RA Podcast

The Sonic Youth cofounder opens up about her solo output, the intersection of art and music, and her new album, PLAY ME.

For over four decades, Kim Gordon has navigated the edges where fine art meets noise. Her claim to fame was as a founding member of Sonic Youth, the band that took the nihilistic, abrasive energy of New York's no wave scene and forged it into a new language for rock.

After Sonic Youth's public breakup in 2011, Gordon returned to her original creative practice: visual art. But in recent years, she has undergone a staggering creative transformation that's led her back to music. At 72—an age when most legends are content with the heritage circuit—she has instead dived headlong into the sounds of the present: industrial electronics, Chicago footwork and the blown-out low-end of SoundCloud rap.

Aiming to break with her Sonic Youth legacy, Gordon released her first two solo albums, No Home Record and The Collective, in 2019 and 2024, respectively. And now, she's back with her third LP: PLAY ME. Working alongside producer Justin Raisen, she uses beat-oriented frameworks to interrogate what she calls the "tyranny of frictionless culture." From naming Spotify playlists in her lyrics to donating proceeds to reproductive rights, her work remains a vital, confrontational critique of late capitalism and technocratic fascism.

In this RA Exchange, Gordon discusses the process of moving closer to solo work, as well as the masculinity of rock; her evolving relationship with electronic music; the politics of the "body;" and why, after thinking she was done with music, she keeps getting pulled back in. Listen to the episode in full.

A b3b for the ages, straight from Detroit techno's Hall of Fame.

"Let's just go through some shit, let's see what we got here." In that unmistakable drawl, Moodymann opens RA.1026—and from there, you know you’re in good hands.

Mike Banks, Carl Craig and Moodymann are artists of the utmost standing. As founders of Underground Resistance, Planet E and Mahogani Music respectively, their catalogues have shaped electronic music in profound ways, from Moodymann's 2004 LP Black Mahogani and Craig's era-defining remixes, to Banks's uncompromising output as Underground Resistance.

But the records are only part of it. All three artists show you can build something lasting without corporate backing, that creative freedom is a discipline as much as a right. Through their work, house and techno became vehicles for resistance, identity and pride.

Recorded live at Movement in Detroit, RA.1026 captures Banks on keys, Craig on the decks and Moodymann on the mic, weaving through Motor City staples, '80s classics and deep cuts, including "The Final Frontier" and "Knights Of The Jaguar." As Black History Month continues in the US, the mix feels especially momentous Coming in at just under two hours, it’s about chemistry, shared history and timeless records.

Read the Q&A with Carl Craig at ra.co/podcast/1045.
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For the Exchange's Season Two relaunch, the visionary duo discuss their first release in 13 years and the inspiration behind their trailblazing sound.

Neel and Donato Dozzy, who perform and make music together as Voices From The Lake, first joined forces in 2011, when what was supposed to be a one-off performance in the Japanese Alps changed the trajectory of ambient techno forever.

The music they made for the occasion was released as a self-titled album in 2012—a record that achieved mythical status in the underground and is still described as the Selected Ambient Works for the Berghain generation. Instead of following techno's standard linearity and instrumentation, the duo deployed a soft pulse, massive reverb trails and carefully placed silence to make their music feel like a living, breathing organism.

Dozzy and Neel then went silent for 13 years, each pursuing their individual careers while fans pined for more music. And in December 2025, they finally delivered. II, which is dedicated to their late friend Nuel, manages to be both a continuation and a reinvention of the sound they pioneered more than a decade ago.

In this RA Exchange, they uncover its guiding concepts, which draw deeply from the well of improvisational practices, concepts in Japanese design and aesthetics, and the minimalist visual art of contemporaries like Mike Parker. The duo also reveal their plans to veer away from the ambient blueprint altogether. Listen to the episode in full.

The Brazilian party starter unveils 60 minutes of sun-drenched house.

Minas Gerais isn't the typical Brazil of postcards. Yet from this landlocked terrain emerged one of its most accomplished sons. As OMOLOKO, João Vitor has mastered the art of summoning summer on the dance floor. Armed with a pair of CDJs and a USB, he carries sun-kissed house dreams shaped by countless hours lost in Discogs rabbit holes, forgotten corners of YouTube and the dust of hidden record shops.

Vitor was born in Rio Grande do Norte, in Brazil's northeast, before moving south as a child when his family set out in search of new opportunities—a well-worn path in the world's fifth-largest country. Adopting the alias OMOLOKO in the late 2010s, he quickly became a beacon in Belo Horizonte's bubbling electronic scene. Carrying sounds from home deep in his memory alongside a restless desire to make the world dance to his own findings, he carved out a singular voice with genre-hopping sets, grounded in an affection for infectious grooves and warm, rolling kicks.

In recent years, Vitor's fine-tuning of his craft behind the decks have made him more than a familiar face at countless essential nightlife hubs around the world, from Panorama Bar to Dekmantel, São Paulo's Gop Tun to Ibiza's DC-10. His résumé, already impressive, is expanding nicely.

So to mark the beginning of carnaval in Brazil, who better for RA.1025. Vitor's RA Mix draws deeply from the lineage of house's most celebrated names, alongside obscure gems your Shazam wouldn't dare recognise. With slow-cooking patience, the session follows wherever the language of dance leads: South African kwaito, diva vocal flashes, funk-laced deep house, vibraphone-led strides and salsa-laced drumwork. It’s like a dream team of house offshoots, all meeting for the very first time at the beach.

Read more at https://ra.co/podcast/1044
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The Memphis artist also known as Cities Aviv delivers 60 minutes of stirring electronics and industrial abstractions.

Since his first release in 2010, Gavin Mays, AKA African-American Sound Recordings and Cities Aviv, has been living multiple lives. The D.O.T. label boss has put out work under various aliases, spanning post-hip-hop, ambient electronics and soul-inflected abstraction, consistently challenging and rearranging the scope of every genre he works within.

African-American Sound Recordings is Mays' "side project"—as hobbies go, it's a formidable one. Since its launch in 2019, he's released ten albums built from a dense palette of samples: distorted voices drift alongside warm currents of jazz and acoustic instrumentation, painting ambient vignettes that swerve between the serene and the industrial.

It's no coincidence that Mays cites Sunday service as a formative space. Samples of gospel worship and memories of communal ritual are the fil rouge running through the project, reimagining Black musical traditions as a living system.

RA.1024 has one of the shortest tracklists in the series to date: three total. The final two tracks, gospel recordings ripped from his own CD collection, arrive like sunlight breaking through the clouds.

Find the tracklist and interview at https://ra.co/podcast/1043
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