whatever sound is on the last sixteenth of each bar here is SO hot n sexy

KPin (lost tape)

The essence of psychedelia is disrupting expectations and altering perspectives - what better place to do so than in the vortex of the rave? 

It was an incredible honor to be a part of the inaugural edition of System Activate. The entire weekender campout rave was an exercise in intentionality, a generous labor of love with visionary execution. Anchored by a single stage with a pristine sound system, brought to life by a seasoned, die-hard-DIY team, and animated with an incredibly unpretentious, open-minded, and imaginative crowd of ravers, System Active was truly a novel, eye-opening adventure that struck real sparks of psychedelic inspiration. 

I believe this is one of the finest sets that I have played to date. Completely at ease in the booth, I played fervently and completely from the heart. This is a totally honest and unrestrained rendition of my creative screwball sensibilities as a DJ, conjuring a propulsive rhythmic tunnel and peeling away into moments of whiplash slack-jawed surprises. Rooted in wormhole-traversing techno but stretching well into psychedelic sludge, shameless sentimentality, poignant lessons, heaving bass-weight, and references to formative personally-precious material, this is a completely earnest translation of my psyche that also incorporates the work of friends and peers. 

It was a deep joy to be in the company of so many brilliant and clever dancefloor scramblers and dear friends as I landed us in dawn's first light. I am deeply grateful for this experience, and excited to share this transmission from the vortex.

TRACKLIST
[artist - track title]

ENTRANCE - Winterlude
Ryuichi Sakamoto - fullmoon
Rose Monica - Be Your Better Self
Plead Slyngshot Neewt - Studio Pressure
Forest on Stasys - Torre De Alquimia
Brnches - Weird Bells
Callum Plant - Nothing More
Marteka Fair - Lucid Thinking
Ω - 99HMI
Perc & Passarella Death Squad - Temperature’s Rising (2025 mix)
Âsan - Reason
Jonas Kopp - Ocher System #1
Max Cantrell - Temporal Shave (Hpin Remix)
Verschwender - Anxiety, Always Haunting Me
Allana Letm - Tempos Múltiplos (Centrific Dump A Puddle In My Hand Remix)
Vertical Spectrum - Oko bez sowy
ANFS - Gesha
Orbe - Jaxa
Goyle - Notice
Blawan - Slow Mick
Zagc - SwampWorld dance dance 500
Concept of Thrill - Cert
LaWhat - Trippy Widow
Kalocain - OBE
Simic - Valley
Joshua James - Coarse (Justin Cudmore Remix)
Richard Holhburn - Better Not Look Too Close
Torvvo - Relay
Astral Renegades - Pluto FM
Switch & Erol Allan - A Sydney Jook (Bok Bok Remix)
The Books - I Am Who I Am
Answer Friend Request - Behringerbandpass (V2)
Erol Alkan - Spectrum (Special Request Kaleidoscopic Mix)
Simic - Orbetello
U - Ascension Hymn
A Strange Wedding - Les Ké de la Daurade
Strapontin & Zillas On Acid - What Worse?
Sextile - 99 Bongos
Slowglide - Solstice (Stonehenge mix)
Arthur Johnson - On The Request Line
Radart - Welcome
Dido - Here With Me
Bruno Sanchez & The Next - Born Hip
Hysterical Love Project - Psychic Nausea
Sideral Tapes - Sideral Tapes #4B
James Begley - Distance
Now Always Fades - Into The Doldrums
APRS - I Was Still Awake
Mint Julep - Aviary
Miles J Paralysis - Still Waiting
Deep Dark Blue - Reincarnation (Otodojo Remix)
DJ Frog and SnP 500 - Cali
Yeyo - feel it
Chelsea Wolfe - Dusk

Furtive live at System Activate 2025

An excerpt of SPF 50 & Albert closing out Bob & Shirley Halloween 2025. Hope you enjoy :)

SPF 50 b2b Albert @ B&S Spectral Shift 11/1/25

One of the defining producers of the 21st century steps up for a rare, era-spanning mix.

We've been in a reflective mood lately: mulling emergent icons, modern classic and the cyclical nature of trends. All things bend around eventually, but if you lived through the mid-'00s the first time, it felt tricky to envision some specifics of those interim years making a second splash. More fool us. Amongst many other things, dubstep is well and truly back.

This resurged appetite for low-end has been a central storyline in 2025. Clear tells were there in the form of Introspekt's Moving The Center and Tracey's "Sex Life," two major highlights of the past 12 months. Alternately, cup your ear to the tremors rumbling across the world and you'd find Mala packing up crowds with gusto. Which makes closing out the year with a mix from the man himself serendipitous.

The South Norwood-born sub sensei has held an anchor role in the movement since its earliest days. A little like what Upsetter was to Black Ark, the principles Mala, Coki and Loefah's DMZ laid down have been expanded on by Deep Medi, a label that has cultivated a loyal fandom who watch over the catalogue like a hawk. (Six years of frothy debate and knowing in-jokes between MEDi 99 and MEDi 100 paints a picture of both steep expectations and an affinity for gently ribbing their leader.)

