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"The forest is such a special place because it is simultaneously rowdy and psychedelic. The timing of my afternoon set, leading from day to night, meant I wanted to play a set that moved from deep and dreamy to joyful and riotous, the momentum and energy building and blooming like a flower. I think it very much turned out as I intended, and it was totally so so special to play as I did in front of this incredibly giving and open-minded audience. Thank you Draaimolen for the incredible opportunity." - Ciel

Ciel at Draaimolen Festival 2024

Another Barker masterclass.

Sam Barker asks more from techno. The artist known simply as Barker is one of electronic music's most consistently conscientious and curious producers, challenging listeners to question the norms we accept about our shared culture—whether it's the music that fills the room, the process behind it, or the purpose of the space itself.

British-born yet based in Berlin since 2007, Barker forged a connection to many of the city's leading institutions, including Ostgut Ton, and over the course of a long and fruitful relationship, he carved out one of the more singular paths on the club and label's roster.

Not one for orthodoxy, Barker challenged four-to-the-floor techno framework in favor of melodic experimentation. By decentering or completely stripping away the typical trappings of kick drums and claps, his productions are both light and immersive, buoyant in low-end presence and shimmering in weightless space.

Six years after Utility, his sophomore album Stochastic Drift arrives this month. Shaped by pandemic-driven reinvention, it burrows deeper into harmonic twists and freeform drift. "At some point I became conscious of the process," he wrote of his latest album. "The only thing you can do is embrace the uncertainty and see every change as a potential positive.”

Consider his RA Podcast another sequel. Like his much-beloved 2019 mix for FACT, it's a collage of live recordings and a fitting expression of the artist's own internal spring. RA.982 radiates wide-eyed optimism: percussion cloaked in foggy, swirling pads and trance-like chords, neatly synched in synthetic glimmers. 

All in all, it's an hour of music crafted for contemplation, collective euphoria, or heads-down epiphany—or for that matter, any moment, really, its emotive depth seemingly endless.

@voltek

Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/982

RA.982 Barker

Full tracklist: https://bleep.com/bleep-mix-300-barker

Fresh from Stochastic Drift, Barker’s buzzing second album named Bleep Record of the Month alongside an exclusive 12”, Barker sends a mix that really digs deep into the unique sonic methodology he has constructed across his solo career width a suitable breadth for what is also a milestone in the series, Bleep Mix #300.

From Debiasing to Utility to Stochastic Drift, Barker has been reimagining club music without its definitive thump, instead driven by melody and tactile synthesis, and this selection of tracks expands Barker’s soundworld with a host of artists walking a similar path. “For this mix, I picked out some of my favourite uptempo ambient tracks, recorded at home with two decks and a mixer. It’s music I've used in a lot of different contexts, as a DJ and listener, and I hope you enjoy it.”

Though the occasional dancefloor thump makes itself known, such as on Adriana Lopez’ ‘What Lies Behind’, it’s mostly in quaking subs rather than actual four to the floor, providing some ground for this mix’s airy freeform variety to fly over. We have the wooden plunks and seaspray of Afefe Iku’s Kenyan island sound, the wonky gamelan of Tyler Friedman’s maze of bells and chimes, the dense atmosphere of shaker-produced rain and electrical chirps forged deep in the ruins of The Future Sound Of London.

The midsection of this mix contains some magic in particular: the maestro of drumless trance Lorenzo Senni creates motion from pure jagged synth energy on ‘The Power of Failing’, dissolving into the aether of an unreleased Barker track, which further discharges into the kaleidoscopic stutters of Caribou’s ‘Never Come Back’ with jubilant piano chords and vocal clips wrought into a glitchy, swirling maelstrom of Koreless' prickly warmth. Digital Justice’s ‘Theme From It’s All Gone Pearshaped’ follows, a timeless staple for anyone wishing to dabble in melodic motion and synthsmithery, or any DJ set seeking to add some lift without losing momentum, of which this mix is in no short supply.

Bleep Mix #300 - Barker

A clinic in minimal from the elusive Acting Press boss. 

Why do certain sounds cultivate a cult following? Simply put, it's often because they resist easy consumption. PLO Man and his imprint Acting Press lean into this. 

Searching for the Berlin-based DJ and producer, you won’t find much online presence, interviews or conventional PR. What you will find, if you look hard enough, is a catalogue of records and mixes with a kind of tape hiss charm (a spiritual successor to Basic Channel and Chain Reaction, but scuzzier and lighter on its feet).

Founded in 2015, Acting Press once seemed to belong to the short-lived "outsider house" trend, but is now synonymous with a certain strain of modern minimal, one that is analogue, spacious and pointedly opaque. PLO Man's output is equally sparse by design: this week, he joins the RA Podcast with a characteristically elusive style, accompanying the near two-hour mix is a one-answer Q&A that gives almost nothing away.

