In the spirit of all this recent focus on one podcast, I’ve also compiled all of the RA Podcasts that I’ve covered in this newsletter, up to and including the RA.1000 itself; they are all on this SoundCloud playlist, appearing in numerical order. (I’ll also note that there’ll be more from the same source in the near future as well.) There’s a lot of listening below—almost eighteen hours’ worth, along with a dozen hours from pt. 1 (cf. BC137). Thirty hours! Talk about a state of the nation address—or, as rightly, media event.
You can hear the five sets below at this SoundCloud playlist.
Jyoty (rec. Nowadays, NYC, June 1; uploaded August 14)
This may be the most purely efflorescent of the RA.1000s—from a globally-eared New Yorker, recorded at her residency, who takes it to four hours. But we’re barely in when it finally happens: “Short Dick Man” makes (I think) its debut on the RA Podcast. Give it up! By the time “My Neck, My Back” makes it in (I think that one actually was in a previous RA Podcast, sorry to get your hopes up there), the way she weaves it in feels . . . is “holistic” a reach? (Not to mention a pun—find it yourself.) I’ll use it anyway, because it applies. This music floats; the DJ’s ministrations steer the flight. Seventeen minutes from the end, a Missy vocal eventually turns into the phrase “big mandala,” which I’ll accept as a found description of the whole.
Frankie Knuckles (August 14)
I’ve written elsewhere (cf. this RBMA piece) about seeing Frankie Knuckles in 2013 and the overwhelming sense of presence he gave the room the moment he hit play—late in his career, physically diminished, almost all self-made new tracks (or new versions of classics), all of it not so much added up but multiplied. (A nod to Gina Arnold, whose formulation of Nirvana was Soul Asylum times Pixies, not plus.) You didn’t just know that someone important was taking the decks, you heard it and felt it. I wasn’t in the room for the performances unearthed for this RA Podcast, but I didn’t have to be, because the second it began, I had a similar reaction. Fuck yes. Let’s go.
This podcast is actually two mixes, from different periods—if you want to get technical (and you know I do), this makes RA.1000 an eleven-part joint. In fact, shortly after its appearance as a single file, RA made the first set, from 1989, and the second, from 1996, available separately. But I like that they’re one thing here. They’re rather unalike, but the real value of this particular pairing is in the shift between them. They combine into a necessarily incomplete but nevertheless three-dimensional portrait.
Two of the dimensions are in the first part, which runs sixty-forty through new 1989 tracks and decade-old Warehouse favorites like “Let’s Go Dancin’” and “We Got the Funk.” He was helping to invent the future, but he was also still the same DJ whose deepest love was in the classics. It’s hard to imagine a big-name DJ mixing like this now—actually transitioning record to record quickly and unafraid of being a little jarring, musically. (Not rhythmically—Frankie’s coordination was unerring.) Flat out, Frankie Knuckles played disco better than anyone else, ever.
The 1996 half is all up-to-that-minute, the sound glossy and large, bassy and roomy, the club sizes expanding, the tracks mostly by others but largely in thrall to the Knuckles Def Mix template. Its slickness is very late-nineties. I don’t think this is necessarily prescriptive—each set is fully energetic. But as the RA page notes, these mixes came from the “batches of private cassettes with hand-drawn liner notes handed out to friends and family” that Knuckles left behind. It’s easy enough to hear the 1989 as something that maybe he made for a friend, and the 1996 capturing him on the job and mid-flight. Both are essential to who he was as a DJ, and their pairing here is inspired.
Theo Parrish (recorded at Fabric, London, December 8, 2024; uploaded August 11)
“Only” three hours—as we know, Parrish is an all-nighter kind of DJ (cf. BC001), and in fact this podcast is an excerpt from an eight-hour set he played for RA itself.) But this selection is not so much representative as concentrated—the feeling that everything you’d get from a longer set is nestled inside this one, nothing slighted or elided. Also, live Prince—something I’ve been hearing in other sets recently (cf. BC132), and always welcome. And when Parrish breaks it down to just the kick drum, the link between the performance and drum machine-abetted Chicago and Detroit eighties DJs is made strikingly clear.
Tim Reaper (August 12)
Clearly, some of these sets were intended less to be listened to than to be lived inside for a while. This is the longest RA.1000, seven and a half hours, one hour longer than Harvey b2b Weatherall, and unlike that one, (a) Tim Reaper selected and mixed the whole thing himself (b) specifically for this podcast, not a live audience. He wants you to hear the rest of music, not just his usual nineties UK hardcore/jungle selections, through his sensibility—and/or, I suspect, he had a playlist of tracks he couldn’t fit elsewhere and decided to get it all right out of his system in one go. Either way, he does more than fill all that space—he goes places and sets out the sights for the rest of us. What do you know—great taste in techno! Lots of stuff that doesn’t really fit into any one category! When the old-school D&B finally does appear, it’s generally great and under-remembered—I nearly fell over when “Never as Good” showed up.
Terre Thaemlitz (aka DJ Sprinkles) (August 13)
Idly, I had wondered what a Thaemlitz critique of the other RA.1000s might read like. I should have known that, in fact, I’d get to hear it. These tracks, snowy ambient skewing toward fusion, make sometimes deep and sometimes pointy background. They’re frequently (though not always) overlaid with spoken testimony from Jewish intellectuals speaking out against Israel’s genocide against Gaza—an undulant, unsettling comedown for the whole thing. It wasn’t intentional, just the way the alphabet works, but apt nonetheless. The testimony is intense, and I did take some breaks.