RA Podcast

Last month, with Goldie's guest curatorship of Resident Advisor, we focused on the history of one of the most important music genres and scenes to come out of the UK: drum & bass. With this RA Podcast from Kasra, we switch over to the style's cutting edge. He's probably best known for his long-running Critical Music label, whose name is instructive. You'll find some of the most essential, crucial...

909 is a special number for us at RA—the name of one of the most hallowed drum machines in all of music, and one of the foundations of techno music—and we're more than happy to offer it up to a DJ who has been a long-time favourite of our team: Glasgow's Bake. In fact, we commissioned this mix roughly ten years ago, but you can't rush perfection. When Bake emerged as one of the heads heads behind...

With their Wisdom Teeth label, British artists Facta and K-LONE are at the vanguard of a sound that mixes New Age-inspired ambient music with loopy tech house and the staggered swing of Bristol techno. Now split between the West Country hotspot and Brighton, the duo have perfected a balance of carefully considered long-players and wicked club EPs, making Wisdom Teeth one of the most essential labe...

Before moving to San Francisco, Iranian-Canadian artist AIDA got her start in one of the world's more unlikely, yet nourishing, rave scenes tucked away in the southwest corner of Canada: Vancouver. There, amongst the basement raves, forest parties and yeast-perfumed gigs on top of bakeries, she found a home amidst a small but strong scene of record-digging minimal lovers, finding power in their pu...

Back in the day, drums were used as signals for festivities and war because their sounds travelled the furthest. Azu Tiwaline has long understood that. A master in the dark arts of percussion, she makes deep and profound percussive music that seems to communicate forgotten rituals from centuries past. Her sound is dense, as if pulled from the depths of the Sahara desert in Tunisia, yet still feels...

For our 905th RA Podcast, we're proud to welcome Goldie, one of the most famous, talented and important electronic music artists of all time. Starting out as a graffiti artist, he eventually made music under the name Rufige Kru, helping push the then-nascent genre of jungle forward with tracks like "Krisp Biscuit (Power)" and "Terminator." The latter was released under the name Metalheads, which w...

When Smoke Machine started doing parties in Taipei, and then created a revered online mix series, it was clear that it was the work of someone with impeccable taste. That would be Diskonnected, once a resident at the beloved Taiwan club Korner who now posts up at Pawnshop and 宀 in Hong Kong. He's also behind Organik, a festival that takes place on the coast of Taiwan and has become one of the wor...

For the past few years, RA cover star Jlin has been churning out complex percussion compositions that sit at the intersection of IDM, trap, mutant techno and sound art. Her tracks are tactile and structurally complex, stacked drums interlocking with glistening melodies and heaving basslines on groundbreaking albums like Dark Origami. Her rhythms gracefully crosscut over one another like towering b...

Di Linh name-checks Ben UFO and DJ Masda as two of her favourite DJs in the interview below, which underlines the lovely duality of her style: her sets are adventurous but buttery smooth. One of Vietnam's most buzzed-about DJs—and a resident at the all-important Hanoi club Savage, as well as Equation festival—she was a punter before she was a DJ. She fell in love with the music at Savage and event...

New York party Merge is often described as a queer techno extravaganza. Over the past two years, it's built a loyal community from the ground up while integrating everything from high-energy trance to disorienting acid into its rave repertoire. Resident Clarisa Kimskii has played a defining role in the collective's growth, largely thanks to the ultra-kinetic and rhythmic pace of her DJ sets. Time...

Ashland Mines, AKA Total Freedom, AKA Big Gay Idiot DJ, AKA Bobby Beethoven, is one of the best and most influential DJs of the 21st century. Starting out at pioneering parties like Mustache Mondays and Wildness (which he cofounded with Wu Tsang)—and a regular at GHE20G0TH1K—Mines helped to define the style that would become known, however cringe-inducingly, as experimental club or deconstructed c...

Talk to any veteran artist and they'll tell you consistency is the secret to longevity. Staying relevant in a competitive industry requires unwavering dedication to the craft—a lesson that nobody knows better than the godmother of house music, Stacey Hotwaxx Hale. The gear head, educator, music nerd and Detroit legend is considered the Motor City's first woman DJ to play underground house music. H...

People in Los Angeles usually remember the moment they first saw Colored Craig DJ. He cuts a memorable figure: throwing down records on the turntables and dancing like he's in the crowd, not behind the decks. He's one of those rare selectors who's almost as fun to watch as he is to listen. But the rest of the world should be listening. Over the past few years, Colored Craig has become one of the L...

