RA Podcast

Sun-soaked house from the Circoloco favourite. Want to know what life is like when the sun is always shining? Carlita might be able to tell you. The Istanbul-born DJ follows the summer around the world, and her calendar reads like a festival bucket list: Coachella, Sónar, Tomorrowland and, most often, Circoloco at DC-10. It's also a neat encapsulation of her DJing. One of the biggest names in big-room house, Carlita has a sound that's warm and melodic, often pairing house classics with pop hooks and the odd swell of strings. It's a long way from where she started. Classically trained on the cello from the age of eight, Carlita only found dance music while studying in Boston, where a Turkish club owner taught her to mix and handed her a residency at Bijou. Since then she's become one of the scene's great crossover acts, mentored by DJ Tennis, blurring music, fashion and art at her Senza Fine parties, and making her pop ambitions plain across two albums for Ninja Tune: 2024's Sentimental and Telepathy, out today, with guests including Justine Skye and SOFI TUKKER. Her RA Mix is a slower burn than her festival sets. Built track by track in Ableton, it's an intimate, detail-obsessed journey that moves from Omar S and a Todd Terry Freeze Mix to newer house from D Stone and Jasper James, with 'Pablo' and 'Rising Up' from the new album along the way. It's made for the couch, the car or an early morning party—wherever the sun happens to be. Find the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1083 @carla-frayman

Two decades in, the UK drum & bass duo are still filling stadiums. They talk staying hungry, resisting the algorithm and their eighth album, Generic Everything. In 2003, Saul Milton and Will Kennard of Chase & Status were sending drum & bass demos to their heroes over AOL Instant Messenger. Two decades on, they're among the biggest acts in UK dance music. In 2016, they became the first UK electronic act to headline London's O2 Arena. Their productions have racked up more than two billion streams, and they've sold 2.6 million albums, more than four times as many as drum & bass's next-biggest act. In 2023, they had four records in the UK Top 40 at once, a run that helped win them the Brit Award for Producer of the Year. So what does a second act look like 20 years in? In this RA Exchange with music journalist Nathan Evans, Milton and Kennard dig into how they keep pushing forward. They discuss Generic Everything, a record about refusing to sound like everyone else in an age of algorithms and AI, and why they worry about what technology is doing to creative work. They also talk about how they choose collaborators, from Skrillex to Little Simz and D Double E, and how they've folded styles like baile funk into drum & bass. Listen to the full episode.

The Manchester artist marches back into the club and cranks up the subs. “You don’t need to study music, you need to study sounds.” That was the advice Andy Stott’s piano teacher, Alison Skidmore, gave him as a teenager. Around 2010, stuck in a creative rut and tired of his dub techno sound, Stott slowed things down, started sampling field recordings and brought Skidmore in as his vocalist. Records like Luxury Problems and Faith In Strangers added a pop twist to his cavernous sound and made him a critics’ darling. His new album, Late Loop, out now, is his first in five years, is out this week. Skidmore returns alongside a new voice, Elaine Howley, and the aim, by his account, was to come away with songs rather than textures. You'll find the word "pop" attached to Stott's name a lot these days., but his RA Mix is about as far from pop as it gets: 12 new, unreleased tracks written fast at home. RA.1063 opens with an even weightier echo of “Numb,” and from there it’s industrial steppers all the way, chugging sub bass cut through with the occasional sharp hi-hat, marching deeper into the dark. Somewhere between the grain of Demdike Stare and the bass pressure of The Bug, it’s almost seductive in how reductive it is. Skidmore once told him to study sounds. All these years later, Stott is still doing his homework. Find the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1082 @andystott-music

