RA Exchange

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.
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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, "Nights 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.
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The genre-fluid multihyphenate on motherhood, songwriting with FKA Twigs and her new album, Heavenly Body: If I'm the Bottle You're the Message.

American singer-songwriter Alexandra Drewchin (AKA Eartheater) is hard to pin down by design. In her music, acoustic instruments like harp and guitar collide with heavy digital manipulation, processed beats and classical technique. Her three-octave vocal range has carried her from operatic folk singing to literally shattering wine glasses on stage. Most recently, she co-wrote and sang on the title track of FKA Twigs' Grammy-winning Eusexua, and has since joined Twigs on tour in support of the album.

In this week's RA Exchange, Drewchin talks about her songwriting practice and her new LP, Heavenly Body: If I'm the Bottle You're the Message. The album arrives at a pivotal moment for the artist: she's recently become a mother and bought back the Pennsylvania farm her family lost when she was fifteen—a place she vowed, even then, that she would one day reclaim.

She reflects on that homecoming, and on how pregnancy, birth and motherhood shaped the record. She also discusses what she learned about songwriting from collaborating with Twigs, and her early mentorship under the late R&B legend Roberta Flack. Heavenly Body: If I'm the Bottle You're the Message is out now on Eartheater's label, Chemical X. Listen to the episode in full.
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The Dutch producer on flow state, communal music-making and his new album, Music for Existing.

Martijn Deijkers, AKA Martyn, has spent close to three decades resisting labels. He grew up in a small Dutch village as a vinyl obsessive, buying his first 7-inch from a store that doubled as a sweet shop, before travelling to London in the mid-'90s to chase jungle and drum & bass. He later became one of the first artists from outside the UK to shape the capital's dubstep scene, fusing it with the Detroit techno and hip-hop of his youth. Since then, he has held a residency at Panorama Bar, started a successful label, 3024, and hosted a long-running monthly jazz show on NTS, Darkest Light.

In this Exchange with RA's Performance Content Lead, Tom Gledhill, Deijkers talks about dubplate culture in '90s London, the mentoring programme that's shaped his approach to creativity and his new album, Music for Existing, a collection of jazz-inflected electronics that explores the powerful, communal act of making music together. The LP is out now on 3024. Listen to the episode in full.
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The UK pirate radio crew and cult TV stars discuss their rebirth and forthcoming EP, Grindah's Decided We're Doing Music Again.

Many UK natives will be familiar with the show People Just Do Nothing, a mid-2010s comedy about pirate radio crew Kurupt FM, who ride the UK garage wave, broadcasting from the outer boroughs of London.

Kurupt FM's core members—MC Grindah, DJ Beats, DJ Steves and DJ Decoy—went quiet for more than a decade after the last episode aired in 2014. After a stretch of solo ventures—books, stand-up, Grindah's domestic upheaval following his split with long-time partner Miche, as depicted in People Just Do Nothing—the crew has reconvened for a new EP, Grindah's Decided We're Doing Music Again.

In this RA Exchange, Grindah, Beats and Steves meet for a rare interview to talk about their rebirth and what's happened in the years that have elapsed since the world last heard from them. They also reflect on Grindah's early run-in with Skepta, their case for the ongoing power of pirate radio in the age of AI and the current UKG revival. They engage in a familiar argument about who owns the lineage of the genre, and for Kurupt FM, the answer isn't complicated: if you weren't there the first time around, you just don't get it. Their new EP will be out on August 21st. Listen to the episode in full.
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