PLO Man—not to be confused with the POW man, Michael McKinney
Late in August, I met up with Michael McKinney, regular mixes columnist (Slam on the CDJs) for Passion of the Weiss (POW), and a Minneapolitan for the past couple of years. We were at an event, but I was in a hang-back mood, happy to play catch-up. Re-reading him after the fact, I noticed a through-line in McKinney’s columns—yet more RA Podcasts that I had missed (cf. BC134), from January to July, prior to bearing down on the ten-part RA.1000s. On the one hand, maybe covering one podcast so much tends toward overkill; on the other hand, there’s more than a thousand of the goddamn things! And few of them sound alike. So why not? There’s another one on the way, as well.
You can hear these five sets at this SoundCloud playlist.
Kia, RA.973 (January 28)
Every mix should ideally take you places, but this one has a real sense of movement, of continually unfolding. It takes a yawning long time to get its feet, but even that stretching out seems purposeful even the first time through—a just-you-wait preamble. At first, I took it to be a dub-focused overview, and it can be heard that way early on. But only for a while—by the finish, the beats aren’t just fast, they’re giddy. McKinney points to the presence of “loopy trance and vertiginous ambience, pointillistic techno and amp-scorching drum & bass, vintage pop-radio balladry and hand-drum whirlwinds”—right again.
Black Rave Culture, RA.974 (February 2)
The name Black Rave Culture is pointed, but it’s also almost comically broad—that’d be almost everything, wouldn’t it? It would, indeed—“stutter-stepping east-coast club and screwfaced UKG, bass-blasted ghetto house and ebullient 3-step, whip-cracking breakbeat and mile-a-minute juke,” per McKinney’s February column, the D.C. trio’s three hours shift constantly while recognizably walking the same line. Each member of the trio gets a full hour, yet bearing down on the parts seems less necessary than luxuriating in the whole—Nativesun, James Bangura, and Amal, in order of appearance on the podcast, give themselves to the collective, playing not merely whatever they may, but shaping it all to work together, even as they do it apart—not interchangeable, but coherent.
Ayesha, RA.983 (April 6)
Coming to this set months after its release has an almost comedic tinge for me. Not because the music is funny—it’s thrilling and intense—but of the set’s shape: lengthy and encompassing, including a lot of the strains I’ve noticed and liked in DJ sets this year all in one place, a kind of platonic ideal of a 2025 mix, only it actually showed up on the timeline earlier than a lot of what I’ve enjoyed in this vein. That means wub-driven techno and 140 resurging, as well as a heavy psytrance tinge. As McKinney noted in the April column, the DJ herself is all over these questions as well as the music that invokes them, quoting from her mix-page Q&A: “Could a track that some perceive as dated or outmoded be recontextualized and maybe even become a bit sexy in the moment?” Uh, yep.
DJ Travella, RA.984 (April 13)
I give—I’ve never heard music so relentlessly pointy, like a skull massage. Singeli is a Tanzanian style that the RA intro to this mix, by a twenty-three-year-old Dar es Salaam producer-DJ, IDs at 170 BPM and I’d guessed as closer to 200. That means it can be hard to take in all at once; I paused this for sheer relief a couple of times. That’s not a criticism, per se—but it is a warning, or at least a proviso. Because that pointillism leads places—its rippling repetition often reveals new patterns as it goes,. This music can be very on-the-surface—as McKinney put it in his April column, “all MIDI horns and just-so string stabs and mile-a-minute drum programming”—but it also has a lot of discernible depth.
PLO Man, RA.988 (May 11)
Minimal techno—yum. Prismatic and pixelated, percussion like strips of aluminum bending with every strike, bass tones that twitch and glide as much as declare a rhythmic thrust, FX set to “cute”—yes, please. This two-hour masterclass starts out like Perlon’s Greatest Hits even when the tracks aren’t from that label, as easy a way to my heart as evoking ’93 jungle, then expands ever outward—toward acid, toward straighter techno, toward Jamaican dub, toward the glorious moment when “Freeki Mutha F cka” sneaks in—without leaving home base.