Regis and Function's first mix in over 10 years is a unique paean to Silent Servant, heavy on unreleased material.

When it came time for RA to compile our Albums of the 2010s, one record with a tauntingly limited availability of 500 copies was never in doubt: Sandwell District's era-defining 'Feed-Forward'. Encompassing Karl O'Connor (Regis), Peter Sutton (Female), David Sumner (Function) and Juan Mendez (Silent Servant), Sandwell District had the underground in a vice grip for over a decade.

The collective imploded in 2013, with Sumner and O'Connor's relationship appearing beyond repair. And yet, an unlikely second phase is here, featuring imminent comeback LP 'End Beginnings' and their return to the RA Podcast after 16 years. In 2023, the trio of Function, Regis and Silent Servant had been performing and laying down new material before the latter's shock death last January. It's in the shadow of loss that this unique mix was forged.

Founded in 2002 as a spiritual sister to seminal Downwards, Sandwell truly began to hit its straps in the late '00s, as shadow-stalking cuts sliced through clubland orthodoxy like a switchblade. In parallel, the label's artwork—a noir recombination of Burroughs cut-ups, DIY zines and arthouse amour that Silent Servant made his own—helped fortify a movement which placed an aesthetic premium on grit, grain and sadism.

By the early 2010s, this fixation on the dark arts had utterly permeated the mood inside techno's masonic temples. Labels like Blackest Ever Black, Stroboscopic Artefacts, Avian and Modern Love were in their pomp, razorwire legends like Severed Heads and Chris & Cosey benefited from second winds, and it was briefly a jailable offence to not have a press photo in black and white. 'Feed-Forward' was the exceptional coronating statement.

RA.978 features a stack of unheard recordings from each of the trio, as well as close allies Stefanie Parnow and Tropic of Cancer, while also gathering many of Silent Servant's all-time favourite songs, including Psychic TV, Grace Jones and Galaxie 500. It's a strikingly vulnerable listen, one without many parallels on the Podcast. We're glad to run it. – Gabriel Szatan

Read more and find the tracklist here: ra.co/podcast/978
Read our new feature with Sandwell District here: https://ra.co/features/4426

RA.978 Sandwell District

(Full recording) inspired by the Sea of Clouds in Alishan National Park (Taiwan)

𝙡𝙞𝙦𝙪𝙞𝙙𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 w CCL #14 Sea of Clouds @refugeworldwide

Tresor Resident LNS started out organizing warehouse parties in Vancouver, Canada. Since residing in Berlin her style of classic techno, house, electro and braindance can easily be identified in her studio productions and DJ sets. Her collaborations with DJ Sotofett are regularly released on Tresor Records and WANIA, while her solo productions and remixes have been released by Counter 99, Emotional Response, Freakout Cult, Sex Tags Ufo and DFA. Enjoy!

ITPS115 LNS

My set (with crowd noise) from the Grove Saturday Night 1-3am, after Djrum, before Identified Patient. 

Out to all the sexy witches of the forest, thank you to everytone there + entire crew @sustain-release-nyc :)

<3 Mastered by the best @wordcolour

CCL @ Sustain-Release Year Ten

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

Loidis @ Good Work - 12 July 2025

This newest transmission is an exploration into my favorite pockets of the Amapiano sound that I've gathered over time. Producers like Lowbass Djy, Buzkin Keyz, Hotfurze, and Jazza MusiQ all represent a constant flow of Ama that, from where I stand, is on the periphery in the best ways right now. This is just a little personal jumping off point into the constant stream of absolute heater tracks these and adjacent artists are churning out. Enjoy! 
Find the full tracklist and related episodes on NTS: https://www.nts.live/shows/adab/episodes/adab-12th-july-2025

Heaven is in You w/ ADAB 120725

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

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

My remix of "Get Out" by Chvrches from their forthcoming album "Love Is Dead" out 05/25/18. Made this remix using only source material from the stem tracks and i was pleased that it reminded me of Caribou, James Holden, and The Chemical Brothers album Further. Trying a lot of different approaches including mixing the vocals into Doogatron instrumental tracks so feel free to message me if you'd like to hear some different versions i've made that get into Techno and Drum n Bass territory.

Chvrches - Get Out (Installation Remix)

Member of bands Doogatron and Chill Spector as well as a producer in my own right. Living in Ypsilanti but i've been known to haunt Detroit and Ann Arbor.

Chvrches - Get Out (Installation Remix)

Stevie Tee

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