Alex Kassian welcomed the first sunrise at Solar Village in 2023, and we can now listen back to his performance. He took Wonderers on a journey that started downtempo and slowly built his set out, marking a new direction for sunrise performances at our beloved venue.

Alex Kassian – Solar Village – Wonderfruit 2023

final 2 of 6 hours at our most loved brandwerk in aachen city - if you know, you know :--) thanks for having us <3

@1emsn ⏩ @djsweet6teen ⏩ @jaschayousefi


mastered by kaan berk altun aka @kb_a

live @ brandwerk open air: lemsn b2b dj sweet6teen b2b jascha yousefi  (20/07/24)

Three hours of high-intensity heaters from the trio lighting up US club music.

"If the baby boomer generation had the three from Belleville, millennials can say…we have Black Rave Culture." Lofty praise from Spain's WOS Festival, and yet the undeniable buzz surrounding the Washington, D.C. trio of Amal, James Bangura and Nativesun makes it feel merited.

The Black Rave Culture experience is physical from start to finish. The trio's glide through the rich canon of Black dance music is, naturally, a huge chunk of the appeal. You can hear them slamming ghettotech into gqom, threading UK garage through East Coast club, stitching antic juke and swung techno, and landing the odd Mad Mike all-timer with flair.

Their productions mine a similar store of energy, and you'll find plenty of those on RA.974 too. Perhaps most importantly, their tangible chemistry and sincere, undimmed enthusiasm for tunes are what makes this group so magnetic. 

While their RA Podcast is split threeways, it could just as easily be a round-robin session behind the decks. RA.974 is an exhilarating exercise in creating serious dance floor pressure while having a ball in the process.

@black-rave-culture @jamesbangura @dj-nativesun @ama_l

Read more at ra.co/podcast/974

RA.974 Black Rave Culture

Six hours recorded at one of my favourite clubs in the world, between the hours of 6am and 12pm. 
I absolutely loved doing this - taking the party deeper and deeper into after hours, and bringing everyone back to consciousness again in the second half. 
I LOVE NYC!

Ben UFO - Six Hours At Nowadays Nonstop 2024

Nilümix

Deep house with heaps of soul to guide spring into summer.

"House music to me is about emotion… it's about how it moves you," says Suze Phaff, better known as Suze Ijó. Emerging from a thriving Dutch scene, Ijó belongs to a generation of DJs reshaping dance culture from the ground up, restoring soul and musicality to the centre of house music. It's a conversation happening not just in her home town of Rotterdam, but globally, among kindred spirits like MUSCLECARS and Dee Diggs in New York, Errol and Alex Rita of Touching Bass in London, and OMOLOKO in Belo Horizonte.

You could call Ijó a deep house DJ, but it's much deeper than that. Her sets embody house music in its most musical sense, rich in nimble percussion, woodwinds, calypso drums, gospel vocals, and romantic string sections. They channel the jazz-inflected heartbeat of the East Coast, the breeze of Balearic shores, and the light-footed rhythms of the Caribbean.

As Ijó explains in her Q&A, her RA Podcast "hopefully feels like a loving embrace." Opening with Key Trunks Ensemble's "Calypso of House (Paradise Mix)," she sets a buoyant, life-affirming tone that carries through the next 90 minutes. As the mix unfolds, her affinity for timelessness is clear, with selections that hark back to the golden age of house, from Lonesome Echo Production's "Sweet Dream (Shrine Sweet Mix)" to the euphoric swell of Blaze's "Klubtrance."

Listening to RA.986, it's no surprise that The Loft—David Mancuso's legendary, much-missed New York party—serves as a key influence for Ijó. "He wasn't confined to just one genre but would just play 'good music' in the right context," she explains. "He allowed the music to breathe."

If ambient music is defined by its ability to breathe in and reflect its surroundings, then Ijó's RA Podcast is ambient in the truest, most human sense: a deep, enveloping soundscape that feels like sunrise, like community, like home—wherever you may choose to listen.

@suze_ijo

Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/986

RA.986 Suze Ijó

A new studio set from one of the foundational icons of drum & bass.

Few names in drum & bass carry as much history as Peshay. Paul Pesce came up in the crucible of early rave and left fingerprints on labels like Mo' Wax, Good Looking and, most obviously, Metalheadz. By the time drum & bass was surging in the mid-'90s, he was bolted as one of the scene's most distinctive voices. 

Where others were pushing clinical austerity or waves of dark pressure, Pesce's ear drew him to featherlight, jazzy chords instead. The atmospheric drum & bass movement—or intelligent, as it's sometimes known today—cohered in his hands with timeless staples like "The Piano Tune" and "Miles From Home."

