EX.699 Phase Fatale

"There are more safe spaces for women to be themselves." The UK star discusses the diversity of the jungle scene and her new album, Silence Is Loud. UK DJ and producer Nia Archives is among a coterie of new artists who are infusing drum & bass and jungle with heartfelt lyrics, lush chords and crowds that are more diverse and inclusive than ever before. Born in Bradford, West Yorkshire, she grew up around a rich sound system culture, developing an early interest in documentary video and choral music from her church. She left home young, setting out to London on her own to pursue a dream of making it in music and self-releasing a string of debut EPs. In the last two years, the 24-year-old has garnered a huge following. Her fans have fallen in love with her heart-on-the-sleeve lyrics taken straight from the pages of her diary—she calls herself an "emotional junglist"—as well as her fun, inclusive approach to a historically male-dominated scene. In this interview with Chloe Lula, she talks about her party series and her debut album, Silence Is Loud, produced alongside renowned songwriter and producer Ethan P. Flynn. Listen to the episode in full.

"We always put minorities to the front." The Mala Junta cofounder and affiliate talk about prioritising femme queer ravers, the value of local party crews and not taking themselves too seriously. Friends and colleagues Hyperaktivist and Yazzus share one important value: putting marginalised folks to the front. The Venezuelan and Ghana-via-London artists, respectively, met in Berlin not long after Yazzus went to the Berlin-based Mala Junta party, a collective co-founded by Hyperaktivist, DJ Tool and door selector Nyaam Hassany. Yazzus was asked to be a party resident and has collaborated with the crew extensively, playing their shows and helping curate lineups ever since. In this RA Exchange with Berlin DJ and journalist Juba, the two talk about their shared passion for better representation on party lineups and what authentic diversity means in a climate that often privileges checking boxes and meeting quotas. They also talk about their solo endeavours, their trajectories into dance music and their shared passion for nurturing the growth of homegrown parties and scenes. Amid Berlin's rising prices (and competition), they reflect that the ideals of collaboration and connection remain stronger than ever before. Listen to the conversation in full.

"I discovered how to build sound systems at our dairy farm." The DJ talks about growing up in rural Australia, starting her own label and more in this Playing Favourites live from Pitch Music & Arts. On this week's Exchange, we reintroduce our flagship live format, Playing Favourites, where artists discuss the songs that shaped their taste in music. Today's episode features CC:DISCO! at Pitch Festival in Australia. As the artist's name suggests, her style fuses disco with French touch, synth-driven electro and funk; she's collaborated with artists like Jennifer Loveless and released her first EP with Erol Alkan on his label Phantasy Sound, and last year she launched her own imprint, Miami Daddy. In this interview, CC:DISCO! plays songs that were formative in her career development and reflects on growing up outside of big cities. Born and raised on a dairy farm in rural Victoria, FM radio became her cultural lifeline and her first introduction to dance music. The artist also talks about working with indigenous promoters from beyond Sydney (Eora) and Melbourne (Naarm), the music that defines Australia today and the protest songs that have helped serve as the backdrop for the First Nations fight for representation and sociopolitical change. Listen to the episode in full.

"It's a pure form of love." The hardcore artist talks about collecting ephemera from rave zines, working in high fashion and his undying love for the gabber community. Alberto Guerrini, better known as Gabber Eleganza, has made a name for himself as a hardcore and gabber DJ, as well as a fervid documenter of the culture that surrounds it. Growing up in Italy, he started going to raves at a club called Number One Hardcore before eventually traveling to the Netherlands with his parents' blessing and starting to DJ himself. Guerrini's love of hardcore spilled over into a Tumblr blog he started in 2011, a project that aggregated the rave zines, photos and stories he collected from his time spent in the gabber community. The goal of the project, he says in this interview, was to build up anthropological dialogues on the "sonic landscape and aesthetic of the hardcore continuum." The online compendium contains amazing pieces of hardcore ephemera: clippings of Soviet era rave zines, letters ex-ravers sent to the hardcore community from jail and Guerrini's own appendices providing context around the global subculture. Much of this archival work made its way into a book that Guerrini published with artists Ewen Spencer Mark Leckey called Hardcore Soul, a photography collection that traces the similarities and relationships between hardcore and the UK's Northern Soul movement. He discusses this and more—including his own label, Never Sleep, and his work with the fashion industry and art worlds—in this conversation with Chloe Lula. Listen to the episode in full.

