solo project since last year, when cofounder Lida P left the group.) Getting his start in Vancouver's punk scene as part of the band Lié, Luk's approach to dance music is informed n...

For some dance music fans, Hamish & Toby may be their new favourite DJs thanks to a recent US tour and excellent sets at festivals like Glastonbury, Dimensions, Houghton and Freerotation. 2022 was, after all, a breakthrough year for the UK duo. But in their own, close-knit world of Discogs fanatics and vinyl purists, Hamish Cole and Toby Wareham are admired and established names. They met while st...

Whether you're hearing a track or a DJ set, you can usually tell it's Nene H pretty quickly. In just a few years, Beste Aydin has developed a very specific approach within the realm of techno. She inhabits the genre yet colours just enough outside the lines without losing the plot—or the pull—entirely. The focus is on fun, on groove and on hooks, with sets that dip into trance, electro, ghetto hou...

Depending on who you ask, Yousuke Yukimatsu is the best DJ in the world. Or at least in Japan. The eccentric Osaka-born, Tokyo-based DJ has built up an arsenal of fans and disciples—most famously Tzusing—who revere his cross-genre approach and knack for out-of-this-world blends. Case in point: he recently released a mostly ambient mixtape that somehow felt more gripping and propulsive than many te...

If you haven't heard of Nikki Nair at this point, we'd invite you to come out from under that rock you're living in. But jokes aside, the last 12 months have been the Atlanta producer's year. He's toured seemingly endlessly, has found his way into a number of local scenes and has put out records for labels like Dirtybird, Lobster Theremin and Scuffed Recordings. If that weren't enough, he's also b...

As anyone who's been to a Nordic country in the summer will tell you, there's a certain magic in the temperate air that you only get from a place that is cold and dark for most of the rest of the year. That probably goes some way towards explaining how a country like Sweden produces some of the sunniest music around, whether we're talking about pop or underground dance. Since she debuted on Stockh...

"You can't take a sound and exclude the people who created it and say, this is our sound," DJ Noir said in our 2020 feature about Juke Bounce Werk, the label she-cofounded. "No, it's either Chicago footwork or it's other." Back then, the Los Angeles-based imprint and crew was still primarily focused around footwork, but Noir and co—including artists like Kush Jones, DJ SWISHA, Surly and Sonic D—ha...

Nadia Struiwigh immediately turned heads with her debut album, Lenticular, on CPU Records. It wasn't her first record, but it was an auspicious release at an auspicious time for a label that was at the centre of a revival of early '90s IDM and electro styles. You could use those terms to describe Dutch producer Struiwigh's music, but you'd have to also mention ambient—just check out her last album...

eviewing their 2021 EP on Livity Sound, RA's Henry Ivry said that the duo—along with collaborator DJ Polo—represented a "micro-history of jungle, garage, dubstep and, of course, their bread-and-butter, UK funky." Now, you might not be familiar with them, but these two London producers, LR Groove and Razzler Man, have been doing their thing in the UK capital for nearly two decades, both together an...

If we were to pick one word to describe Ziggy Devriendt, AKA Nosedrip, it would probably humble. He runs a one-man empire out of the modest Belgian coastal town of Ostend, and his STROOM label is one of the most quietly brilliant outfits in Western Europe. A mixture of obscurer-than-obscure reissues and quirky new material makes for a label as unpredictable as it is essential, and Devriendt's unus...