RA Podcast

We're not in the habit of quoting press materials all the time, but in Kajetan Łukomski's case, it feels appropriate. The first sentence of his bio is "Avtomat is a person with way too many interests." If you know any artists from Poland's wide-ranging, always-growing electronic music scene, chances are he's one of them. He's a DJ, producer, organizer and activist, once a member of the queer feminist collective Oramics, and is endlessly passionate about supporting, spreading and playing music from the Central European and Eastern European regions. With roots in metal, goth and electroclash, there's a certain spikiness to Łukomski's style, but also a polyglot knowledge and a hunger for new sounds. Lately he's been trying to mix club music with Polish folk traditions, which is the mission of Łukomski's RA Podcast, but it's also just the jumping off point. In these almost four hours of expert blending, genre-jumping and incredible pacing, Łukomski touches on almost every style of dance music you could think of,

Before she was Femanyst, Akua Grant was called The Lady Blacktronika, also known as the First Lady Of Beatdown. Beatdown was a type of of ultra-deep house characterized by creamy chords, soulful melodies and, in Grant's case, honeyed vocals. She ran an integral label called Sound Black Recordings, home to some of her best tracks. But around 2017, she turned towards what was essentially the polar opposite: industrial-tinged super hard techno, full of distortion and anger. This is where we find Grant now, as Femanyst, with a mix that shows off heavy-duty techno that still has a heart. She started her own new label, called Dark Carousel, and has released on Paula Temple's Noise Manifesto. She manages to take some of the hardest techno around and imbue it with her signature melodic style. This is probably one of the toughest RA Podcasts yet, but it's also full of feeling, dynamism and tension. Get your best listening setup ready and sink in for two hours. @msladyblacktronika Read more at https://ra.co/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 sound like the future or the past, sometimes both at once, and the Venezuelan-born, Spain-based producer's name is shorthand for musical adventurism and variety. Last year, things got even wilder with the debut of Safety Trance, a new alias that explores pan-Latin club music, with a focus on collaboration and shorter, structured songs. (Artists he's worked with include Arca, Iceboy Violet and Virgen Maria.) It's some of the best and most creative work of his career, riding a larger Latin techno wave producing some of the best music around these days. If that weren't enough, returning to Cardopusher, Garban has a ca

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 homage to their other favourite place: Amsterdam. Dales and Smeets have become core parts of the Amsterdam house scene in their time, especially with their excellent Heist Recordings label, which they started back in 2013 (hey, now *that's* literally ten years ago). It's easy to understand why the duo have become so popular. In person and onstage, they're goofy, funny guys, the kind of people you might describe as the life of the party. And musically, they're massively appealing, marrying a European tech house strut to deeper and more soulful inspirations, a preoccupation reflected in Heist's impressive artist ros

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 others) and appearances on labels like Work Them and Oaks. What really sets Anetha apart, though, is her commitment to developing and uplifting the artists around her. She launched her own label, Mama Told Ya, in 2019 with a unique and heartwarming concept: each release would highlight an artist, often young or new to the game, and feature one collaboration with Anetha herself. It's a move that turns the usual label-artist dynamic on its head, making each new record a fully-fledged collaboration, and lending her own gravitas to the artist she features. And a year later she started an agency—or what she calls a "creativ

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 and spine-tingling melodies. And on his 12-inches, he brings that sensibility to the dance floor, with an approach probably best described as articulate. Even on his most ambient of tracks, everything is in its right place. Along with founders the Zenker Brothers, his music outlines everything that makes Munich outfit Ilian Tape one of the best techno labels going. On the decks, it's kind of a different story. It might surprise you if you only know his albums, but Skee Mask is an incredible DJ, balancing his predilection for hip-hop and UK-informed sounds with laser-focused techno. He can adapt to all sorts of situa

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 is very good. Earth Trax is the project that really made us swoon, with a soft-focus, sunset-hued meld of techno, breakbeat, progressive house and trance. On wonderful records like LP1, melancholy is the operative word, but Kruczyński isn't exactly a sadsack. It's more complex than that, nailing the tears-on-the-dance-floor vibe with the part that many people forget: it's still club music. That's why tracks like "Dream Pop," which kicks off this mix, are so successful—they're heavy but never weighed down by emotion, with a skip in their step and a robust low-end to go with the sighing vocals. Kruczyński's RA Podcas

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 and future. Her recent EP, Black Metropolis, accomplishes this with a genuinely innovative take on '90s Black dance music that uses a vintage template to do something fresh. She calls her RA Podcast a "Black excellence" mix, traveling between eras and places, featuring artists like Skin On Skin, Paul Johnson, Drexciya and Huey Mnemonic. It's part of her mission to highlight (and remind people) about the Black origins of dance music, and also the vitality of today's Black dance music. This mix is a history lesson, a narrative and a rave all in one, something we're proud to host from an exciting young mind in the elec

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 encompasses breaks, electro, techno and more, with soft-focus melodies and plenty of vocal hooks. She's one of the first residents at the legendary club to truly reflect the glorious cross-pollination of dance music styles in the '10s, when techno absorbed ideas from dubstep, garage and more. Adasi represents both floors of that club, and you could imagine this RA Podcast going down in either room, but of course, she exists outside that club's narrative too. What you'll hear here is a cutting-edge and dynamic blend of electro and Latin techno—with two tracks from 2022 MVP Nick León—mixed with grace and finesse. He

