RA Exchange Resident Advisor

"The dance floor is a portal and a transmission tool in addition to being a technology of togetherness." The British author’s new book, Dance Your Way Home, offers a sociocultural history of the dance floor.

Emma Warren has been documenting grassroots music culture since co-founding Jockey Slut magazine in the mid '90s. From those early years to subsequent stints at THE FACE and Brixton’s youth-run Live Magazine, her journey of personal growth has become intertwined with nightlife.

In this episode, the UK author speaks with Aaron Gonsher, former editor-in-chief of the now-defunct Red Bull Music Academy, about her new book, Dance Your Way Home: A Journey Through The Dance Floor. Writing about how music thrives through in-person connections and physical spaces, she provides a social history of the dance floor while highlighting the power of communion.

Their conversation is a fascinating and far-ranging one; they speak about writing from the heart and Warren's deep connections with nightlife communities. She also talks about how the dance floor acted as a palliative in times of personal strife. "As I was writing [the book] and working it out through the writing, I realised that the less my dad could move or had control over his body, the more I needed to dance and have control over mine," she says of her father's disability. "So, I feel this absolute connection to the strength which you bring on the dance floor: that core control, that tightening of your body, that loosening of your limbs when you're moving and just how important that was to me—and what a life saver, really."

Warren is also the author of three other books, including Make Some Space: Tuning Into Total Refreshment Centre, Document Your Culture: A Manual and Steam Down: Or How Things Begin. Listen to the conversation to hear her thoughts on why we dance together and what dancing tells us about ourselves.

This episode of the RA Exchange originally ran in 2022.

Shanti Celeste is one of those artists whose personality matches her DJ style. Her fun-loving nature and breezy demeanour always light up a room, as do her vibrant sets that span sunny house music, slow-burning disco and emotive techno—just revisit her RA podcast for a reminder. Fresh off her Hessle Audio debut, the London-based artist sat down with Martha Pazienti-Caidan for an honest chat about track selection, bad gigs and her approach to production.

During DJ sets, the Peach Discs co-founder doesn’t like to focus on genres. Instead, "I think about, like, building and releasing tension and making sure that I stay in a specific energy level," she explained. "Whereas before, I think I knew the energy I wanted to bring, but I didn't know how to do that cause I was just thinking about everything in terms of genre."

Reaching this holistic stage, however, took time. It was a process of acquiring knowledge and experience but also confidence, she described, adding how she previously had "really bad imposter syndrome." Learning to recognise that certain factors might be outside an artist’s control is essential to self-realisation, she continued. Recounting her experience of playing big festival stages, she noted the importance of "learning what side of yourself to channel" rather than compromise on music.

For more details on her experience playing with fellow women DJs, her lockdown romance and recording her vocals, listen to the discussion in full.

"We were doing parties in Staten Island that were completely packed; Manhattan didn't want anything to do with us." Three New York visionaries discuss the city's '90s heyday.

'90s nightlife in New York conjures images of Party Monster, jacking disco house and a rotating cast of mega clubs that saw thousands of revellers pass through their doors each weekend. From Limelight and Sound Factory to Palladium and countless others, clubbing was hitting its stride in New York, while producers like Joey Beltram, Frankie Bones and Damon Wild were producing game-changing 12-inches. But it was also the beginning of a decline, catalysed by the rollout of Mayor Rudy Giuliani's discriminatory policies that slowly gutted the club scene and the communities that called it home.

To honour Resident Advisor's partnership with Wire Festival in Brooklyn this weekend, we're revisiting a panel recorded at our 24/7 party at Nowadays in 2018. We tasked the beloved Brooklyn fanzine Love Injection with presenting discussions covering five decades of dance music history. In this panel, Strictly Rhythm cofounder Gladys Pizarro, DJ and producer Lenny Dee and drag superstar and vogue performer Kevin Aviance spoke with journalist (and former RA staffer) Max Pearl about the rise and fall of the city's club scene during its golden decade. They also discussed how the city was sequestered, forcing many artists at the vanguard of '90s-era techno to make music and throw their own parties as the scene grew and shifted beneath the weight of city-wide reforms.

"We were doing parties in Staten Island that were completely packed; Manhattan didn't want anything to do with us," said Lenny D. "So when we were doing it, we were making parties out in Brooklyn. A lot of music at that time was made here in Brooklyn—Joey Beltram, Frankie Bones, Tommy Musto, Damon Wild. So we had this scene where we're making great music, but no one's letting us play, so we're just going to do it ourselves."

Listen to the episode in full.

"You realise you're not just playing music. You give people the power to empower themselves." Cofounders CEM and MCMLXXXV discuss the revered party series and its fledgling label.