But Mala's banner 2025 hasn't relied on the heads alone. The adrenaline of his fissuring basslines and barrel-chested vocals have drawn people into his orbit, and there are rarer qualities at play, too—like pacifism, winked at by the demilitarized name and reinforced on their all-time greatest tune; or contemplation, inked on flyers beseeching the crowd to meditate on bass weight.

In that spirit arrives a mix we've asked after for years. Subtitled The Listening Session, it's rare on two counts. Despite his enduring popularity, Mala is a conspicuous absence on most DJ series. (It's not that he doesn't enjoy recording, just gets spooked by the reaction.)

A nearly-three hour studio set—spaciously paced and laced with a combination of 2025 highlights, freshly-cut dubplates and some of the biggest anthems in the genre's history—is unheard of. No tracklist for now, on Mala's request. Soon come.

RA.1016 is the kind of document that jogs the memory back to when dubstep was a discrete enterprise, something you could only fleetingly access by, say, dialling into Youngsta on Sub FM, ripping 320s of "Circling" off long-forgotten blogs or hugging the back wall of Mass. Which, in service of thinking the evolution of 21st century electronic music, is pretty perfect really.  – Gabriel Szatan

Find the interview at ra.co/podcast/1035

@maladmz
@deep-medi-musik

RA.1016 Mala

Special 90-minute edition with a recording from Buckle Up Baby at Bossa on Wednesday, December 3, 2025 - dreamy liquidy dnb adjacent sounds for a night focused on fast breaks. The Strelitzia flower was chosen for this episode because of a memory of one of these flowers that once adorned the Bossa DJ booth, and sometimes represents paradise, freedom, and exploration. 

Avant Gardens 05: Strelitzia [Lychee live at Bossa]

Recorded at SutroFM studio on November 9th.  Inspired by an afternoon with a dear friend and our deep love for Miles Davis- This set features some artists within the orbit of Miles and more recent artists, friends that have been top of mind. 

Setlist:

Bennie Maupin - Winds of Change
Phipps Pt. - post-water
McCoy Tyner - A Prayer for My Family
John McLaughlin - This for Us to Share
Mister Water Wet - Sweetheart (Penny) [feat. Memotone & K. Freund]
Blankfor.ms - Crail Family Post Office
Tokio Ono - Rare Fish
Charlie Haden - Song for Che
Seefeel - Blue Easy Sleep
Tokio Ono - Onion Soup Dub
Phipps Pt. - thirds (an egregore)
Sweguno - Affect All
Joe Zawinul - The Harvest
Hermeto Pascoal - Slaves Mass (Missa dos escravos)
Weather Report - Freezing Fire
John McLaughlin - Extrapolation
Jeff Mills - The Phonetic World
Miles Davis - Medley: Gemini/Double Image
AWRYAL – smoke spirit
Mister Water Wet - Proper Pulp [feat. Sleepdial and more eaze]

Interwoven 13 @ SutroFM

The London-via-Bilbao DJ marks 15 years of Cartulis with two hours of punchy techno and electro, recorded live at FOLD.

When you think of London label and party Cartulis, dark, muscular electro and tough tech house spring to mind. But the name is more revealing than it first appears: in founder Unai Trotti's native Bilbao dialect, cartulis translates to "nerd." Like any labour of love, the project is driven by a deep, obsessive dedication, centred around sound, mood and community. 

Recorded at Cartulis' 15th anniversary party this autumn, RA.1017 captures why Trotti is such a compelling DJ. Playing only vinyl, he has a deft ability to balance functional club pressure with more leftfield selections, and as he outlines in his Q&A below, it comes from a belief in creative limitation, committing to a finite set of records and trusting instinct over abundance. 

Across the two hours, there are plenty of big, physical tracks built for the dance floor, but also some genuinely strange, confrontational stretches. Around the 15-minute mark, church bells ring out as a gothic female vocal looms overhead—David Lynch, if he needed an electro soundtrack. It's the kind of material you only hear at parties where dancers feel truly at ease, unafraid of the weird. That's Cartulis.

@unai-trotti
@cartulisday 
Read more at ra.co/podcast/1036

RA.1017 Unai Trotti

FADA2EYAT’s last episode of the year is a special one for me, because none other than Brooklyn pillar and multifaceted artist Lychee takes charge!

Lychee was one of the first DJs to inspire me when I started going out. They’re known for deep, psychedelic selections, and an immaculate sense of whatever room they’re playing demands.  

Their extensive connection to the dancefloor is merely logic — it goes way beyond DJing! They organize community events, are staff member at Nowadays and The Bunker, and even hosted their own mix and interview series Spontaneous Affinity, which focuses on the communal nature of dancefloors. They’re also part of highly influential Brooklyn collective Antidote and were a board member of the Aslice foundation.
 
Tonight, rather than have us dancing knees to the floor, they take us on an elaborate space voyage that’s intended for radio listening.

