Fantastic Man live from The Beach Stage at Love International 2023.

Live from the Adriatic 2023: Fantastic Man

Field Notes 9

Tia Cousins: 13th August '25

RA.1000 launches with Theo Parrish, live at fabric: a vanishingly rare club mix from the king of deep crates and impossible transitions.

There are DJ sets and then there are Theo sets. No matter how many times you've caught him in action, every time still feels like the first. Running hot, levels smoking, isolator working over time. You think you know dance music? Think again.

Parrish's long-awaited debut on the RA Podcast is a milestone for the series, one we've sought for over 15 years. So it was only right that Theo led off our 1000th celebrations, the first of ten mixes this week. Recorded live at fabric last December as part of RA's collaborative party with the London club for their 25th anniversary, this three-hour segment documents the crescendo of his eight-hour marathon. 

The Detroit legend doesn't release mixes often, and when he does, they're usually studio recordings: think NTS shows, his 100% Detroit edition of DJ-Kicks or classic tapes Body (1997) and Methods of Movement (2020). A capture of the Sound Signature boss on the dancefloor is hard to come back. On RA.1000, you'll hear Theo in his element.

Sure, there's galvanising build-ups and crowd-pleasers, but laced throughout a Parrish beatdown are rarities designed to shock the system. In a business dominated by image-driven marketing, the vinyl master towers above thanks to a relentless hunger for lustrous melodies, moods and textures of all stripes, which he and he alone can fold into an inspiring and exhilarating joyride.

On RA.1000, blissful reggae precedes new wave disco; '80s R&B morphs into synthy techno; bleepy Chicago jack makes way for a poignant vocal ballad. Theo, once again, proves that anything and everything is possible with the right records.

@theoparrish @fabric @soundsignaturedetroit @crownruler

Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at 1000.ra.co

RA.1000 Theo Parrish

The mastermind behind Basic Channel, Hard Wax and Rhythm & Sound doesn't do mixes. For RA.1000, he made an exception.

Trace Mark Ernestus's path, and you trace the evolution of electronic sound itself. The timeline of contemporary Berlin is unimaginable without him. At first, that meant Hard Wax, the crucial hub that shaped the early era of the city's techno revolution. Carl Craig once said it plainly: "Mark was ground zero."

From there, Ernestus never stopped. There's the birth of dub techno and the near-flawless catalogue that followed through Basic Channel and Rhythm & Sound. There's his immersion in Senegalese mbalax with Ndagga Rhythm Force. Lately, that means Open Ground the Wuppertal bunker that's letting people hear music as never before.

As part three of RA.1000, Ernestus has kindly supplied his first studio DJ mix. As you might expect, it's technically immaculate, but more than that, it feels like a substantial and generous conduit to one of the world's most vital genres.

Amapiano remains underexplored in music media. Publications like our own are still learning to keep pace with the South African sound's global pull, animating millions across the globe. 

You'll hear the range and richness of the genre across the near two-hour mix, from the gothic, percussive stomp of Caltetonic's "Bambela"  to the devotional glow of GemValleyMusiq's "Something Spiritual."

Through all of this, Ernestus has remained understated. He lets the music speak for him, with a quiet honesty that lies in decades of opening doors—creating the conditions for new sounds and scenes to flourish and carry the culture forward.

@opengroundclub @hardwax 
Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/1011. Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at 1000.ra.co.

RA.1000 Mark Ernestus

My set from Stallions at Houghton Festival on Sunday night, Aug 10th, 2025

BILL BREWSTER | Live at Stallions, Houghton Festival, 10th Aug, 2025

The arena-conquering duo glide from gritty rave to skyscraping arpeggios on RA.1000, a mix many years in the making.

A new name undeniably entered the pantheon of major electronic live acts over the past decade: next to Faithless, The Prodigy and The Chemical Brothers, now sit @feelmybicep.

The Belfast duo's music doesn't half reach for the stars: a melodic blend of ambient, breakbeat, trance and tech house, able to turn the biggest arenas into intimate affairs.

If anything, mainstream success, BRIT Award nominations and mammoth dance crossovers like "Glue" have only hardened Andy Ferguson and Matt McBriar's resolve to keep innovating.

Their prized blog, running for nearly as long as the RA Podcast, regularly platforms upcoming artists. And you won't find many festival headliners releasing climate change-themed records with Indigenous artists, as they did recently on Takkuuk.

RA.1000 exists in that spirit. After many polite declines, and before a year off to usher in the next era, Bicep come through at the last: from dub techno and screwface breaks to São Paulo garage, before a tide of signature synths floods the zone. Stadium-sized intimacy at its finest.

@feelmybicep 
Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/1015. Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at 1000.ra.co.

RA.1000 Bicep

A bi-montly collage of acoustic and electronic sound in our current orbit. Probs seasonal. Sometimes fickle.  
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/moin/episodes/moin-12th-august-2025

Moin 120825

Andrew Weatherall's first official posthumous mix. The only b2b DJ Harvey ever agreed to. Six hours at Trouw. The rarest of rare for RA.1000: this one's special.

