RA Podcast

Entirely unreleased, undeniably funky techno.

Charles Accarisi, AKA Chlär, treats techno like a science. From his earliest days as an audio engineer, the Lisbon-via-Switzerland artist has approached techno with the precision of a seasoned experimentalist, dissecting our love of listening to kick drums in dark, sweaty clubs down to its very bones.

Before launching his label, Primal Instinct, in 2023, he dug deep, building its foundation on neuroscience studies exploring syncopation and bass frequencies. Yet, for all its academic rigor, Accarisi's music remains incredibly funky.

You can hear this endless pursuit of groove in his DJ sets. His productions flit across the techno continuum with similar versatility. One minute, as half of Funk Assault, he's flipping a Beastie Boys vocal into a 140-BPM weapon; the next, he aims straight for the head, trading peak-time bacchanalia for the haunted hypnotism of the afterhours.

RA 1041 is all of this and more. Composed entirely of unreleased tracks, it delivers 70 minutes of heads-down techno in its purest form. It's heavy and dark, for sure, but undeniably swung, seamlessly bridging dub techno and sweat-inducing hardgroove throwbacks. This is contemporary techno synthesized by a master chemist.

Read the Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1060
@chlaer
@primalinstinctrecords

The jungle DJ and trumpeter talks about late-career popularity, jazz in Japan and what it means to build a life in music.

You probably know Takuya Nakamura first and foremost as a viral sensation. The Tokyo-born, New York-based trumpeter has achieved minor internet fame in recent years for playing live trumpet over jungle records on The Lot Radio. But Nakamura was composing and performing for more than 30 years before becoming one of the most talked-about acts of the contemporary Jungle revival.

In this RA Exchange, Nakamura dives into his musical journey: growing up in Tokyo, the Japanese jazz scene, and studying at the New England Conservatory of Music under the great composer and theorist George Russell. He also reflects on how jungle has evolved, why he loves performing in the UK, and how a new generation is breathing life into jazz. Listen to the episode in full.

The São Paulo-based artist tears through baile funk, ballroom, Latin club 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