Artwork by Robert Reda
—————————————
Words from Lychee:

Years back, I made a mix for UK DJ collective SIREN that was my take on a "climate fiction" - I don't think that mix is online anymore, but I really enjoyed the exercise of thinking about a narrative and then creating a mix to soundtrack that narrative.

It's been a while since l've done this explicitly, so I approached this mix with a similar constraint in mind.

This time, I was thinking about human patterns of darkness, exploration, hope, and the way our worst tendencies repeat cycles of destruction. Initially this was a sci-fi soundtrack concept, in response to the extraterrestrial theme of the FADAZEYAT series - space colonialism, a narrative of trying to leave one ruined planet and start fresh but destroying again through industrialization, capitalism, disconnection from nature.

Ultimately I think this mix took on a more personal angle though - the ways we enact similar patterns on a micro-scale every day and the constant effort it takes to resist tendencies toward disposability, comfort, etc.
For radio, l've been self-imposing a constraint where I don't re-record - any radio mix you hear from me, even if it's recorded at home, is a one-take studio mix. So there are a couple imperfect moments, but I'm still happy with the way this one turned out and I think this mix ended up offering some closure to the year for me. Hopefully it can do something similar for someone else 💗

FADA2EYAT 09 w/ Lychee - Radio Alhara 15/12/2025

The Leisure System co-founder talks psychology, behavioral science and his standout album of the year, Stochastic Drift.

Sam Barker's influence on contemporary electronic music culture spans many levels—not only as a producer and DJ pushing against traditional genre boundaries, but also as key figure behind the scenes as head of the label Leisure System. He came into RA HQ to talk about the central thesis in his current work: exploring organic, human timing in a genre that has become increasingly obsessed with mechanized grids. 

The Berlin-based artist tells us about how he puts this theory into practice in his standout album of the year, Stochastic Drift, and his recent collaborative project with saxophonist Bendik Giske. Beyond the technical, he also reflects on the evolution of the Berlin scene, the surprising arguments for liberation in the streaming economy and the role of art in imagining a utopian future. Listen to the episode in full.

EX.786 Barker

We close out 2025 with a rare studio mix from the gifted London DJ.

DJing is a craft. It reveals itself over time rather than all at once, and few embody that better than OK Williams. Active since 2019, the London DJ has built a reputation through steady accumulation rather than acceleration, becoming one of the city's most trusted and widely admired selectors in the process.

Williams has never been interested in narrowing her taste into a single calling card, and it's no coincidence that her roots lie at NTS Radio. She learned to DJ at the Hackney station,  starting out as a volunteer producer in 2017. Musically, she moves easily between moods—sometimes cheeky, sometimes deep—and tempos, playing everything from 160 BPM jungle and amapiano to baile funk, deep house and dub techno. 

For  her <i>RA Mix</i>, Williams offers up her "purist" side. Despite her background in radio, Williams doesn't share mixes often and RA.1019 arrives as a relatively rare studio document. Recorded at home on vinyl, the 90-minute session mostly leans into '90s and early '00s techno and prog house. 

"Ten years ago I tried learning how to play [vinyl] on a friend's 1210s and gave up after a couple of weeks,"Williams tells us below. "Those same decks were then gifted to me years later and were used to record this mix. It's quite nice to see how far I've come." 

In returning to vinyl, and to the decks that once marked a rocky start,  Williams' RA Mix arrives as a fitting marker for the year's end. As 2026 approaches and new resolutions begin to crowd the horizon, RA.1019 serves as a welcome reminder that the best things seldom arrive in a hurry.

Find the tracklist and inteview at https://ra.co/podcast/1038
@okwilliams

RA.1019 OK Williams

Stumble into 2026 with the 3XL favourites' uncanny vision of ambient. 

 It's become a tradition that the first <i>RA Mix</i> of every year eases listeners into January with soft, gentle and unhurried tones. For RA.1020, though, crimeboys take a different approach.

Made up of Ben Bondy, Special Guest DJ and Pontiac Sterator, the US trio are all loosely associated with 3XL. Over the past decade, the Berlin-based label, run by Special Guest DJ, has helped define a strain of ambient that foregrounds strangeness, texture and eccentric detail.

This energy comes through immediately on RA.1020.  Listen to the first ten minutes and you might not quite feel soothed. Stick with it, though, and a different logic begins to emerge, as church bells, corroded electronics and industrial abrasion give way to long passages of dub pressure, shadowy rhythm and low-lit propulsion. 

Across two hours, the trio draw a map of influences both internal and external to the 3XL universe, from foundational reference points like Skinny Puppy, M.E.S.H. and DJ Krush to artists embedded within the label’s wider orbit, such as Perila, james K and Critical Amnesia. Together, these selections trace a throughline from '90s industrial and jungle into dub techno, experimental club and contemporary ambient's more unsettled edges. 

RA.1020 isn't comfort listening in the conventional sense, but it does offer its own form of recalibration and release. Stay put, and you'll be rewarded.

Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/1039
@triplexlarge
@benbondy
@pontiacstreator
@specialguest-dj

KPin (lost tape)

ottogoth

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