Documentaries

FAUZIA, DamnShaq and counsellor Darlington Zvionere discuss performance anxiety and how to overcome it with Vanessa Maria.

As part of Resident Advisor's wellness month, and in collaboration with Black Minds Matter, host Vanessa Maria discusses performance anxiety—what it is, how it manifests, how to overcome it—with FAUZIA, DamnShaq and  Psychotherapeutic counsellor Darlington Zvionere. 

Support Black Minds Matter here: http://bit.ly/BMMRA

In simple terms, performance anxiety is stage fright. As Zvionere explains, artists may experience everything from clammy hands to stiffness and blurred vision, which then impacts their performance. It's a vicious cycle, he says, as a falter in your performance will likely lead to increased nerves next time. "Be the best you can be in that moment," advises Zvionere. "Worry about tomorrow, tomorrow." 

In her own experience as a DJ, Maria has suffered from performance anxiety to the point of cancelling shows and relying on the influence of alcohol to calm her nerves. She speaks to DJ, promoter and presenter DamnShaq, known for his "madman" energy in the booth, about the pressure he used to put on himself. He reflects on how the pandemic has allowed him some time to reset and make peace with the fact that his boisterous stage character is not a sustainable way to function day-to-day. 

For FAUZIA, whose transition from DJing to having a live show has come with a huge increase in pre-performance anxiety, steadying her nerves is a work in progress. She speaks to Vanessa about fine-tuning her set, stepping away from social media and the confidence boost of working with Kelela.   

Black Minds Matter is a charity on a mission to connect Black families with free mental health services from qualified Black therapists. They are currently looking for 21,000 long-term donors who are able to donate £5 per month. With your support, they will be able to take steps forward to achieve their goal of lasting impact on Black mental health. Contributions can be made on the website if you are in a position to do so.

Tracklist:
Space Afrika - yyyyyy2222 [Dais Records]
Fauzia - Lap, Sir
Fauzia - When It's All Over [with Kelela]
Fauzia - Lap, Sir
Kundai - Decisions
House of Pharaohs - Okay (Instrumental)
andarctica - waiting on the tides

@djfauzia @damnshaq

EX.595 Performance Anxiety

The 600th episode of the Exchange marks a pivot in Resident Advisor’s audio coverage. Source Material, one of our new series, moves towards in-depth, documentary-style reports on the electronic music community and beyond. For the inaugural edition of Source Material, we invite perspectives from Ukraine following the country’s invasion by Russia, which has sparked a humanitarian crisis with over 1.5 million displaced refugees.

Starting in 2014, Kyiv became a global dance music destination, due to its world-class venues and festivals, plus the government’s relatively hands-off approach towards enforcing social gathering regulations during Covid. Many flocked to its dance floors during a time when other countries operated under stringent lockdowns, and interest in the city only continued to grow. But the promise of Kyiv’s fertile club scene has been completely decimated by the war.

Those who made the community so vibrant are now faced with  the unimaginable decision to either flee or fight. The voices within this episode include Timur, known as the producer John Object, an affiliate of CXEMA, who is defending his country as part of the Territorial Defense Force, and Margareeta, RA’s City Manager for Kyiv, who discusses the emotional toll of fleeing from the war. Woven throughout are also interviews with anti-war protestors in the streets of Berlin and the volunteers helping refugees at the city’s main train stations.

Guests: John Object, Margarita Evi
Interviewer: Whitney Wei

Tracklist: 
John Object - Draft (2010)
John Object - Xanax & Silk (Live) (2016)
John Object - Kiss (2018)

EX.600 Source Material: Kyiv’s Club Community, Fractured By War

Collaboration is intrinsic to creative jobs. Whether you're a lone wolf or a team player, it's impossible to avoid partnerships and group coordination. But working with other people can get messy, especially when ego is involved. As part of Resident Advisor's ongoing collaboration with Black Minds Matter, this episode of the Exchange explores how alliances affect an artist's craft and wellbeing. In separate conversations with UK singer-songwriter Aluna and Hamburg-based DJ crew SLIC Unit, host Vanessa Maria asks them about the challenges of building collectively versus individually.

For SLIC Unit, being part of a network is all about mutual trust. Each person brings different talents to the table so it's important to reinforce each another while streamlining the decision-making process, founding members Nissa and SENU describe. "Being together or being in a collective always means more work," they say, referring to the need for clear communication, empathy and making time for everyone's projects. SLIC Unit practices what they call "radical solidarity," a support system that reduces chaos and stress while enabling them to have fun while working.

