RA Podcast

The Manchester artist marches back into the club and cranks up the subs.

“You don’t need to study music, you need to study sounds.” That was the advice Andy Stott’s piano teacher, Alison Skidmore, gave him as a teenager. Around 2010, stuck in a creative rut and tired of his dub techno sound, Stott slowed things down, started sampling field recordings and brought Skidmore in as his vocalist. Records like Luxury Problems and Faith In Strangers added a pop twist to his cavernous sound and made him a critics’ darling.

His new album, Late Loop, out now, is his first in five years, is out this week. Skidmore returns alongside a new voice, Elaine Howley, and the aim, by his account, was to come away with songs rather than textures.

You'll find the word "pop" attached to Stott's name a lot these days., but his RA Mix is about as far from pop as it gets: 12 new, unreleased tracks written fast at home. RA.1063 opens with an even weightier echo of “Numb,” and from there it’s industrial steppers all the way, chugging sub bass cut through with a sharp hi-hat, marching deeper into the dark.

Somewhere between the grain of Demdike Stare and the bass pressure of The Bug, it’s almost seductive in how reductive it is. Skidmore once told him to study sounds. All these years later, Stott is still doing his homework.

Find the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1082
@andystott-music

The German producer on touring with Nine Inch Nails, pushing past criticism and his new full-length album, 7LLVSION.

Alex Ridha is notoriously private. Ridha, AKA Boys Noize, has been making headlines over the last couple of years: you may have seen him on tour alongside Trent Reznor’s industrial rock band Nine Inch Nails, or in the credits of the soundtracks for Challengers and Tron: Ares. It follows an illustrious run of collaborations with Lady Gaga and Skrillex, discreetly making him one of the most influential producers moving between the underground and pop.

But long before all of this, Ridha was just a 16-year-old making music in Hamburg. He went on to start his own label, Boysnoize Records, and broke through in 2007 with his debut album, Oi Oi Oi. His sound, an abrasive mix of EBM, industrial, French touch and electroclash, won over a young generation of ravers around the world and inspired particular devotion in the US.

In this RA Exchange, Ridha discusses what it's like to have Trent Reznor's ear; how it felt to have his music panned in Germany but celebrated abroad; and his hesitation about putting out a solo album in what he sees as an oversaturated music landscape. Ridha is now scoring his first film on his own, a horror movie called Replacer, and on November 6th he releases 7LLVSION, his first solo album in five years. Listen to the full episode.

A sonic diary from one of UK experimental music's brightest talents.

Loraine James doesn't like to sit still. She first made waves on Hyperdub, where 2019's For You and I and 2021's Reflection reimagined grime, IDM and dub with a mischievous touch. But calling her a club experimentalist has never fit the bill. The London-born artist has collaborated with everyone from Yaeji to TSVI, remixed Kelela and Tirzah, hosts an NTS show steeped in contemporary classical and turns out records at a staggering pace. She also makes some of the most evocative ambient around as Whatever the Weather.

What holds it all together is irreverence and intimacy, like tuning into the silly but heartfelt voice notes you might send a new lover. And that energy runs through her RA Mix. It opens in wistful territory with her own Tirzah collaboration, before shifting into the spectral jazz of African-American Sound Recordings. A third of the way in, it moves to the darker corners of her USB, as Aoki Takamasa's glitchy minimal gives way to Burial at his hardest-hitting. From there, things stay weird: deconstructed freestyle rapping, vintage Flying Lotus, post-club trance via Arca and plenty of James's own music.

Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1081
@lorainejames

A 100 percent production mix from the dubwise don.

“You can find inspiration in everything, as insignificant as it seems,” Andy Martin told 15 Questions earlier this year. For the Mexican-Jamaican producer, that stretches from dub to Mexican literature, ancestral knowledge and science fiction, all fed into techno that sounds otherworldly but never forgets the floor.

Dub is the skeleton of Martin’s music. Sometimes it’s explicit, as on his collaboration with Lee “Scratch” Perry. Sometimes it’s subtler, as on this year’s “Tierra de Nahuales” for Animalia, where a dub siren and decayed reverb pull proggy, tribal sci-fi techno into dub’s orbit. No wonder he’s a buy-on-sight producer for DJs like Kia, Priori and CCL, and as at home at Berghain and FOLD as at memòri and pe:rsona.

Running just over 90 minutes, RA.1061 is an anthology made entirely of his own music. Track titles nod to Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo and Remedios Varo’s painting La creación de las aves, yet the mix is never as cerebral as that suggests. At a time when music is increasingly asked to justify itself in numbers, Martin counters: “Value exists precisely because it cannot be quantified.”

Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1080
@andy-martin

The Berlin DJ, one of the brightest of her generation, makes a patient case for house and techno on vinyl.

We’ve all heard the phrase “DJ’s DJ.” Too often, it’s lazy shorthand for a technical skill so esoteric it’s lost on the dance floor. But Nathalie Ogazón Faber embodies the craft in its fullest sense, commanding respect from the regulars at the booth to the sound technician at the back.

Known simply as Ogazón, she played her first gig in 2018 and made her Berghain debut in 2022. Since then she’s become the quintessential Panorama Bar DJ, a resident in spirit alongside ItaloJohnson, Steffi and her regular b2b partner, Ryan Elliott. Her affinity for techno is equally pronounced, and her mixing bridges both floors: patient and refined without ever feeling too polished.

That patience defines her RA Mix. Forgoing obvious drops, she builds subtle, drawn-out peaks through delicate shifts like a weightier kick drum or an incoming hi-hat. Melody arrives as a pad here, a dubbed-out chord there. The connecting theme, she says, is emotion.

Recorded entirely on vinyl, RA.1060 embraces imperfection. “In a world where everything is becoming increasingly polished and ‘perfect,’” she notes, “I think a little bit of grain and a few pops here and there can only be a good thing.” Ogazón is consistent, but don’t mistake that for regression. It’s what makes her a DJ’s DJ, in the truest sense.

Find the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1079
@ogazon