"The Beatles blew my mind." The LA artist talks about her new album—Something in the Room She Moves—writing music while pregnant and how she works in the studio. The LA-based composer and musician Julia Holter has garnered a reputation for releases that toe the hazy edge of shoegaze and dream pop, always skirting the contours of the electronic music world. On today's RA Exchange, she takes a deep dive into her sixth studio album, Something in the Room She Moves, with music editor Andrew Ryce. Holter talks about writing all but one of the songs while she was pregnant ("Evening Mood" even captures a sample of her child's ultrasound, recorded from her phone), which lends the album a warmth and tenderness unparalleled in any of her past releases. But it's also a somber record; her nephew died while she was recording it, an event that forced her to process the complexity and gravity of two conflicting, converging experiences while composing. For the technically inclined, Holter also discusses how she works in the studio and manages post-production. As the artist tells Ryce, she likes to play with resonant frequencies and processing that puts each of the sounds she records into the same sonic world on a record, using effects and composition tricks to give everything what she calls a "sensuous vibe." Something in the Room She Moves is out now on Domino Records. Listen to the episode in full.

"Humans think they're top of the hierarchy." The Live From Earth member talks about growing up in Sunshine Farms, the perils of competition in the music industry and how TikTok changed her career. You might know horsegiirL from her horse mask, her viral singles on TikTok or her hugely popular online videos. The DJ and producer—who famously never breaks character—has launched into popularity over the past two years, bringing her frenetic and contemporary style of hardstyle-meets-Europop mash-ups to dance floors around the world. Her fans, or "farmies," go crazy for her music, donning cowboy hats and pitchforks at all of her shows. In this episode of the RA Exchange, horsegiirL sits down with senior producer Chloe Lula to talk about her upbringing in Sunshine Farms and the key differences between the animal kingdom and the human world. They also discuss her involvement with the Berlin-based label Live From Earth Klub, an irreverent art and DJ collective featured as part of our latest cover story. (Two of the crew's other key artists, DJ Gigola and MCR-T, also mixed this week's RA Podcast.) Listen to the horsegiirL episode in full.

"You could feel the ground shifting beneath you." The long time BBC Radio host talks about her party, All Queens, her love for SHERELLE and music as a force for good. Resident Advisor continues its celebration of Women's History Month (and International Women's Day) with a special conversation with Mary Anne Hobbs. The long time BBC Radio presenter has been a diehard documenter of music culture and a radio fanatic ever since she was a young girl. As she recounts in this episode, the transistor she kept in secret while growing up became her getaway to another universe, a beacon of hope that she listened to every night under the covers at home. In 1996, she became a host at BBC Radio 1. It was a time when there were few women involved in the music industry in general, and few people at all championing leftfield electronic music. Hobbs famously started the Breezeblock show and championed dubstep and grime, pushing new artists whose work she admired and helping usher them into the limelight. Today Hobbs' iconic voice is still hosting the radio every day—this time at Radio 6. She's leading an exciting project called All Queens, a platform that started as a radio show for women's music that has quickly turned into a touring club night at fabric run by and starring women, from the sound engineers to the bouncers and headliners of the night. Hobbs discusses the platform and is joined by close friend SHERELLE, who dissects some of the nuances in representation the scene fails to overlook when it discusses gender in nightlife. The pair recently performed sets together at the BBC Radio 6 Music Festival. Listen to the episode in full. This episode was recorded at Recorded at Pirate Studios – Recording, Rehearsal, DJ, Podcast and Dance studios spread across New York, London, Berlin, Los Angeles and beyond. For more information, visit pirate.com.