To a contemporary generation, he may now be best known for Studio Set, which caught alight as a prime slice of algorithm fodder on YouTube in the late 2010s, racking up millions of plays. Alongside Bailey’s Intelligent Drum & Bass, the mix has taken on a second life as a seminal document of a genre in flux. All of which made its removal from the internet, based around a spurious copyright strike, a hot concern.

Although a little tad reserved than some of the scene's most dominant names, Pesce has remained a loyal custodian and historian of the sound. While Studio Set was down, we offered him a crack at making something fresh, and though it's thankfully back up, the Kafkian nightmare galvanised his commitment to preserve recorded history.

Known as a DJ for his dynamic way with a groove, extended blends have long been Pesce's signature. You’ll hear plenty of those on his RA Podcast, as golden-age rollers and contemporary vocal cuts push in and out for up to four minutes, painting a portrait of the genre’s vitality from someone who helped define its terms. True to form, RA.993 carries the touch of a jazz conductor and the assured cool of a veteran who's been deep in the culture for over 30 years.

@peshay-official

Find the interview and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/993

RA.993 Peshay

Part two of RA.999: two NYC Downlow favourites go back-to-back for the first time with a jubilant homage to classic house.

The RA Podcast launched 19 years ago in 2006, making it one of the world's longest-running online mix series. As we gear up to celebrate the 1,000th episode, RA.999 lands with five mixes across five days with a cohort of artists who've left a singular mark on electronic music over the past few decades. The chemistry and legacy of these duos make for something very special—and worthy of such a huge milestone.

First up was 1morning and Regal86 with a live recording from New York's Bossa Nova. Next up? We move to NYC Downlow, and who better to capture Glastonbury's beloved queer utopia than Prosumer and Peach, going back-to-back for the first time.

If house is your thing, then Prosumer and Peach going one-for-one on the decks is nothing short of a treat. With Glastonbury still just about in the rearview mirror, this mix captures the spirit of NYC Downlow. If you're familiar, you'll know this means steamy euphoria all-night long, sweat dripping from the ceiling and an intoxicating feeling in the humid air.

And Prosumer is a true Downlow darling—a treasured custodian and storyteller of dance music who delivered his first RA Podcast way back in 2007. "If a record doesn't move me emotionally or physically, I won't play it out," he said at the time, befitting of the impeccable curation and irresistible body groove that became his trademarks. He is, in the words of the Johnny Dangerous track in the mix, the "King of Clubs."

For Peach, RA.999 marks a full-circle moment: Prosumer's 2019 closing set in the Downlow is one of her all-time Glastonbury memories. Since her first RA Podcast in 2021, the London-based artist has only grown more in-demand, with sets that typically traverse the house and techno lexicon—and occasionally R&B—with a distinctly peppy energy. "Neither of us are afraid to go deep," she said about playing with Prosumer. "We just had fun with it."

@ohpeach
@prosumer
Read the full interview at ra.co/podcast/1006

RA.999 Prosumer & Peach

Andrew Weatherall's first official posthumous mix. The only b2b DJ Harvey ever agreed to. Six hours at Trouw. 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 series' 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 an RA 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 scintillating minutes of arpeggiated chug and slow-cresting climaxes: a moment when the resting heart rate of dance floors plunged lower than any comparable point in the 21st century. A masterclass, entirely self-contained in audio form.

If you've got time to spare, a fun side game is sussing out who plays what. A disco-dub cover of Echo & the Bunnymen? Smart money's on Weatherall. Exuberant EQ'ing of 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. 127 BPM feels practically like an F1 car.

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. Full send.

DJing and the mythmaking around it has undergone a quantum leap since 2012, let alone 2006, 1996 or 1989. 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. 

Where will electronic music, DJ sets or any of this be in 2044? Hard to say. Best not to overthink that one. Instead, we want to say thanks to all contributors on the series so far. Now 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 https://1000.ra.co

RA.1000 DJ Harvey & Andrew Weatherall

Listen back to this 1-hour excerpt from Nilüfer, recorded live from our Pikes Ibiza poolside radio show. Catch us live every Saturday from 6–8 PM!

OpenLab Live From Pikes 14/06/25 [with Nilüfer]

Richie Hawtin: Decks, Efx & 909 CD Version (Full Mix) (1999) MINUS4CD

Just an audiophile living the dream on that silly little island in the Balearics 🦎

Nilümix

Nilüfer

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