Phonica Records

London DJ and Phonica Records staff member Tia Radkiewicz brings a deep-rooted love of house and techno to her Friends & Family mix, drawing on the German and Dutch minimal scenes of the mid-to-late 2000s. Alongside her work at the shop, Tia has also stepped behind the decks for Phonica’s Rinse FM shows, with a taste shaped by years of record digging and an appreciation for music that moves between styles. For this mix, she delves into the deeper, heavier corners of her collection, opening with early Ostgut Ton cuts from Steffi, Ryan Elliott and Len Faki before moving through hypnotic minimal, hand-clap house and driving techno. A personal journey through records that continue to inspire her, it captures the sounds and influences that have shaped her approach to the dancefloor.

Short Span is the Sheffield label founded by Matthew Kent, whose years spent running the influential Blowing Up The Workshop mix series and co-running Mana have given the imprint a deep-rooted sense of curation, connection and musical curiosity. Since launching in 2025, the label has built a distinctive catalogue around dubbed-out techno, ambient, house and experimental electronics, with releases from Sa Pa, Mammo, Conna Haraway, emer, Yu Su, Picture, K Wata, Mr. YT, Bot1500 and Miles, alongside the sprawling Short Tracks compilation that mapped out a wider network of friends and likeminded artists. For this Phonica mix, Kent turns the focus away from the label’s existing release schedule and towards the constant flow of music surrounding it, bringing together a near-continuous stream of unreleased tracks, demos and new dubs being passed between Short Span’s artists, friends and extended orbit. As Kent explains, the mix is an extension of the way he listens to this material — giving things time, returning to them in different contexts and allowing connections to reveal themselves — with a deliberately loose, broadcast-like approach that feels less concerned with technical display than simply giving these sounds room to breathe.

Black Bones have spent years making a virtue of the unexpected. The Belfast duo of Aaron Black and Timmy Stewart first came together through a shared obsession with records, eventually turning that chemistry into a much-loved series of edits, releases for the likes of Optimo, Hoga Nord, Duca Bianco and Emotional Response, and DJ sets that refuse to sit neatly in one box. Their Off The Record mix follows the same instinct, beginning in low-slung, dubby territory before gradually gathering momentum through leftfield electronics, post-punk, acid, disco and darker dancefloor mutations. There’s a sense of two selectors joining the dots rather than forcing them, with The Chromatics, Stereolab, The Velvet Underground, Ministry and a couple of Black Bones cuts all finding their place along the way. As they put it themselves, personality and energy are central to their approach — and this is a mix that lets both come through.

Tom Sharkett has spent the last few years carving out a distinctly wonky route between Manchester’s DIY scene and the dancefloor, as a founding member of W. H. Lung and a producer in his own right, with releases on Optimo Music, Okay Nature and Ransom Note Records, collaborations with System Olympia and Raf Rundell, and remixes for the likes of Pip Blom, Glok, Nation of Language and Nightbus. His much-loved edit of LCD Soundsystem’s ‘Home’ even went from bootleg to official DFA release, while his DJing has taken him through The White Hotel, Golden Lion and further afield, with appearances alongside names including Erol Alkan and Justin Strauss; he’s also hosted his Inside The Outside show on Soho Radio and contributed mixes to Phantasy Sound, NTS and Worldwide FM. For this Phonica mix, however, Sharkett turns away from the club records and production work to dig into a very different kind of archive: a recently inherited collection of 7"s from his partner’s family, spanning Sheffield synth and new wave, Northern Soul and forgotten oddities unearthed from her grandparents’ boxes. Played entirely from those discoveries, the result is deliberately noisy, crackling and chaotic — a lively little trip through records that might otherwise have remained hidden in the jukebox.

With a growing reputation for mood-lifting selections that refuse to sit neatly in one box, Sarahtonin has spent the last few years moving between the dancefloor, radio booth and festival circuit with the same broad-minded approach to music. A Low Life resident since 2023, she’s played alongside the likes of Bill Brewster, Frank Broughton and Optimo, while appearances at Glastonbury, Love International, Kala, Bugged Out! and Field Maneuvers have seen her take that instinctive approach to increasingly far-flung dancefloors. Away from the clubs, her weekly Do!! You!!! Radio show has become another outlet for her encyclopaedic taste, where house, disco, acid, electronica, techno, UKG and all manner of harder-to-categorise sounds can sit comfortably alongside one another. For her Off The Record mix, she’s done something slightly different: rather than mapping out a route in advance, she plugged in her USB, pressed record and simply followed whatever felt right — one take, no plan, just seeing where the music would take her.