A sonic diary from one of UK experimental music's brightest talents. Loraine James doesn't like to sit still. She first made waves on Hyperdub, where 2019's For You and I and 2021's Reflection reimagined grime, IDM and dub with a mischievous touch. But calling her a club experimentalist has never fit the bill. The London-born artist has collaborated with everyone from Yaeji to TSVI, remixed Kelela and Tirzah, hosts an NTS show steeped in contemporary classical and turns out records at a staggering pace. She also makes some of the most evocative ambient around as Whatever the Weather. What holds it all together is irreverence and intimacy, like tuning into the silly but heartfelt voice notes you might send a new lover. And that energy runs through her RA Mix. It opens in wistful territory with her own Tirzah collaboration, before shifting into the spectral jazz of African-American Sound Recordings. A third of the way in, it moves to the darker corners of her USB, as Aoki Takamasa's glitchy minimal gives way to Burial at his hardest-hitting. From there, things stay weird: deconstructed freestyle rapping, vintage Flying Lotus, post-club trance via Arca and plenty of James's own music. Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1081 @lorainejames

A 100 percent production mix from the dubwise don. “You can find inspiration in everything, as insignificant as it seems,” Andy Martin told 15 Questions earlier this year. For the Mexican-Jamaican producer, that stretches from dub to Mexican literature, ancestral knowledge and science fiction, all fed into techno that sounds otherworldly but never forgets the floor. Dub is the skeleton of Martin’s music. Sometimes it’s explicit, as on his collaboration with Lee “Scratch” Perry. Sometimes it’s subtler, as on this year’s “Tierra de Nahuales” for Animalia, where a dub siren and decayed reverb pull proggy, tribal sci-fi techno into dub’s orbit. No wonder he’s a buy-on-sight producer for DJs like Kia, Priori and CCL, and as at home at Berghain and FOLD as at memòri and pe:rsona. Running just over 90 minutes, RA.1061 is an anthology made entirely of his own music. Track titles nod to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Remedios Varo’s painting La creación de las aves, yet the mix is never as cerebral as that suggests. At a time when music is increasingly asked to justify itself in numbers, Martin counters: “Value exists precisely because it cannot be quantified.” Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1080 @andy-martin

The Berlin DJ, one of the brightest of her generation, makes a patient case for house and techno on vinyl. We’ve all heard the phrase “DJ’s DJ.” Too often, it’s lazy shorthand for a technical skill so esoteric it’s lost on the dance floor. But Nathalie Ogazón Faber embodies the craft in its fullest sense, commanding respect from the regulars at the booth to the sound technician at the back. Known simply as Ogazón, she played her first gig in 2018 and made her Berghain debut in 2022. Since then she’s become the quintessential Panorama Bar DJ, a resident in spirit alongside ItaloJohnson, Steffi and her regular b2b partner, Ryan Elliott. Her affinity for techno is equally pronounced, and her mixing bridges both floors: patient and refined without ever feeling too polished. That patience defines her RA Mix. Forgoing obvious drops, she builds subtle, drawn-out peaks through delicate shifts like a weightier kick drum or an incoming hi-hat. Melody arrives as a pad here, a dubbed-out chord there. The connecting theme, she says, is emotion. Recorded entirely on vinyl, RA.1060 embraces imperfection. “In a world where everything is becoming increasingly polished and ‘perfect,’” she notes, “I think a little bit of grain and a few pops here and there can only be a good thing.” Ogazón is consistent, but don’t mistake that for regression. It’s what makes her a DJ’s DJ, in the truest sense. Find the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1079 @ogazon

Cinematic techno from the mysterious Dutch producer. Some of the best techno is both beautiful and austere. On an old Robert Hood or Sandwell District track, the industrial clank of percussion gives way to bursts of melody where you can hear the ghosts singing inside the machines. It's this version of techno that the Dutch producer nthng has been honing since the mid-2010s, from his debut on Lobster Theremin's Mörk to records for Delsin. His take on techno, borrowing from trance, dub and ambient, has always hewed close to the edge of the dance floor, that space where dancers keep their eyes shut and get lost in the shadows. For RA.1059, he delivers an hour from the most visceral and cinematic end of his sound. The opening suite of four of his own tracks is nothing (pun intended) short of breathtaking: sky-searching IDM turns into chromatic techno, followed by a dubstep-referencing vocal track with a rolling break that hits with the weight of a guillotine, before he lets loose a slightly syncopated barnstormer. He never lets the drama and tension slip across the remaining 48 minutes, ending on his own piece of paranoid and skeletal drum & bass. Find the tracklist at ra.co/podcast/1078 @nthngnthng

