Samuel Kerridge is one of the most striking techno producers around. Offering up a wall of noise and rhythm, texture and experiential electronics, he stands alone and really doesn’t care what anybody thinks. This attitude allows him to push borders and explore new ground on labels like Downwards, Contort and Blueprint. There Berlin based Brit is as exceptional in the DJ booth ask he is the studio and live arena, and his output remains as vivid and vital as ever six years after his spellbinding debut.

This mix is arresting from the off. It’s a blizzard of overdriven drums and frazzled synth lines that are impossibly restless and raw. Even the moments of relative emptiness and calm are pregnant with tension and menace before things race off once more and leave you gassing for breath. It’s an impressively exhilarating ride that balances light with dark and calm with chaos in just the right proportions so as to never let up and never let you go.

Magic Teapot Records is an exclusive online record store in Barcelona, but also a recently launched record label (run by Daniel Baughman— A&R at Hivern Discs, booker at audiophile venue Nica —, Marco Gegenheimer - who releases on Studio Barnhus as MLiR - and Jens Ingelstedt). The DJ duo though is made up of Baughman and Gegenheimer, and when they come together they unleash hidden vinyl gems that get you dancing and romancing. Their sound is one that has a lot to say and draws on steamy tropical delights and intoxicating world music that could be thirty years old or brand new.

Their mix for us is a 90 minute live recording of them doing what they do best at Nica, namely taking us around the globe on a real adventure that has a sense of musical wanderlust running right through it. There are intimate moments of acoustic heaven bleeding into soft, drunken synths and glorious passages of churning reggae and twinkling disco along the way. It’s music with meaning threaded together by a air of expert curators.

DVS1 came up as a raver in the Midwest, throwing techno parties for over 20 years and getting up to mischief, often next to huge stacks of speakers that still influence him to this day. He is now well-established as a vital DJ and resident at Berghain and Panorama Bar. 

This mix is something special and a side of DVS1 normally not heard or recorded! A true digger and passionate record collector running the eclectic Mistress Recordings and the more pure techno label HUSH. Here he crosses into house territory for a special dekmantel mix. 

Of the podcast we have here, he says, “This mix is two hours of a four hour rare “house” set recorded LIVE in Sept 2017 at an undisclosed location. I make it a point not to release many mixes and while most people know and follow me for my techno sets, this mix is for those who dig a little deeper and appreciate it all… Enjoy!" There is still a real sense of pace to the mix as it glides effortlessly though flurries of percussion into vocal numbers, cosmic curveballs and piano laced anthems. It’s a fascinating insight into a whole other side of one of techno’s foremost talents.

Khidja is a Romanian duo focussed on fusion. They met at high school in Germany and since then have soaked up sounds from all over the world, as well as from their Romanian homeland. From jazz to gypsy music, traditional instrumentation to techno, they skip between genres and generations with ease. Mixing up synths and cult instruments like the setar or ney, their organic soundscapes have come on labels like Hiven Discs and [Emotional] Especial and always add up to intoxicating and esoteric trips.

Across the course of 90 minutes for us, they lay all that bare. It’s a punk minded session that journeys through sci-fi noise, freaky disco and no wave sounds with real intensity, building to dense peaks before dissipating and sinking down into a slithering groove. Bold and adventurous, Khidja explore the roots and peripheries of electronic music in brilliantly beguiling fashion.

Every mix in our series is special for different reasons, but there’s no denying that a new one from DâM-FunK will always turn heads. The multi-talented American DJ, musician and vocalist is a one man funk machine who has spent his life distilling boogie, g-funk, electro and synth pop into his own modern take on the genre. The Stones Throw afficionado and Glydezone head honcho has an encyclopaedic knowledge of music, is a prolific producer and collaborator with the likes of Snoop Dogg, and for ten years has hosted his own LA party Funkmosphere. Also, make sure to keep your eyes and ears pealed for his upcoming release ‘Architecture II’, dropping in August.

This selection is very much like a night at one of those events: at nearly three and a half hours long, it touches on every facet of DâM-FunK’s sound from the opening and closing eighties synth-pop of Prefab Sprout to Jayda G’s recent tribal house cut ‘Sestra’s Cry’. Next to those, an impossibly diverse list of house and funk names includes Omar-S and Sylvia Striplin, 808 State and Barry White, Bas Noir and YES. As is always the way with DâM-FunK, each track is given the respect it deserves. The mixing is unfussy, often allowing tracks to end before slamming in the next one. Sometimes he moves the mix forwards, at others he takes a brave sidestep that would seem impossible on paper but that makes perfect sense in the context of this mix. All that means its likely you’ll keep on coming back to this timeless selection for many years to come.

Mixed live in Ladera Heights (Los Angeles, California), via all original wax pressings owned by DāM-FunK.