"Every opportunity to learn something new is what's going to grow your craft as an artist." The Toronto star talks discipline and gaining self-confidence as a producer. Cindy Li, AKA Ciel, always seems to be one step ahead. The label head, DJ, producer and activist has a hard-won career that dance music producers dream of—when she's not playing underground institutions across the globe, maintaining radio residencies, planning her own parties or collaborating with her favourite artists, she's thinking about what's next. "I'm the type of person that I'll stay up trying to finish everything rather than going to bed knowing that I didn't finish everything on my list," she tells RA's Nyshka Chandran in this week's episode. The Toronto resident is a conservatory-trained pianist who uses the discipline she learnt from a lifetime of lessons to balance DJing and production. "For me, it is challenging to juggle both because they use very different parts of my brain," she describes. A deep digger whose love for atmospheric textures and '90s grooves influences her fresh take on UKG, tech-house and jungle, Li has been putting out music since 2017. She has various EPs and singles under her name, plus several joint releases with the likes of Dan Only, D.Tiffany and Priori but says she didn't always have the confidence for a solo full-length. "I never thought I could write an album," she admits. But after playing live for the first time at MUTEK Montréal in 2021, that changed, leading to the 2023 release of Homesick, her debut album. "Don't ever let fear influence your decision-making," she says, describing how that show pushed her to overcome lingering doubts in the studio. For more on Li's process, listen to the episode in full.

"I often myself being responsible for a film's music, but also fighting for its absence." The composer discusses movie scoring, his love of opera and his new album, Scope Neglect, on Mute Records. The multidisciplinary Australian artist Ben Frost might best be known for his score work: he's soundtracked Netflix shows like Dark and its spinoff 1899, as well as a number of major motion pictures and video games. While his formal studies were in visual art, he started experimenting with music-making from an early age, homing in on a unique sound that is truly a melange of his influences in punk, black metal, classical and modern minimalism. His unique approach to composition has led him to some extreme places to capture field recordings, like the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Amazon rainforest and the empty hulls of fishing boats docked on the banks of Icelandic port towns. Artists like Steve Albini, Björk, Brian Eno and the band SWANS have tapped Frost to work with them, and he's performed extensively as a solo performer and as part of an A/V outfit at the world's biggest festivals and art world circuits. In this episode of the RA Exchange, he sits down with senior producer Chloe Lula to discuss his latest venture, a full-length album, Scope Neglect, on Mute. It pulls heavily from his proclivity for guitar music and metal, but still nods to the cinematic minimalism that has become one of his work's primary tropes. Frost dissects some of the recording techniques he used to make the record—he borrowed from the methods used by Mark Hollis of the band Talk Talk—as well as his studio practice, his love of opera and his approach to writing scores. Listen to the episode in full.

"The road is incredible but has a lot of pitfalls." The fabric resident discusses striking the balance between DJing and production, the challenges of a life on tour and choosing to stick out. Daniel Avery wasn't expecting to make it big. Born in the seaside town of Bournemouth, his early musical diet consisted of shoegaze, post-punk, electroclash and indie rock; he was a die hard fan in attendance at every local live show. But when he moved to London, he was introduced to dance music and became immersed in nightlife, meeting artists like Erol Alkan and Andrew Weatherall who were using the sounds of guitar bands with techno and electronic music for the dance floor. Soon Daniel was working out of a studio next to Weatherall's—who became his longtime mentor—and started warming up the dance floor at fabric on a regular basis. His debut album, Drone Logic, was released to critical acclaim in 2013, and has been followed by six more full-lengths and a number of EPs and singles since. In this episode of the RA Exchange, Avery reflects on the shock of being catapulted into the limelight after Drone Logic's unexpected success, and the ongoing struggle he's contended with as he's taken on a full-time touring schedule as a DJ. He also touches on his eclectic range of influences and how he's integrated them in his forthcoming album and newly revitalised fabric party series, Divided Love, which launches on March 2. Listen to the episode in full.