RA.1050 O Ghettão

The titan of UK bass delivers a head trip through dub's past, present and future, one year on from RA.1000.Time has a way of slipping through the fingers. A year ago, RA.1000 marked the 1,000th release in the RA Mix series. Now, 52 weeks on, we've arrived at RA.1052—and first up is Kevin Richard Martin, AKA The Bug, finally making his long-awaited debut on the series. Ask anyone who's stood within earshot of a soundsystem he's operating: Martin doesn't so much make music as engineer entire weather systems. His music demands total immersion, from the earthquake-like bass weight of anthems like "Skeng" and "Poison Dart" to the post-apocalyptic pull of his slower steppers. As he told RBMA in 2018: "The more music becomes relegated to a cheap accessory, the less people will realise there's great magic in music as a form." For his RA Mix debut, Martin delivers "nocturnal dives into the city with memories of Blade Runner on repeat." A tribute to PRESSURE, his Berlin night, RA.1052 runs through Porter Ricks, Dillinja and Tikiman, charting dub's kaleidoscopic range — from Basic Channel's minimalism to K Wata's sleek bass science. A year ago, RA.1000 looked back on two decades since 2006. RA.1052 picks up the torch and keeps walking. See you here again next year. Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1071 @thebugofficial

Decades after walking away from trance, the superstar DJ unpicks the machinery behind his own brand, and what a career spent at the top actually costs. Tiësto has been one of the biggest DJs in the world for the better part of 30 years. Since the '90s, the Dutch artist has been part of an elite inner circle who dominate major festival bills, residencies in Ibiza and Las Vegas, and command some of the most astronomical fees in the industry. Even if he isn't part of your regular listening diet, you've almost certainly heard his music on the radio or pouring out of bars and clubs around the world. It's easy to forget, though, that he made his name in trance—a genre he publicly walked away from more than a decade ago, saying he'd done what he wanted with it and wouldn't be going back. As of this summer, he's finally changed his mind, announcing his return with a set at Silverworks Island in London. In this Exchange, he talks about being inspired by the new wave of trance DJs and the artists putting a modern twist on the genre. He also reflects on the years before Tiësto was Tiësto: cleaning club bathrooms, selling records to Jeff Mills as a young store clerk, producing gabber under a secret alias and being inspired to take up DJing after seeing Sven Väth play live. Listen to the episode in full.

An antidote to the summertime banger, with an hour of breezy ambient from the Vienna artist. When we picture the summertime banger, we picture high energy. But with record-breaking heatwaves from South Korea to the South of France, a different soundtrack makes sense. Cue RA.1051. Across an hour of woozy lo-fi electronics—many his own productions—Mietze Conte offers the alternative, inspired, as he puts it below, by "the fresh cool cleansing breeze" after a storm. At his most energetic, the Vienna artist appeals to fans of Live From Earth or 1tbsp—eurodance meets hyperpop with a DIY smirk. At his most contemplative, he drifts toward the ambient reverie of Otto Benson and Dylan Henner. What ties it together is playfulness: songs under two minutes, hand-drawn covers, music that's deeply serious and deeply unserious at once. Here he goes wide without raising the temperature, from Green-House to Nala Sinephro to Terekke's dub-hazed loops. Step into his world and find some much-needed shade. Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1070
 @mietzeconte

An antidote to the summertime banger, with an hour of breezy ambient from the Vienna artist. When we picture the summertime banger, we picture high energy. But with record-breaking heatwaves from South Korea to the South of France, a different soundtrack makes sense. Cue RA.1051. Across an hour of woozy lo-fi electronics—many his own productions—Mietze Conte, AKA Matthias Oldofredi, offers the alternative, inspired, as he puts it below, by "the fresh cool cleansing breeze" after a storm. At his most energetic, the Vienna artist appeals to fans of Live From Earth or 1tbsp—eurodance meets hyperpop with a DIY smirk. At his most contemplative, he drifts toward the ambient reverie of Otto Benson and Dylan Henner. What ties it together is playfulness: songs under two minutes, hand-drawn covers, music that's deeply serious and deeply unserious at once. Here he goes wide without raising the temperature, from Green-House to Nala Sinephro to Terekke's dub-hazed loops. Step into his world and find some much-needed shade. Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1070 @mietzeconte

The British sibling duo talk creative process, stepping away from successful solo projects and their new album, Pure Devotion, on XL Recordings. Tom and Ed Russell are brothers who spent the first decade of their careers working separately, building solo careers with real underground momentum. As Truss, Tom made techno on labels like Perc Trax and R&S. As Tessela, Ed put out jungle and breaks on Poly Kicks and his own label, All Caps. Both walked away from them after a week in a Welsh cottage in 2015, when they wrote the material that would form the foundations of Overmono—today, one of the most popular projects in dance music today. What binds them now is a set of self-imposed rules, designed to produce interesting accidents out of the studio. On their new record, Pure Devotion, that meant engineering genuinely out-of-the-box experiments: baking a crash cymbal in the oven overnight to see how would change with heat; running tape past magnets to erase half of what they were recording as they recorded it; and writing 84 versions of one album track, "Knights in Shining Prada," before settling on one that would make the cut. The brothers write obsessively in studios, hotels, airplanes and tour buses, a shared instinct honed to the point that they rarely disagree during the production process. In this Exchange, RA Editor Gabe Szatan sat down with Tom and Ed to reflect on some of their more surprising musical inspirations, letting go of other people's opinions and summoning the courage to walk away from two solo careers that were arguably at their peak. Pure Devotion is out August 7th on XL Recordings. Listen to the episode in full.