Aluna, on the other hand, has a solo career in addition to being one-half of the duo AlunaGeorge. For her, going solo meant confronting her relationship with fear. Being in a band provided her with a sense of safety but that ultimately became a warning bell, she explains. "I knew that I was using it as a safety net from a place of either displacement or fear," she continues, alluding to her issues with racism and sexism. At the end of the day, it's important for artists to establish stability and security within themselves before they can join a group, she notes.

For more insights on how creatives can preserve authenticity and self-worth in a team environment or on their own, listen to the hour-long podcast.

EX.612 Source Material: Collaboration & Mental Health

Streaming from Amsterdam's Radio Radio: this is RRFM.NL w/ @black-cadmium

RRFM • GLXY w/ Black Cadmium • 26-10-2022

Rinse FM Podcast

Ciel (Live from Ankali) - 07 November 2022

Faced with shrinking margins and higher rents, event organisers are finding new ways to keep the party going.

As the cost of living crisis continues to eat into club land, promoters around the world are increasingly being forced to adapt to shrinking margins. This new episode of Source Material, our documentary-style podcast series, shines a spotlight on Glasgow, Taipei and Chicago, where local organisers are testing out unconventional forms of inclusive promotion in response to widespread economic uncertainty. 

In Glasgow, Han Read runs a monthly night called Events Research Programme that operates off a Patreon subscription model. Bonjour, meanwhile, is a queer venue in the Scottish city that runs as a co-op, sharing a minimum 50 percent of its profits among staff in an effort to acquire more financial freedom. In Taipei, venue 23 Music Room is using its non-traditional business model to bolster the next generation of promoters while RA contributor Steve Noah describes the state of DIY parties in Chicago.

Listen to the full conversation for details on each of these scenes.

Producer: Rose Manson
Executive Producer: Martha Pazienti Caidan

EX.637 Source Material: Sustainable Promotion

recorded live @ the listening club, chicago for BANGERS ONLY featuring @dj-dijital-1 + @toyacoyah

you can tell from the skips that there's a lot of records in here i adore and have played the hell out of. it was an honor to play with detroit legend DJ DI'JITAL + underground hero TOYACOYAH <3

aciddaddy @ the listening club, BANGERS ONLY ◦ 11/25/2022

Since at least the 1970s, artists have composed music for plants. From Mort Garson’s Plantasia to dublab's Plant Music compilation, albums recorded with nature in mind often intend to stimulate growth or simply entertain leafy creatures. This episode of Source Material, a documentary-style series, explores the symbiotic links between electronic music and house plants.

Diving into the world of frequencies and root systems, @martharadio speaks to various experts to learn how nature responds to ambient tunes and synthesisers. Among them are biotherapeutic musician Imka, Joe Patitucci of PlantWave, an app that translates plants' biorhythms into music, sound artist Karine Bonneval and composer Erland Cooper.

To discover how bass frequencies mimic bees and why festivals are adopting sonic soil pollution, listen to the episode.

EX.641 Source Material: Plants and Electronic Music

Santiago Salazar Live From Spankys Jan 15 2023

Two hours of sonic gems, brought to you by Rose Kourts. Each show is thematically centered around a different gemstone’s meaning and energies; this month’s gem is rose quartz, which speaks to the heart chakra and holds the vibration for all kinds of love, harmony, and compassion.

https://www.instagram.com/rose.kourts

GEMS with Rose Kourts: Rose Quartz @ The Lot Radio 02-15-2023

In honour of World Radio Day—which landed on February 13th—this week’s RA Exchange celebrates the power of radio in a documentary-style deep dive. UNESCO inaugurated World Radio Day in 2011 in order to commemorate its efficacy in reaching remote communities, connecting with people everywhere regardless of their education level, and providing a platform for positive and democratic discourse. It's also critical in spreading critical information during times of crisis or emergency. According to UNESCO, "increasing radio's journalistic standards and capacity should be considered as an investment in peace."

On a more modest level, podcasting and radio, especially in the world of underground music, can help forge in-person and virtual networks and celebrate and spread new and lesser-known music. During the pandemic, it also held together underground music scenes when people couldn't be together in the club, and sustained a kind of intimacy and connection by letting people share music over the airwaves and community platform chat rooms. 

In this episode, we hear from various radio producers around the world—including Jamz Supernova, Hana Walker Brown, Dublab Barcelona and Hong Kong Community Radio, among others—about why radio resonates so strongly with them. "Good radio is always an exercise in connection, especially host-led radio,” says Rory Bowens, NTS’s Head of Radio Production. “The fact that it's a live experience is really crucial. People can listen to something in real time with a huge audience of other listeners at the same time, and that intrinsically connects them to each other." Take a listen to the episode in full.