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 kaleidoscopic sound into its constituent parts, with Maker's side focusing on woozy hip-hop and R&B and Campos's reflecting a love of straightforward '90s techno, as dance floor-friendly as anything the group have ever released. It's the latter that we're here to showcase with this week's RA Podcast, which is a recording of Campos's new live set. In a way it's a more fleshed-out, comprehensive companion to the his side of the album, but it stands on its own as a blistering techno performance. Combining the melodic sense and quirky arrangement tics of Mount Kimbie with a pulsating, stripped-back approach borrowed fro

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 psychedelic, with pristine audiophile sound played at a medium volume level kinder to the ears. You didn't need to blast the music to appreciate the sonic perfection of the music and the system it was played on. Over the decades, Mancuso invented his own influential style of DJing, letting the records breathe rather than mashing them together. Mancuso, who died in 2016, had many acolytes over the years, perhaps none more prominent than Colleen 'Cosmo' Murphy, who provides our final 2122 birthday RA Podcast: a tribute to The Loft. Murphy has an impressive resume without The Loft: she's a long-time radio DJ, founded the C

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, originally from Florida, has been an integral part of New York's electronic music as a DJ and as a booker at one of the city's best venues, Nowadays. Voices got her footing as a selector as a founding member of the DJ collective Working Women, but these days she performs solo through her Nowadays residency and her radio show on The Lot, Nothing In Moderation. Her sets are known for their psychedelic dynamism—her selection, with which she prioritizes "energy and drama over genre," often flits from rolling low-end music, uptempo tracks (that she then slows all the way down) and wonky leftfield beats. "It would be h

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 electroclash and post-punk for a sound that feels familiar but totally new at the same time. In 2019, she announced she was retiring from live club music, and then formed a band with fellow Montreal scenesters. But on her RA Podcast, she returns to dance music with a cannonball-sized splash. To hear her tell it, Davidson only became interested in DJing recently—she's only been doing it for a few months. It's a new way for her to explore club music and also pay tribute to the artists she loves, without putting her whole self out there in the same way required of live performances. But you could never tell that Davidson

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 such a fantastic DJ, and one of the most technically skilled around (he uses CDJs like few others can). He practices two hours every day, and has been DJing since he was 13. For him, there was no specific party or club that made him the DJ he is today—it was the whole Baltimore scene he grew up in. He is the party. His approach is deeply informed with his history in Baltimore, a city with its own vibrant music scene that always taken a different tack than the rest of the major American undergrounds. House, techno, hip-hop, jazz (and of course Baltimore club), there have never been any boundaries for as long as Clayt

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 is no longer necessary: he's one of the world's best DJs, bar none. An absolute master at curating and mixing techno, Nobu has helped to inspire a Japanese school of techno that is psychedelic, hypnotic and often very pretty, without losing the genre's oomph or edge. And he's more popular than ever around the world, playing some of the best parties and clubs in pretty much any country or city you could name. But DJ Nobu's roots and heart are close to home. Frustrated with techno in the Japanese capitol, he created his own party in his neighbouring hometown, Chiba, where nightlife was less pretentious and the vibe

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 in the late-'70s when he was in his early 20s and became a pioneer of the form alongside names like Larry Levan, Tom Moulton and Walter Gibbons. And though he would become a house icon, he became especially known for the trippy "dub" mixes on the B-sides of records, which often eschewed the structure and vocals of the songs he was remixing in favour of excursions into the unknown. It's that legacy that led him to Deep Space, his Monday-night residency at the once-legendary Meatpacking District club Cielo, which was one of the most beloved (and best-sounding) rooms in Manhattan. Deep Space started at 2003 and ran

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 millions—of people's most formative dance floor experiences, with an unparalleled vibe, near-perfect sound and window blinds that have taken their own place in dance music mythology. The duo's mix highlights the style that Tama Sumo and Lakuti have brought to the club and represents its anything-goes energy, mixing tracks from iconoclasts like Hieroglyphic Being (including one of his best-ever tracks) in with old-school favorites from Reel By Real, Larry Heard and even Ministry, moving from house to industrial to disco without batting an eyelid. Tama Sumo and Lakuti's loose but impeccable flow ties together house music h

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 not only by those origins but by Western Canada's long history with industrial music and techno (spot Skinny Puppy and Tunnel Canary in the tracklist). 
 Minimal Violence first impressed us with their hardware-focused house and techno, a harder-edged version of the sound that was sweeping Vancouver at the time, before moving on to Ninja Tune sub-label Technicolour and then Tresor for a series of records that saw their sound become more expansive, sharper and more melodic, incorporating not just techno and punk influences but also trance, EBM and more. These are the genres that feed into Infinity Division, and Luk's R

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 studying in Leeds, bonding over a shared love of wiggly bombs at countless clubs and hazy afterparties. They ran events (Butter Side Up, Dog Eat Dog), DJ’d tirelessly and continued to dig for obscure gems. Within a few years, they were both working full-time music jobs in London, booking Dimensions Festival (Hamish) and The Pickle Factory (Toby). (Hamish is now a director at Dimensions.) All in all, they’ve dedicated the past 15 years of their lives to dance music. For all their behind-the-scenes work, Hamish & Toby’s true love is DJing together. They’re known for their long, expressive sets that go, in their own word

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 house and even hints of hyperpop, tying in neon threads into techno's all-black garb. She's used techno as a jumping off point for orchestral and choral performances, as well as the poignant expression of grief (on her stellar debut album). She's become a regular at Berghain and groundbreaking festivals like CTM, traversing a highbrow-lowbrow line that posits that every kind of dance music deserves the highbrow treatment. Her RA Podcast is an irresistible hour of techno full of what she calls "Neneisms," turns into pop hooks amidst hulking techno beats and dips into funky, electro-informed beats. @nenetreat Read mor