Stripped-back, ever-so-slightly sleazy and coated in dust, PLO Man's RA Podcast continues that lineage in style. Opening with the featherlight microhouse of Margaret Dygas, RA.988 unfolds into a carefully curated spectrum of minimal, dub and deep techno. Among familiar names—look out for the blinding Rhythm & Sound and Moodymann blend—are deep cuts and left turns alongside the odd outlier, like lovers' rock pioneer Gregory Isaacs.

Like the best of his forebears, PLO Man wants RA.988 to take time for you to settle in. But once you do, you won’t want to leave. 

@p_el_oh

Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/988

RA.988 PLO Man

recorded live at good work in a backyard on a lovely saturday in brooklyn

Loidis @ Good Work - 12 July 2025

It is not easy to find Saphira, and it is even harder to leave. If it so chooses, the city will appear first as a quivering mirage on the horizon, second as a blinding stone mirror, and third as a sprawling maze whose sounds and sensations embrace the traveler in a slow and languid frenzy. Quite famously, it is home to countless locked eyes and spellbound hearts. It is a place whose deep currents of longing, like the sound of its ocean shore, seem to rumble and hiss under the surface of every word and gesture, in every bead of sweat that blooms from the glimmering skin of its people.

Saphira is at all times caught between a low-lying sun to the west and a glowing moon to the east. They hang above the skyline with an eerie stillness, watching the city’s tireless creatures writhe together in tenderness and sin, casting upon them a pale, silvery gold light that hangs heavy in the humid air. It is in the tension of this peculiar light and its slender, tangled shadows that Saphira’s longing grows dense and time thickens within its walls. Traveler and resident alike are suspended in an endless eros, caught tightly between pain and pleasure, between the sting of saltwater in one’s eyes and the sticky sweetness of ripe fruit on one’s lips. 

Perhaps this is why Saphira’s radios and televisions stutter with phrases and images so ghostly yet so intimately familiar, why its dusty buildings seem always to crumble so gloriously yet never collapse, why around every corner there is a street that so closely resembles one of a distant and loving memory, and why the curling flakes of paint on its walls and facades will reach out against the heat without fading or falling. It is a city inside of want and outside of time.

Text by Devon Hansen, Photo by CCL

Invisible Cities Ⅰ: 𝓼𝓪𝓹𝓱𝓲𝓻𝓪

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 https://1000.ra.co

RA.1000 Mark Ernestus

Loidis at Waking Life 2025

Ricardo villalobos live 21 oct 06

‘For home use only’ is an anti-club social, a chance to get to know someone/something. A series of transmissions purely dedicated to exploring the other side.

Buonasera!!!

How are we? We is good. We is so good!

We is back with numero sette! aka lucky number seven. I know we weren’t gone long enough but when you’ve got good news you really should share it. 

This time around its a team effort, brought to you by the gruesome twosome themselves Pjenné & Simon TK, two of Melbourne’s finest on both sides of the turntables, in preparation for their upcoming ‘Earth Tones’ party at the Fairfield amphitheatre. Which follows a similar vein with a familiar vibe. 

Simon TK aka the melodic jack russell aka the cosmic van-damme aka DJ Gravy-Fingers aka the guy that plays ‘good’ disco, he’s been one of Melbourne’s legs for many years, making and creating the scene we so comfortably know in the neu-modern era. The man has two pies for each finger (DJ Gravy-Fingers) a founding father of the ever fun Wax'o Paradiso, XOXO (rip), ¿Club D'érange? and now Earth Tones amongst a few more handfuls of tasty ventures. The man can mix though, by jove’s have I seen this bloke do some amazing shit behind the decks, can command a dance floor like a bloody blue healer on show day. All of this and he still manage’s to stay grounded, he’s a true ledg who will hopefully continue to steer Melbourne in the right direction for the foreseeable future. 

Now, Pjenné aka penne puttanesca aka the little engine that done did aka DJ Compact Disc aka the walking record bag, if there was a formula that Pjenné followed to start her foray into this ridiculous game of ‘play the music’ then I would bottle it all and drink it for myself. A classic case of ‘shut-the-fuck-up-and-listen’, she spent years hanging with her cohorts, digging through their tunes, taking notes on their train wrecks, taking samples of sweat from the crowd, only to apply her knowledge from the very beginning. I knew from the very first time she put a needle on a record it was meant to be. Since then, she hasn’t looked back, destroying dance floors Australia wide and leaving no souvenir. She is ‘on’ 

The mix itself is an absolute trip through your own mind. Perfect road trip soundtracking. Stopping off in every suburb in the state of genre, from dub, reggae, street soul, ambient breaks (it’s a thing) and every single step in between. Summer vibes through and through. listen to it. You probably already are. 

Go check out Earth Tones this weekend at the Fairfield Amphitheatre for much the same from the speakers from much of the same good people’s. 

addio. xo

Simon TK >>>  https://soundcloud.com/simon-tk

Pjenné >>> https://soundcloud.com/pjenne

la festa >>> https://www.facebook.com/events/1872244982996013/

FHUO # 7 // Pjenné & Simon TK

hugo jay  / retired dj
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bookings: jaimee@waymgmt.com
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@djkushboogie 
@storagemedia
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hugo jay

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