RA Podcast

"It was so difficult to become someone." The house hero talks about Chicago's competitive scene, developing a sound and letting go of his ego. Theo Parrish is one of dance music's most influential DJs and producers. Raised in Chicago, he's become synonymous with slow-burning, immersive grooves and sets that mix classics with obscurities. He began DJing in 1986 aged 13, eventually earning a degree in sculpture and moving to Detroit, where he hit his stride as an artist and became a member of the collective Three Chairs alongside Moodymann, Rick Wilhite and Marcellus Pittman. He also started the label Sound Signature, which uses the language of soul, jazz, disco, Chicago house and Detroit techno. A few months ago, Resident Advisor teamed up with London institution fabric to host Parrish for an eight-hour set—his first time playing the club. While he was in town, he also spoke with CDR's Tony Nwachukwu. In the Exchange, Parrish talks about the intensely competitive scene he grew up in. He DJ'd for 13 years before he was ever paid or had his name billed on a lineup. It took years of passion and hard work to break out of his local scene and build the career he's become known for. "At five years, you're dealing with the technical part [of DJing], at ten it's finding your sound and at 15 it's dealing with the ego of it all," he says. "It's not until much later that you actually start to play for and with people." Parrish also reflects on the ongoing dearth of diversity in the dance music industry and posits whether some of the most popular music in the US—such as trap—reinforces counterproductive racial stereotypes. He asks: did house music ultimately survive because it left where it originally came from? Listen to the episode in full. -Chloe Lula

Deep house with heaps of soul to guide spring into summer. "House music to me is about emotion… it's about how it moves you," says Suze Phaff, better known as Suze Ijó. Emerging from a thriving Dutch scene, Ijó belongs to a generation of DJs reshaping dance culture from the ground up, restoring soul and musicality to the centre of house music. It's a conversation happening not just in her home town of Rotterdam, but globally, among kindred spirits like MUSCLECARS and Dee Diggs in New York, Errol and Alex Rita of Touching Bass in London, and OMOLOKO in Belo Horizonte. You could call Ijó a deep house DJ, but it's much deeper than that. Her sets embody house music in its most musical sense, rich in nimble percussion, woodwinds, calypso drums, gospel vocals, and romantic string sections. They channel the jazz-inflected heartbeat of the East Coast, the breeze of Balearic shores, and the light-footed rhythms of the Caribbean. As Ijó explains in her Q&A, her RA Podcast "hopefully feels like a loving embrace." Opening with Key Trunks Ensemble's "Calypso of House (Paradise Mix)," she sets a buoyant, life-affirming tone that carries through the next 90 minutes. As the mix unfolds, her affinity for timelessness is clear, with selections that hark back to the golden age of house, from Lonesome Echo Production's "Sweet Dream (Shrine Sweet Mix)" to the euphoric swell of Blaze's "Klubtrance." Listening to RA.986, it's no surprise that The Loft—David Mancuso's legendary, much-missed New York party—serves as a key influence for Ijó. "He wasn't confined to just one genre but would just play 'good music' in the right context," she explains. "He allowed the music to breathe." If ambient music is defined by its ability to breathe in and reflect its surroundings, then Ijó's RA Podcast is ambient in the truest, most human sense: a deep, enveloping soundscape that feels like sunrise, like community, like home—wherever you may choose to listen. @suze_ijo Find the tracklist and interview at ra.co/podcast/986

"I'm in a place of brutal honesty." The electronic pop auteur talks about her new album, the pressures of performing and falling in love with techno. One of today's most exciting stars is Tahliah Debrett Barnett, better known as FKA twigs. Genre-wise, she's difficult to pin down; some critics call her music ethereal, alien R&B refracted through the lens of dance music. She's now touring her third album, Eusexua which she's described as "that surge of nothingness right before a surge of creativity, or the moment before an orgasm." It's a response to falling in love with techno a couple of years ago, and the songs all hover somewhere around the rave. In this RA Exchange recorded live at AVA London 2025, twigs talks to Nadine Noor, founder of queer arts platform PXSSY PALACE, about the process of putting the LP together, as well as the sometimes painful pressures involved in performing and adopting a public persona. Today, twigs says she's in a place of brutal honesty, and on the edge of 40, "hitting the perfect arc of behind hot and not an idiot anymore." She also discusses starting her dancing practice from an incredibly young age, taking her first steps on what she anticipates will be a long partnership with modular synthesis and the challenge of making original art in an era dominated by trends. Listen to the episode in full. -Chloe Lula

Relentless rhythms and Latin dance history from one of TraTraTrax's finest. Percussion is, at the root, a conversation. It's about different instruments meeting each other, and interacting to form something bigger than the sum of its parts. Few engage in this dialogue as boldly as Pablo De Vargas, AKA Uruguayan experimentalist Lechuga Zafiro, who draws from tradition, to make sounds like candombe and clave feel, well, completely new. De Vargas' music reaches outward, building bridges between Montevideo and Bogotá, Tijuana, Berlin and beyond. He's a key figure in the hybridisation of Latin American club music, with releases on labels like NAAFI and an album on TraTraTrax. His RA Podcast plays like a manifesto in motion. RA.985 opens with a recording of Jorginho Gularte, a Uruguayan composer, playing a jazz rhythm, from there, it expands: cuban guaguancó, Venezuelan drums, batida, tribal, techno—it's all here, stitched together with precision and intention. De Vargas is also, crucially, reckoning with these roots. His 2018 EP Testigo confronted the colonial violence embedded in the history of the Río de la Plata. His sets are similarly alive with memory—asking, without nostalgia: what does it mean to inherit rhythm? Who gets to carry it forward? He's also just a killer DJ, one of those rare artists who uses CDJs like an instrument. His sets are full of hot cues, delay FX and left turns. It's technical, but never cold. It’s, in a word, funky. @lechugazafiro Find the interview and tracklist at ra.co/podcast/985

The vaunted techno producer discusses the connections between visual art and music, balancing a full-time career as a fine artist and how he creates his signature sound. There's a connection between visual art and dance music that's seldom explored on our channels. Mike Parker is well known in the underground techno scene for minimal, hypnotic and beautifully executed sound design that sits somewhere at the edges of club music. But he also received his master's degree in fine art and teaches drawing and painting at Daemon University in Buffalo, New York. Fans of Parker will recognise his visual trademark: monochromatic prints that adorn the covers of the records he puts out on his label, Geophone. In this RA Exchange, Parker sits down with Chloe Lula to talk about how he balances his art- and music-making practices and how they inform each other. He also opens up about the long process of sticking to his sound and finding an audience rather than catering to the demands and suggestions of labels and distributors. His 2001 breakout album, Dispatches—which he reissued last year—is a meditation on the act of living far away from any listeners or immediate influences, and he discusses the ongoing drawbacks and rewards of balancing the Eurocentric pursuit of DJing with day-to-day work that's so geographically removed. He also opens up about his longtime collaboration with Donato Dozzy, his love of mid-20th-century sci-fi movies and how free-form radio shaped his approach to music and art. Listen to the episode in full.