Kampire's half of a double-sided mix by two Nyege Nyege all-stars.
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Nyege Nyege is synonymous with radical sonic innovation. Since 2015, the boundary-pushing Ugandan festival and its associated label have become a vital hub for adventurous, experimental sounds emerging from East Africa and beyond. Its alumni roster includes some of the past decade's most thrilling and forward-thinking artists—DJ Travella, Nihiloxica, Juliana Huxtable, MC Yallah, and even New York's mayoral frontrunner, Zohran Mamdani. In the process, the collective has reimagined what club music can be.
On the B side mix is Kampire. The Kampala-based DJ has been a core member of the collective since the label's inception. Her mixes often feel like a lesson in musicology, weaving together narratives, tempos and genres while losing nothing in dance floor vitality. These talents are reflected in her contribution to RA.995. A typically kaleidoscopic blend of tough percussive workouts, infectious edits and raw, unreleased gems, the hour-long mix spans batida, singeli, bruxaria and countless more urgent sounds from the global underground.
The other half of this special release comes from the enigmatic DJ TOBZY, which you can find on the A-side.
Presented together, as the first edition of a new format marking the countdown to RA.1000, this two-sided mix offers a bracing snapshot of a label that has redefined electronic music over the last decade.
Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/996
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RA.995 DJ TOBZY
Part A of a two-sided mix from two Nyege Nyege all-stars.
Nyege Nyege is synonymous with radical sonic innovation. Since 2015, the boundary-pushing Ugandan festival and its associated label have become a vital hub for adventurous, experimental sounds emerging from East Africa and beyond. Its alumni roster includes some of the past decade’s most thrilling and forward-thinking artists—DJ Travella, Nihiloxica, MC Yallah, and even New York's newly-elected mayor, Zohran Mamdani. In the process, the collective has reimagined what club music can be.
Kampala-based Kampire has been a core member of the collective since the label's inception. Her mixes often feel like a lesson in musicology: weaving together narratives, tempos and genres while losing nothing in dance floor vitality. These talents are reflected in her contribution to RA.995. A typically kaleidoscopic blend of tough percussive workouts, infectious edits and raw, unreleased gems, the hour-long mix spans batida, singeli, bruxaria and countless more urgent sounds from the global underground.
Then there's the enigmatic DJ TOBZY. At the tender age of 23, he's at the forefront of the effervescent cruise scene in his adopted hometown of Lagos. Breakneck, unpolished and fiercely DIY, it's a sound Giulio Pecci described as "a delirious blur of vocals and drums, influenced by other African dance music styles but moving only to its own strange, internal logic." TOBZY's mix captures the frenetic energy of a scene evolving in real time.
Presented together, as the first edition of a new format marking the countdown to RA.1000, this mix offers a bracing snapshot of a label that has redefined electronic music over the last decade.
Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/995
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RA.994 D.Dan
Waves of pulsing, layered techno from the revered Mala Junta resident.
If the electronic music industry is caught in the crosshairs of a battle over what makes for true techno, then D.Dan is one of the underground's great modern emissaries.
A figurehead from the new guard of DJs to arise in the '20s, the Berlin-based artist and Mala Junta resident is an ambassador for a sound that is strongly anchored in the classic roots of techno. His productions, like his mixes, are revved-up takes on the hypnotic wormholes that defined dance floors last decade, but with a fresh (and high BPM) millennial twist.
Originally from Seattle, D.Dan became enamoured with the spectral stylings of psych rock and shoegaze in adolescence. It's not difficult to see how the cosmic tapestry of bands like Cocteau Twins became a blueprint for the entrancing music he's gone on to make as an adult. His releases on Mutant Future and summerpup are latticeworks of loops and layered percussion, custom-tooled for lost hours on the dance floor and drawn-out mixes behind the decks.
This approach directly extends into his DJ practice, where he pairs song selections from contemporaries that mirror his own reduced, controlled approach to techno. RA.994 is a Grade A display of contemporary four-to-the-floor from flagbearers like Roll Dann and Marcal.
And like D.Dan's standalone records, his RA Podcast finds room for sweetness—the intermittent peal of an open clap, the steady ripening of a chord—while ultimately emphasising the beauty of function and form over flair.
@ddan-sounds
Find the full interview and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/994
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RA.993 Peshay
A new studio set from one of the foundational icons of drum & bass.
Few names in drum & bass carry as much history as Peshay. Paul Pesce came up in the crucible of early rave and left fingerprints on labels like Mo' Wax, Good Looking and, most obviously, Metalheadz. By the time drum & bass was surging in the mid-'90s, he was bolted as one of the scene's most distinctive voices.
Where others were pushing clinical austerity or waves of dark pressure, Pesce's ear drew him to featherlight, jazzy chords instead. The atmospheric drum & bass movement—or intelligent, as it's sometimes known today—cohered in his hands with timeless staples like "The Piano Tune" and "Miles From Home."
To a contemporary generation, he may now be best known for Studio Set, which caught alight as a prime slice of algorithm fodder on YouTube in the late 2010s, racking up millions of plays. Alongside Bailey’s Intelligent Drum & Bass, the mix has taken on a second life as a seminal document of a genre in flux. All of which made its removal from the internet, based around a spurious copyright strike, a hot concern.
Although a little tad reserved than some of the scene's most dominant names, Pesce has remained a loyal custodian and historian of the sound. While Studio Set was down, we offered him a crack at making something fresh, and though it's thankfully back up, the Kafkian nightmare galvanised his commitment to preserve recorded history.
Known as a DJ for his dynamic way with a groove, extended blends have long been Pesce's signature. You’ll hear plenty of those on his RA Podcast, as golden-age rollers and contemporary vocal cuts push in and out for up to four minutes, painting a portrait of the genre’s vitality from someone who helped define its terms. True to form, RA.993 carries the touch of a jazz conductor and the assured cool of a veteran who's been deep in the culture for over 30 years.
@peshay-official
Find the interview and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/993
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EX.769 Emily Witt
"I'm ready to bring back gatekeeping." The New Yorker staff writer discusses how to protect the underground, experimenting with drugs and her new book, Health and Safety.
Can drugs help us find meaning in music and nightlife? This is a question that today's Exchange guest, New Yorker staff writer Emily Witt, asks in earnest in her new book Health and Safety: A Breakdown. Just released in hardcover in the UK and Europe, the memoir traces Witt's life in her early-to-mid 30s. A journalist living and working in Brooklyn, she began experimenting with psychedelics and club drugs after years of living what she describes as a conservative, straight-and-narrow, middle-class life. She became enamoured with the borough's underground raves, frequenting events like the festival Sustain-Release, the party Unter and sets at Bushwick haunt Bossa Nova Civic Club, all while falling in love with an aspiring DJ and producer she calls Andrew.
As the book progresses, Witt documents the growing MAGA movement in America, gun rights rallies and mass shootings. As the country falls apart, she watches her romantic relationship fall apart, too. Drugs and Brooklyn nightlife, she writes, became both an escape and a way to rearrange a world that she starts to feel no longer makes sense.
Witt shares critical opinions about the underground scene's capacity to be a utopia and place of belonging in an increasingly hostile world, arguing that there should be more gatekeeping in place to protect a scene that's threatened by capitalism and the mainstream. She also interrogates what she calls "woke identity politics" in Brooklyn, the lack of change that came from the Black Lives Matter movement, empty calls for political protest that dominated the early days of the pandemic and why, despite everything, she's chosen to stay in Brooklyn for good. Listen to the episode in full. -Chloe Lula
Ireland