EX.648 Source Material: The Power of Radio in Times of Crisis

SAOIRSE

Darwin - Rinse Mix For SAOIRSE

Life films us exactly. Our experience of it, though, lies beyond images and descriptions. Emotions, coming in irrational flashes, are non-figurable. We lose our little connection to them very quickly. We look for forms with this in mind : so they can take us to meet the subconscious. Chain reaction was a sublabel of Basic Channel founded in 1995. Peter Kuschnereit aka Substance, René Löwe aka Vainqueur, Torsten Pröfrock aka Various artists and Resilent, Andy Mellwig, Thomas Köner aka Porter Ricks, Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke, Torsten Pröfrock aka Monolake formed some of the artists of the now defunkt label.

Chain reactions is a mix tribute to the label / 1995-2003, it is influenced by glitch techno, dub and ambient. Sounds of CR are captured within tiny fragments of time and then within one’s mindspace. I think it’s important to play this mix on a decent system so you can really hear and feel the interactions between the delays, the warm basslines and the soundscapes that surrounds them.

In German : Das Leben erfasst unser Dasein mit filmischer Präzision. Unsere subjektive Erfahrung aber versagt sich diesen scharf gezeichneten Bildern und Beschreibungen. Unsere Gefühle, unsere Affekte – sie strömen in irrationalen Momentaufnahmen auf uns ein und sind in ihrer Intensität nicht messbar. Schnell entgleiten uns diese Wahrnehmungen in ihrer Flüchtigkeit. Mit dieser Prämisse sehnen wir uns immer wieder nach deren Gestalt: Damit sie uns dem Unterbewussten begegnen lassen. Chain Reaction wurde im Jahre 1995 als Sublabel von Basic Channel gegründet. Peter Kuschnereit aka Substance, René Löwe aka Vainqueur, Torsten Pröfrock aka Various artists and Resilent, Andy Mellwig, Thomas Köner aka Porter Ricks, Gerhard Behles, Robert Henke, Torsten Pröfrock aka Monolake gehören zu den Künstlern, die das Gesicht des mittlerweile inaktiven Plattenlabels entscheidend prägten.

Chain Reactions ist ein Tribut an die Musik des Labels von 1995 bis 2003. Die Einflüsse reichen von Glitch Techno, über Dub bis hin zu Ambient. Die verwendete Music von Chain Reaction ist dabei vollkommen subjektiv motiviert verwendet worden. Um der Musik gerecht zu werden sollte sie auf einer angemessenen Stereoanlage abgespielt werden, damit die Wechselwirkung zwischen Delays, warmen Bassläufen und den alles umgebenden Klangkonstrukten erfahrbar wird.

Chain reactions

@pureimmanence is the DJ duo of Nick Bazzano (@nmb2115) and @kiddosincere. They are residents with New York underground queer rave collective Unter, and hold a popular eponymous Wednesday night residency at Bossa Nova Civic Club that will celebrate its two-year anniversary this July. This set was performed and recorded live at Sustain-Release 2017 around a campfire in the forest during a misty sunrise from 5am to 10am on Saturday morning. Pure Immanence will perform at The Bunker Pride on June 29 at Elsewhere in a chill-out room collaboration with residents from Hypnotic Spa.

The Bunker Podcast 171

The Bunker Podcast 171: Pure Immanence

Rinse FM Podcasts

Download

Hessle Audio feat. Ben UFO - 01 June 2020

@dannydaze has proven incredibly hard to pin down since he first emerged. After starting down a path that very quickly took him to the best clubs in the world but off the back of a sound that wasn't really his, he has managed to rewrite perceptions. After deciding to do things his own way, at his own pace, he is now known for what he really loves: techno, electro and IDM. Just recently he continued his collaborative work with Brazilian RHR on four dark, gritty and evocative cuts on OmniDisc, and has more music on the way soon on Schematic Records. 

This mix hints at what to expect from that EP, says Danny. "Due to the current conditions, I decided to go with chill zone session for this one mixed live with a bunch of the styles that influenced me over the last 20 years. Went a bit more trip-hop/IDM/electro with it which points to the direction the upcoming EP and album later in the year. Hope everyone has a nice week." So strap in for two freewheeling hours of interplanetary sonics, churning rhythms and otherworldly cinematics that will start your week right.

Dekmantel Podcast

Dekmantel Podcast 286 - Danny Daze

The weekly RA Exchange is a series of conversations with artists, labels and promoters shaping the electronic music landscape.

EX.595 Performance Anxiety

RA Exchange

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