Batu’s on a roll. He always is. In a few short years, the Bristol producer has made his own Timedance label widely acclaimed as one of the best out there, while his own productions constantly nudge swinging, bass heavy and broken beat techno in subtle new directions. They have come on the likes of Fringe White and Hessle Audio, while earlier this month he signed to XL Recordings for his latest EP. Always experimenting, challenging himself and and challenging us, he is an innovative artist driven by creating something new.

In the DJ booth he’s just as interesting, and here serves up 100 minutes of music that show off his many different styles. His characterful broken beats eventually turn to techno, UK funky drum patterns and then get turned inside out as you’re left to float in a sea of ambient synths and subliminal rhythms. It’s a mix run through with the spirit of UK music from across the ages and wilfully flips mood and tempo so that you can start and end the mix at any point and it will always make sense.

After a couple of well received releases for 1080p and Pinkman, Betonkust and Palmbomen II will properly consummate their relationship with Center Parcs, a debut album on our label this summer. It brings together two Dutch artists with an achingly nostalgic, perfectly washed out and saturated sound that calls on house, pop, ambient, electro and IDM and fills you with familiar emotions from a time and place you might never have actually experienced.

On this new, rough edged and hardware heavy mix the duo offer timeless sounds coated in tape hiss and rich in fuzzy, lo-fi melody. There are dreamy ambient passages that are like looking at sunlight through a frosted window, crunchy drum tracks that bristle and prickly with sharp hits and glassy keys and 80s synth tracks that are beautifully naive and innocent. The whole thing plays out with faded kaleidoscopic colours that leave you in a dreamy reverie, and it’s utterly magic.

SHXCXCHCXSH’s techno is as mysterious and abstract as their artist alias. The Swedish duo has remained anonymous since their debut in 2012, largely because they believe that existing in isolation makes it easier to be creative. And they sure have been that, with a spotless run of EPs and LPs on Avian and Rösten that balance light with dark, noise with groove. Though the pair produce famously heavy, dense and gritty soundtracks, they never forget a powerful underlying groove that makes them an equal part artful noise band and compelling techno duo.

Their mix for us is made entirely of their own new compositions and is aimed directly at the club after a few years making non dance floor material. It bares that out across an idiosyncratic hour of broken rhythms, fizzing synths and distorted textures "but we didn’t want to repeat tired old patterns and processes and tried something new. This experiment gave us a new way of working with rhythms and we never had as much fun in the studio. Much of the material that came out of the experiment is in this mix and much more will come out as one album called OUFOUFOF on our own Rösten in October, and one EP on Mord in November." As such the mix has all the dynamism of a impromptu live set as it shifts from the sound of malfunctioning machines to apocalyptic techno and back to anxious ambient. Unpredictable and challenging, it’s the sort of mix that leaves you thinking WTF and immediately heading back to the start for a second run, just to try and work out what you just heard.

Alessandro Adriani has been championing unusual and unknown synth wave and industrial sounds for a decade now. The Berlin based Italian has done so on his Mannequin Records label as well as on Pinkman and Jealous God and at his bi-monthly party at Säule/Berghain. An inquisitive mind and avid collector whose taste ranges from jazz to Italo to disco, he is a real treasure trove of musical knowledge, as are his DJ sets.

There’s a real sense of discovery to the mix he has laid down for us. It’s filled with chilly synths and industrial textures that are sometimes manic and wild, at others stripped back and haunting. There’s also twisted techno and macho disco, all stitched together with a sense of style that manages to sounds as much from the 80s as it does some unknown future. Adriani’s world is a timeless world, then, but one you’ll be compelled to return to over and over again.

Shanti Celeste always gets the party pumping. Not by reaching for obvious tunes or resorting to the lowest common denominator, but with great selections and slick mixing. Her reach extends deep into house, electro and techno, and can take you way back to the early days or propel you into the future with a seamless ease. Her own productions pull the same trick, and have given rise to pumping vocal house, slippery electro or darker techno jams on key labels like Dekmantel, Idle Hands, Brstl and her own Peach Discs.

The London based Chilean born artist also finds time to do an NTS show, and serve up red hot podcasts like this one. It is made up of predominantly new and forthcoming music from friends and peers such as Strategy, Peverelist, E-unity, Bass Cleff, SW:SVN, Talaboman remixed by L.B Dub Corp, plus FFT1 and LNS. And it sure does pack a lot in without ever sounding hurried. There are skeletal sci-fi rhythm tracks bleeding into corrugated electro funk, tribal broken beats and deep techno with a fantastic sidestep into the peerless neo-soul of Jill Scott. It’s a brave mix of styles and tempos that leaves you wondering how Celeste has made them all work together quite so well.