Picoroco

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 club, directly inspiring fellow visionaries like Arca. 

Like some of the best DJs before him, Mines uses the CDJs as an instrument, but that doesn't mean just fancy tricks and looping. Instead, he artfully throws together clashing sounds—effects, samples, monologues, pop and R&B acapellas, and beats that run the gamut from dancehall to kuduro to breaks and techno. He's not afraid of the grotesquerie of human life and movement (just check out the monologue at the beginning of this mix), and he likes to push buttons. Once he put on a party where dancing wasn't allowed. Some of his sets are intentionally anxiety-inducing, evoking horror movies and modern classical composers like Penderecki, while others are bouncy and ebullient, weaving between genres and tempos like an old-school platformer. The best are both.

On Mines's RA Podcast—a milestone 900th in the series—he shows off this inimitable style, sharpened and reinforced over a decade-and-a-half of playing some of the world's best parties, fashion shows, you name it. He's the kind of DJ who creates his own music as he goes along. He makes you hear old tracks—especially pop music and R&B—in a whole new way. Titled "Cursed Piercing," this is a near-hour of controlled chaos that'll confound you at one moment and deeply move you the next.

Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/900

RA podcast

RA.900 Bobby Beethoven (FKA Total Freedom)

Grabación de Caterpillar Blues, año 1976. En un garage con un grabador y dos micrófonos. Guillermo Pelosi, Guitarra, Gustavo Mamut Muñoz ,Bajo y Gustavo Parada, Batería. Un ensayo.Edades entre 18 y 20 años.

El Caminante  Caterpillar Blues 1976

Living, breathing, banging techno from an artist defining the highly-textured new frontier of the sound in 2024.

Lindsey Wang, AKA Polygonia, has an amorphous style you could call organic—or, better yet, harmonious. She interweaves unfamiliar elements with a mercurial touch. Wang can make something completely otherworldly sound totally, well, natural. It's made her a fixture everywhere from Munich's BLITZ to major festivals like Sustain-Release and Draaimolen.

Unsurprisingly, Wang is not one to be pinned down. Be it the sound design-anchored side project Lyder, her own label QEONE, or co-producing an album's worth of experimental percussion alongside jazz drummer Simon Popp, it's fair to say her personal output matches the feverish energy of her mixes. There's multidisciplinary, and then there's Wang: Poly-disciplinary, you might say.

Wang's entry into the RA Podcast series is no different, another stellar emphasis of her artistry. RA.955 is a voyage into wild variations of texture, rhythm and feeling, guided along by the principle of endless metamorphosis. Supple driving grooves meet crinkled surfaces, scuttling hi-hats meet chattering sonics, and good luck keeping hold of a consistent drum pattern for long. Behold a living organism raised by the club and the great outdoors in equal measure.

@polygonia

Read more at ra.co/podcast/955

RA Podcast

RA.955 Polygonia

Amigos! Esta es una invitación a los cantantes de Pop Latino para colaborar. Les regalo esta base, que armé por encargo para Nene Malo.
Espero les guste <3
#instagood #summer #chiletour #friends #sun

moringa

On Saturday evening, São Paulo favourite RHR turned Vesshcell upside down with a storming two hours of dancehall, techno, drum & bass and his beloved baile funk.

Read our new Breaking Through 2025 feature on RHR here: https://ra.co/features/4423

@rhrmusiq

RA Live - RHR - Horst Arts & Music 2024, Belgium

Mesmerising dance floor tapestries from a singular experimental musician.

Can you reinvent the human voice? The oldest musical instrument in existence, our voices are the foundation of music as we know it, and few push its limits in electronic music today like Lyra Pramuk. On her masterful debut, Fountain the Berlin-based, US-born artist's voice was the only instrument. No drums, no synths—just her voice warped, synthesized and layered to achieve orchestral-like electronics.

Five years on from her breakout, Pramuk's practice has steadily evolved, with a continued interest in ideas of folk and futurism, and how technology can enable us to build community beyond boundaries of time and space. There’s a holistic nature to her artistry, one that extends seamlessly into her DJing.

As she explains in the Q&A accompanying this week's RA Podcast, she sees her work as "part of a continuum of sacred, folkloric, and communal music represented by many different subcultures and communities across the world."

It's an approach that, like much of Pramuk's output, feels explicitly choral in nature. The first voice we hear on the mix comes from Lonnie Holley, his woozy Southern drawl calling out, "Earth will be there to catch us when we fall." (Although, you have to wonder, if we keep flogging the Earth, will it?) 

More voices follow across an eye-catching tracklist, from the poetry of friends (Nadia Marcus) to esoteric French chantresses from the ’80s (Anne Gillis), while Pramuk wraps an extensive amount of her own forthcoming material around tracks from SD Laika, Leyland Kirby, rRoxymore and 33EMYBW, to name just a few.

By the end, voice and noise become indistinguishable—stammering, glitchy vocals colliding with an orchestra of instruments. The effect is mesmerising.

Unfolding as one continuous composition, RA.979 exists somewhere between an ambient set at Kwia and the main stage at Unsound, voices and textures blurred into a fluid tapestry of sound. It's a singular offering to the series from a singular artist.

@lyra_songs

Read the interview and find the tracklist at ra.co/podcast/980

RA.979 Lyra Pramuk

Download

EU SOU DO FUCK 😈

Relentless rhythms and Latin dance history, courtesy of the TraTraTrax innovator.

Percussion is, at the root, a conversation. It's about different instruments meeting each other, and interacting to form something bigger than the sum of its parts. 

Few engage in this dialogue as boldly as Pablo De Vargas, AKA Uruguayan experimentalist Lechuga Zafiro, who draws from tradition, to make sounds like candombe and clave feel, well, completely new.

De Vargas' music reaches outward, building bridges between Montevideo and Bogotá, Tijuana, Berlin and beyond. He's a key figure in the hybridisation of Latin American club music, with releases on labels like NAAFI and an album on TraTraTrax.

His RA Podcast plays like a manifesto in motion. RA.985 opens with a recording of Jorginho Gularte, a Uruguayan composer, playing a jazz rhythm, from there, it expands: cuban guaguancó, Venezuelan drums, batida, tribal, techno—it's all here, stitched together with precision and intention.

De Vargas is also, crucially, reckoning with these roots. His 2018 EP Testigo confronted the colonial violence embedded in the history of the Río de la Plata. His sets are similarly alive with memory—asking, without nostalgia: what does it mean to inherit rhythm? Who gets to carry it forward?

He's also just a killer DJ, one of those rare artists who uses CDJs like an instrument. His sets are full of hot cues, delay FX and left turns. It's technical, but never cold. It’s, in a word, funky.

@lechugazafiro
Find the interview and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/985

RA.985 Lechuga Zafiro

A suite from Andrew Dickson's soundtrack for the film NAKED, directed by Mike Leigh, available from Caldera Records.
For more information, please visit: caldera-records.com/portfolio/naked/

Naked - Andrew Dickson

Avril 14th Bubbling

🐸
Latam Bookings: lechugazafiro en gmail
EU Bookings: mark@disconnect.li
US Bookings: nathan@awesome-agency.com