RA Podcast

Soul Summit is a New York institution. The DJ trio have been putting on a summer festival in Brooklyn's Fort Greene park for well over a decade now, and those gatherings have become a yearly house music pilgrimage for fans from all over the Five Boroughs. The party embodies the ethos of house music: free for everyone, open to families both blood and chosen, a place where everyone is welcome to gro...

Purelink have been described more than once as an "ambient boy band." (They themselves say "jam band.") It's not meant dismissively—the American trio purposefully mean to function as a band, even if their main instruments are laptops. Ambient might not quite cut it as a descriptor, though. The group's music crosses eras and scenes, touching on the late '90s clicks & cuts boom as well as the billow...

Dr Banana is a name that commands a lot of respect in certain corners of the dance music world. The man has his Ph. D in record digging—not literally, mind you, but play along—and key to his success is the sense of fun, joy and ecstasy he brings to his DJing. UK garage historian? Sure. Blinding DJ? Definitely. He likes to play records you've never heard before, records that not only make you dance...

Quest's RA Podcast starts slowly, with a thrum of synths that feels like watching a rocket take off in slow motion. Before you know it, you're in outer space, floating through zero gravity with waves of synths and gentle breakbeats. The Italian DJ is a premiere selector in the world of digging for rare records, but his outré taste shouldn't be confused with willful obscurity. He's a beloved DJ par...

Detroit dance music thrives on intergenerational connections. In the late '70s and early '80s, the late Ken Collier mixed disco, soul and early electronic dance music in eye-opening DJ sets that left a mark on up-and-coming artists like Delano Smith. Once Smith established himself in the city's explosive techno community, he, in turn, influenced soon-to-be legends like Juan Atkins, Eddie Fowlkes,...

It would be no exaggeration to say that 33EMYBW is one of the most original club music producers we've heard in recent years. In addition to being a talented visual artist and a bass player in the experimental band Duck Fight Goose, her solo productions are a highlight of Shanghai’s bustling underground scene—home to forward-thinking artists like Tzusing, Osheyack, Swimful and Hyph11e—moving with...

What some refer to broadly as "Latin club music"—from dembow to raptor house—is having a moment on dance floors around the world. Since making his mark at Manchester's legendary Swing Ting parties in the 2010s, Florentino, who is of Colombian heritage, has melded high-pressure perreo, cumbia and other styles with high BPMs and fat-bottomed bass in his DJ sets and productions. The result is an ultr...

At this point, Shy One might be familiar to most music fans as one of the hosts of NTS's daily breakfast show, Soup To Nuts, where she helps listeners across the UK and Europe settle into their morning routines with an eclectic and soulful selection of dance music and downtempo. But the London artist has been around a lot longer than that, with a discography that goes back well over a decade. She...

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...