Berlin queer party Herrensauna—which means "men's sauna" in German—started as a seed of an idea shared between friends Cem Dukkha (AKA CEM) and Nicholas Endlicher (AKA MCMLXXXV). They were teenagers in Vienna at the time, dreaming of becoming DJs in Berlin. When they finally relocated, they started throwing parties in the basement of a Neukölln off-location. This quickly snowballed into a residency at Tresor, and now a globally recognised brand that curates lineups at clubs and festivals around the world and counts Salome, SPFDJ, Héctor Oaks, JASSS and DJ Saliva as residents.

In this RA Exchange, hosted ahead of Herrensauna's curated night at Wire Festival in New York, CEM and MCMLXXXV spoke with senior producer Chloe Lula about the party's origins and how its mission has changed, shifting from focusing on gay men to championing an all-inclusive vision of queerness. They also discussed their artwork and aesthetics—including their provocative re-appropriations of quasi-religious iconography—as well as the role that platforms like theirs have in shifting the cultural zeitgeist and attitudes towards the LGBTQIA+ community. Listen to the episode in full.

"You can trace techno's origins to the seminal 1988 album Techno! The New Dance Sound of Detroit, which featured many producers that are now regarded as techno pioneers." We discuss Detroit techno, Frankfurt's electronic music museum and more in this month's Critics' Roundtable.


As we approach the end of May, and with it, Movement Festival in Detroit—one of the longest-running dance music events in the world—Resident Advisor returns to a discussion about electronic music's roots.

In this month's Critics' Roundtable, RA music critics Kiana Mickles and Andrew Ryce talk with producer Chloe Lula about the newest release from Detroit "techno soul" stalwart Eddie Fowlkes and a breakout album from a newer Detroit name, DJ Girl, who just released on Planet Mu.

The trio also discuss how techno's origins in Detroit's Black communities continue to be contested. The Museum of Modern Electronic Music in Frankfurt, which opened last year (and was written about recently in The New Yorker), has overlooked the city's key role in the creation and dissemination of techno, sparking backlash from the electronic music community. Mickles and Ryce lay out the implications of the continuous omission of Detroit from techno's narrative. Why is electronic music's origins an ongoing debate, and how do we honour its progenitors as electronic music moves further away from its foundations into the mainstream? Listen to the conversation in full.


Tracklist:

Eddie Fowlkes - Shake Your Hips
DJ Girl - Technician
Rhythim Is Rythim - It Is What It Is
Jossy Mitsu - World's End

"It feels like every artist is presenting their work in the same way that a gallery or an art institution would." Seven artists share their thoughts on the genre-bending label and its legacy.

Resident Advisor's April cover features Bill Kouligas, the singular curator at the helm of PAN. Now celebrating 15 years, the imprint's releases traverse a dizzying array of mediums and genres. As Whitney Wei writes in her article, PAN has long befuddled some people in electronic music. Its catalogue is a bricolage of musique concrete, improvisations, left-field club music, performance soundtracks and other strains of electronic-adjacent work that feel somewhat impossible to place. Amnesia Scanner's cyberpunk nu-metal and Eartheater's sweet singer-songwriter pop are some of the best examples of this immense range. But sitting in Bill's studio, she writes, everything makes sense in context.

"I feel a lot of record labels tend to somehow fall under an umbrella of a sound, or a specific genre of music," reflect Amnesia Scanner in this episode of the Exchange. "With PAN, every artist is presenting their work as independent from the work of others, like in the same way that a gallery or an art institution would present work. Of course there are shared ideas and shared values and so on, but it's not built on a narrow idea of what kind of music PAN would represent."

The label has garnered a devoted fanbase that recognises the vision uniting this seemingly far-reaching output. And as Kouligas has moved increasingly towards interdisciplinary interests such as fashion soundtracking and art directing, his audience has followed him. The music on the label has done the same, evolving from tracks for the dance floor to documentation of avant-garde visual art.

This episode of the RA Exchange collects music and interviews from key individuals who have shaped PAN's trajectory and canon, including Anne Imhof, Objekt, M.E.S.H., Rashad Becker, Amnesia Scanner, Eartheater and Low Jack. Listen to the episode in full. If you're looking for more PAN content, be sure to tune into our live RA Exchange with fellow PAN artist Tzusing from Rewire Festival, which aired last week.

Tracklist:

Anne Imhof - Dark Times (Sex)
Objekt - 35 (Cocoon Crush)
M.E.S.H. - Search, Reveal (Hesaitix)
Rashad Becker - Dances VII (Traditional Music of Notional Species Vol. II)
Amnesia Scanner - Faceless (Another Life)
Eartheater - Claustra (Irisiri)
Low Jack - Rough Rider (Low Jack Remix) (STILL)