A showcase of East Coast club music, old and new, from a new Baltimore star. Baltimore doesn't get the credit it deserves. Maryland's largest city gave the world Baltimore club, a blueprint for much of the East Coast's dance music—Jersey club and Philly club both trace their lineage back to it. The scene is alive and kicking, and Tromac, real name Miles Cowling, is at the heart of it. From Prince George's County, Cowling moved to Baltimore in 2019. In 2022 they launched Break A Leg, a party series and safe space for people to dance their pain away, and they've collaborated with RA cover star Zack Fox, Black Rave Culture and Cortisa Star. "You know how long I been waiting for this. I'm about to make a name for myself," begins RA.1058. From there, Cowling twists through contemporary East Coast club—OSSX, JIALING, JD. Reid, AceMo, DJ Swisha—plus honorary peers Bored Lord, Conducta and Jam City. Across 38 tracks in 66 minutes, it's high-tempo but not for the sake of it: sometimes coasting, sometimes jumping, sometimes letting it all out. About halfway through, a Tucker Carlson sample calls Baltimore one of the most dangerous cities around. Cowling's answer comes straight after, with the voice of CalvoMusic: "There are beautiful things here, don't come down to play the fuck around." Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1077 @tromac @breakalegparty @hochiruns @3SIDEmusic

An hour of ancient and alien sounds from the Catalan composer and PAN favourite. Marina Herlop is at once from the future and from the past. The classically trained Catalan singer's voice opens a door onto an older world—a nymph out of a Romantic painting. Underneath, something deeply alien. "When you're writing a song… there's a moment of expulsion, like a squid spitting," she told Pitchfork. She didn't open a laptop until her third album, learning Ableton from scratch over a fortnight in her father's family home in the Aragon hills. That record, Pripyat, and its follow-up Nekkuja landed on PAN, placing her among the experimental queens like Eartheater and Jenny Hval—with a touch of Björk. Her RA Mix brings those influences to the surface: classical with a whiff of the strange (Holst's Rig Veda hymns, Sakamoto playing Ravel), music for worlds that don't exist (Ragnarok Online, Jujutsu Kaisen, Morricone) and a study in everything a voice can be made into. Barely any is club music. Assembled in Ableton—"I don't have access to a CDJ right now," she says—RA.1057 is a soundtrack for decompression. Asked which club shaped her most, she named one that isn't: El Pumarejo, the Barcelona space where she met the musicians still in her band. Find the Q&A and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/1076 @marinaherlopofficial

One of the Netherlands' sharpest selectors turns in over two hours of smoke-thick techno and cathartic bass weight. "Genre-defying" has trailed Jasmín Hoek, best known as Jasmín, for years. It isn't wrong—listen to the Dutch-Argentinian artist's mixes and you'll hear anything from Rrose and Blawan to Ricardo Villalobos and DJ Koze. But it misses a better question: what holds it all together? "For every set I play, I think of the colours I want to represent," Hoek explains in her Q&A. For RA.1056, she channels warm, earthy colours; you'll see it running through the tracklist, from "Burning Blood" and "Eruption" to "Chamas E Fumaça." The other constant is percussion over melody. Half Argentinian, Hoek has spoken about her preference for rhythm, and it gives her work a physicality you can almost walk into. It's there from the first minute: Pinch and Shackleton's "Burning Blood," dark and twisted and sprawling. But Hoek is a techno head too, with plenty that wouldn't feel out of place at Berghain: Cari Lekebusch, Rene Wise, Rrose. It's a cliché that the best DJs are dancers first, but Hoek embodies it, having worked at De School and, more recently, programming with Nachtparlement. Last year's Bite The Hand That Feeds You arrived as Hessle Audio's 50th release; this year she lands on fabric Originals. Whatever floor she graces next, she'll arrive with a vision that will take you by the hand, and pull you all the way in. Find the Q&A and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/1075 @Jasminhoek @fabric @hessleaudio