When mulling which direction to go in for RA's 1000th mix celebrations, many options came to mind. Some shadowy character 2-stepping around the fringe of our collective consciousness? An impossible-level IDM icon?

All tempting. But, ultimately, we are a DJ-forward publication and this is a DJ mix series. It felt truer to the history of the RA Podcast to release deep vault material from a time when the world of niche records felt different, tighter, more discrete.

The fourth-longest mix in the RA Podcast's history is an unrepeatable marathon set recorded in 2012 at a superclub that no longer exists. (2012, incidentally, is farther away from 2025 than 2012 was from 2000; if we have to clock it, so do you.)

It's the coming together of one British icon who passed away in 2020, and another whose time on the road has scaled back considerably as of late. DJ Harvey agreed to exactly one b2b set in his life: this one, with Andrew Weatherall.

The night took place at Trouw, an Amsterdam club already considered legendary before it shuttered its doors in the opening hours of 2015, as part of RA VS, a series anchored around start-to-close combinations. Harvey was at the peak of an irresistible career second act, which dovetailed with a disco revival that dominated clubs for years. Weatherall, with infinite brownie points stockpiled from the '90s, remained everyone's favourite debonair psychonaut. 

What follows is 385 minutes of arpeggiated chug and slow-cresting climaxes, chronicling a moment when the resting heart rate of dance floors plunged lower than potentially any comparable point in the 21st century.

If you've got time to spare, a fun side game is sussing out who plays what. The goosebumps-inducing slide into a disco-dub cover of Echo & the Bunnymen? Smart money's on Weatherall. Exuberant EQ'ing of the comically overripe bass on The Isley Brothers? Gotta be Harvey. As for the low 'n slow, lightly spangled house that was all the rage in the early 2010s (think Maxxi Soundsystem, Disco Bloodbath, Rub & Tug, C.O.M.B.I. and Full Pupp), it's anyone's guess. The pair putter around the 100 BPM range for so long that nudging up to 127 by the double encore feels practically like flooring it down the highway.

When we kicked off our RA.1000 campaign, we outlined a few goals: tick off a handful of long-awaited dream guests, honour architects who shaped the world around us and deliver recordings you truly can't hear anywhere else. We sought to render an accurate picture of DJ culture in 2025 for posterity, and get arms around some of the key storylines since we went 5 for RA.500.

DJing and the mythology around it has undergone a quantum leap since 2012, let alone 2006, 1996 or 1989. It's a scarcely-recognisable scene. For those of us who were kicking around in the former, there's a creeping melancholy that our prime is fast becoming a matter of historical record. The killing moon really did come too soon. 

Yet a sense of accomplishment is bundled within that melancholy. Appreciation, too. 1000 episodes is great innings, and we're thankful for every contributor and facilitator who built this series, week by week, mix by mix. Where will DJ sets—or any of this—be in 2044? Hard to say; best not to overthink that one. Instead, enjoy luxuriating in the company of two of the greatest to ever do it, together, for the first and last time.⁠ – Gabriel Szatan, Editor (RA)

@andrew-weatherall

Read the interview with DJ Harvey and Andrew Weatherall's family at https://ra.co/podcast/1016. Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at 1000.ra.co

RA.1000 DJ Harvey & Andrew Weatherall

For RA.1000, we take it back to the source with two never-before-heard tapes from Frankie Knuckles's private collection, the Godfather of House.

There is no house music without Frankie Knuckles, literally or figuratively. The queer icon's luxurious DJ sets at Chicago's Warehouse gave a rising movement its name. From there, countless offshoots splintered and travelled the globe. But what did the genesis and growth of the sound really feel like?

The Godfather of House left behind not only timeless records, but personalised cassettes with hand-drawn liner notes handed out to friends and family. Two of those, dated to 1989 and 1996, have been digitised especially for RA.1000. (Thank you to the Frankie Knuckles Foundation.)

To put that in context: the first tape predates not only many of today's active clubbers, but the entire existence of jungle, drum & bass, UK garage, French touch, Jersey club, Afrobeats, IDM, baile funk, hardcore, footwork, dubstep, dub techno, tech house, breaks, minimal, maximal, gqom, gabber, grime and hyperpop.

In short… that's a very, very long time ago. The world of dance music was much smaller. DJ culture was functionally unrecognisable from the one we see in 2025. 

And yet, to some degree, what you'll hear on RA.1000 hasn't changed at all. It's a capture of not only what made Frankie Knuckles one of the beloved pioneers of first-generation dance music, but what draws people to club culture in the first place.

The mood on these Frankie Knuckles sets outlasts even its creator: a spirit of optimism that floods the world's best dance floors and keeps dance music pulsing on into the future, nearly 40 years later, in spite of it all. We end our 1000th mix celebrations here because it all starts there.

Find the tracklist at ra.co/podcast/1018. Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at 1000.ra.co

Field Notes 9

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