RA Podcast

The São Paulo-based artist tears through baile funk, ballroom, kuduro and techno in a turbo-charged showcase of global club music's cutting edge.

Take one look at Clementaum behind the decks and she seems less like a DJ than a force of nature. Dressed to the nines and usually keeping time with a fan, she mixes impossibly chaotic drum patterns that ricochet from baile funk to ballroom, Baltimore club to kuduro. Her sets are packed with her own productions—deliciously chaotic collisions of two decades of Latin American club music, shaken hard with EDM and techno.

Raised in Curitiba, Clementaum entered nightlife as a hostess before stepping behind the decks and beginning to produce in 2018. A Rinse FM residency followed in 2023, her first European tour in 2024 and now, fresh off her debut Oceania run, she has her sights set on the rest of the globe.

RA.1040 is a turbo-charged introduction to Clementaum's sonic world. Loaded with unreleased tracks from herself as well as other rising figures in the Brazilian underground, it captures the bleeding edge of global club music: ecstatic horn lines, flubber-bounce kick drums, freewheeling vocal samples, stadium-sized breakdowns, video game arpeggios and basslines that seem to rearrange space-time itself. It's possible you haven't heard a Clementaum set before, but it's impossible to forget one when you have.

Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1059
@clementaum

The pioneering artist talks philosophy, Berghain and touring on the eve of her 80th birthday.

Suzanne Ciani is a synth music legend. After establishing herself as one of the first virtuosos of Don Buchla's modular system in the 1960s, she went on to earn five Grammy nominations, score a Hollywood film and found her own sound design company—creating iconic commercial soundtracks for Coca-Cola, AT&T and Atari.

In this RA Exchange recorded live at IMS Ibiza, Ciani traces her remarkable path to success. She breaks down the working philosophy that got her there: from walking away from opportunities that didn't align with her vision, to carving out her own lane in a male-dominated industry that refused to make room for her.

Now, just weeks away from turning 80, she discusses life on the road, collaborating with a new generation of electronic musicians and her first impressions of Berghain. Listen to the episode in full.

Sleek, sensual bass science from the NYC SLINK boss, sketching a new blueprint for dub in the 2020s.

Kenzo Perron, AKA K Wata, uses bass the way a poet uses punctuation. Sub weight, subtle wobbles and snaking rhythms become commas, dashes and periods—tiny gestures that shape movement, tension and release.

Perron's sound sits somewhere between the cavernous minimalism of Rhythm & Sound and the wiry precision of Livity Sound, pulling equally from sound system culture, contemporary minimalism and East Coast club music. His breakthrough 2021 EP, What Do U Wan, sounds like the photo negatives of a Fade to Mind record redesigned for sunrise at Sustain-Release (not to mention his work with Daytimers affiliate Enayet as E-Wata).

More broadly, Perron belongs to a a growing American underground reshaping dub techno and bass music in adventurous ways. What sets his music apart, however, is the way it balances delicacy with kineticism and, as his RA Mix makes clear, a touch of sexiness and intimacy too. RA.1039 draws from that very sonic palette.

RA.1039 is mainly composed of contemporary dub tracks released in the past decade (with a few choice exceptions). One minute we're wigging out to the krautrock-meets-Black Ark Studio of Eiger Drums Propaganda, the next we're slinking to the hi-fi club of Significant Other. In Perron's hand they melt into a molten liquid of sexy, sleek, bass science.

Find the tracklist and read the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1058

@kwatakwata

The Radiohead guitarist talks about finding spirituality, life inside one of the most mythologised (and occasionally polarising) bands of the last 40 years, and his second solo album, Blue Morpho.

Ed O'Brien has been a guitarist in Radiohead since the band formed at Abingdon School in the mid '80s, playing a supporting role across a catalogue largely written by Thom Yorke. He comes from a guitar tradition that runs through Johnny Marr, John McGeoch and Will Sergeant—players who serve the music rather than themselves.

His second solo record, Blue Morpho, is his most fully realised statement away from the band. The themes running through it are spiritual, in the broadest sense. With anything related to group dynamics or current affairs averted by request, in this RA Exchange, O'Brien speaks with RA’s Editor Gabe Szatan about a long period of depression during lockdown, the meditation practice that pulled him through it and his deepening interest in devotional music and sound as a physical force, which has fed his subsequent songwriting. He also discusses the wider arc of a life in music: his years at Parlophone, the early Radiohead webcasts, the move from OK Computer to Kid A and what it felt like to climb back on stage with the band last year. Blue Morpho is out May 22 on Transgressive Records. Listen to the episode in full.

90 minutes of blissful, sun-soaked house from the essential UK producer duo.

For a certain type of DJ, a record from The Trip is a buy-on-sight proposition. Even if the name is new, you’ve likely heard their tracks in sets from Job Jobse, Shanti Celeste or Avalon Emerson. With a catalogue full of records equally at home at Pitch Music & Arts or fabric Room 2, Oliver Hiam and Max van Dijk have locked into a particular sweet spot: big, emotional dance music with enough drive to snap a festival crowd into focus, while still carrying the nuance and emotional pull of the best ’90s club records.

The key to this is decidedly old-fashion: clocking hours on the dance floor. Long before they became a hot-shot producer duo, Hiam and van Dijk were promoters first. For more than a decade, they hosted parties at Corsica Studios under the Tessellate banner, bringing artists like DJ Sprinkles, Mr. Ties and Octo Octa to London.

Think of RA.1038 as a marker for the start of summer: packed with bongo drums, piano breakdowns, and the occasional surprise (at one point, you might even hear what sounds like a dolphin sample). It hits that sweet spot for outdoor dancing: light, playful and just euphoric enough.

As they note in their Q&A, it traces a line through the deeper corners of their taste, ducking pure peak-time pressure to show off a real feel for tension and release—honed over years of reading the floor from both sides of the booth.

Read the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1057
@tessellatelondon