Kerrie started a label called Dark Machine Funk, a name which hints toward the kind of music she plays. And while the Irish artist might be a capital-T techno DJ, her idea of "dark" is a little different than the black-clad legions of her generation. You won't find whiplash-inducing BPMs or racy pop edits in her sets. Her idea of techno is more classicist, without veering towards the stuffy or the...

Broken beat, or bruk, is intrinsically collaborative. Its London originators often recorded together, taking inspiration from jazz, hip-hop, deep house, drum & bass and Afrobeat. Because the genre was born of fusion, it brought together heads from all corners of the music spectrum—sound system purists to junglists to Latin Nuyorican aficionados—who each resonated with bruk's complex rhythms in the...

RA CC Copenhagen brought together online radio station Drift Radio for a livestream and local community builder and record store Proton Records for a pop-up record sale at cultural hub Øen in celebration of the interconnectedness of their community and the distinctiveness of the Copenhagen sound. https://soundcloud.com/atikka-music https://soundcloud.com/drift-radio https://www.pr-t-n.org/ https:/...

RA CC Copenhagen brought together online radio station Drift Radio for a livestream and local community builder and record store Proton Records for a pop-up record sale at cultural hub Øen in celebration of the interconnectedness of their community and the distinctiveness of the Copenhagen sound. https://soundcloud.com/cockwhoreandmacho https://soundcloud.com/drift-radio https://www.pr-t-n.org/ ht...

RA CC Copenhagen brought together online radio station Drift Radio for a livestream and local community builder and record store Proton Records for a pop-up record sale at cultural hub Øen in celebration of the interconnectedness of their community and the distinctiveness of the Copenhagen sound. https://soundcloud.com/lyravalenza https://soundcloud.com/drift-radio https://www.pr-t-n.org/ https://...

RA CC Copenhagen brought together online radio station Drift Radio for a livestream and local community builder and record store Proton Records for a pop-up record sale at cultural hub Øen in celebration of the interconnectedness of their community and the distinctiveness of the Copenhagen sound. https://soundcloud.com/teateatea123 https://soundcloud.com/drift-radio https://www.pr-t-n.org/ https:/...

Like most multi-genre music fans, London-based Ruby Savage approaches DJing through a wide-angle lens. Whether she's touring, playing her post-punk disco party, In Flames, or hosting her monthly show on NTS, the Amsterdam native opts for warm, bouncy tunes that traverse dub, jazz and '80s proto-house. As she once Mixmag, she isn't beat-matching but "heartbeat-matching." For her, a dance is a means...

House music started in Chicago, but what gets lost in history lessons is how it evolved and mutated in New York. None of that would have happened without Todd Terry. Bringing together hip-hop and house with his distinctive drum sounds, Terry not only created a whole subgenre (hip-house—check out Jungle Brothers' 1988 classic "I'll House You") but helped redefine the sound as a whole, bringing it t...

This RA Podcast is a celebration of all things Moodymann, and by extension, Detroit. The long-time DJ and producer Dez Andrés calls Moodymann his "big brother," and here pays tribute to the true expanse of Kenny Dixon Jr's music, from core house cuts to rambling funk jams to remixes of artists like Dua Lipa and Solomun, which really hammers home how important Moodymann is on dance music from acros...

As a producer, Lamin Fofana makes ambient music that makes you think. His painterly compositions may be beatless, but they're full of movement, expanding and contracting from modulations and shifting frequencies to create a sense of infinite vastness. This immensity of sound creates a cerebral mood, allowing the Sierra Leone-born talent to explore sociocultural issues close to his heart, like the...

A spark of light erupting from a naked, crouched body adorns the cover of Sodomy, the new EP from Jorkes on their label Freeride Millenium. The image, serious yet playful, seems to represent an outburst of ideas and emotions from a person's inner core, literally. It's the perfect metaphor for Jorkes, whose palette of rugged house music, slick disco, '80s synth-pop and booming acid always feels una...

Of all the one-word techno project names out there, Truncate has to be among the most descriptive. The name started as a name for David Flores's most pared-back tracks, different from the stuff he was making as Audio Injection at the time. As happens with people who are really good at techno—or just understand the genre fundamentally—Truncate's DJ tools took off quickly, because people in the scen...