There are DJs who build a reputation through big releases, and then there are those who earn it one dancefloor at a time.

Harri Pepper falls firmly into the latter. Equally at home behind the counter at Jelly Records as he is behind a pair of turntables, he's spent the past few years becoming a familiar name across the UK's most discerning parties, with appearances at Fabric, Houghton, Gottwood, Glastonbury, Rally and a growing list of all-night sessions that showcase the depth of his record bag. It's that side of Harri that comes through on his Phonica Mix, taken from the closing stretch of an all-night set at Om earlier this year. As the club emptied and the dancers dug in for the final hours, he settled into a raw, high-energy journey that captures exactly what makes his sets so compelling.

Some mixes are snapshots of the present; others trace a much longer arc. Benedikt Frey's contribution to Off The Record belongs firmly to the latter. Built around jungle records he first bought as a teenager, it's a deeply personal excursion that reconnects with the sounds that shaped his musical identity. That sense of history has long defined Frey's approach—as a DJ, producer and label co-founder, his sets unfold with patience and intuition, favouring emotion over convention. Here, memories of formative dancefloors collide with decades of experience behind the decks, resulting in a mix that feels both nostalgic and strikingly alive. With new music arriving across Club Blanco, R.i.O. and Turbo Recordings over the coming year, it's another compelling chapter from one of electronic music's most quietly distinctive selectors.

Not many selectors embody the quiet, obsessive spirit of record culture quite like Australian DJ Nick Gencarelli a.k.a Gencia (Commonly known in the shop as Nick G). Having spent the last few years behind our counter at Phonica Records while steadily building his own reputation as a discerning digger, radio host and party curator, Gencia has become a trusted conduit between forgotten boogie, leftfield house, Balearic oddities and soulful dancefloor discoveries. That instinct has carried him from Australia's underground scene to London's vinyl community, where his time at Phonica has coincided with a growing profile as both a DJ and tastemaker. His contribution to Phonica Friends & Family feels less like a DJ mix than a snapshot of that journey: a lovingly assembled collection of records discovered through countless hours in the shop, recommendations traded between fellow staff and releases championed from friends' labels. As Gencia explains, every track is tied to the community that Phonica fostered around him—a musical education built through shared knowledge, back-to-back sessions and endless conversations over the counter. The result is a warm, deeply personal mix that celebrates the friendships, discoveries and crate-digging ethos that continue to define one of dance music's most enduring institutions.

Few artists capture that sweet spot between introspection and dancefloor euphoria quite like Dublin's Long Island Sound. Since emerging with early releases on Body Fusion before carving out a distinct identity through their own Signs of Space imprint, Rob Roche and Tim Nolan have steadily built one of Ireland's most compelling catalogues—stretching from the shimmering house and breaks of Initial Ascent and Broken Signals to the emotionally-charged Lost Connection LP, the club-ready Don't Let Me / Air EP, and this year's expansive new six-tracker. Along the way they've earned support from the likes of Bicep, Pete Tong and Bonobo, remixed Depeche Mode, appeared everywhere from Boiler Room and AVA Festival to Berlin's Griessmuehle and London's fabric, while their own all-night-long parties have become something of a rite of passage back home. Fittingly, their Phonica mix captures the duo exactly where they thrive: recorded during the opening hours of an open-to-close set at Dublin's Tengu, it patiently stretches the elastic between warm-up and release, slowly unfolding from hazy atmospherics into rolling, heads-down grooves before stopping just shy of lift-off—the moment, as they put it, when "the balloon is almost ready to pop into full-on party mode."

For this edition of Off The Record, we welcome Miles J Paralysis.

Hailing from West Yorkshire, Miles has been steadily shaping a world of his own through releases on Crying Outcast, Mysticisms and Emotional Response. Drawing loose threads between dub, electro, hip-hop, post-punk and regional folklore, his productions feel as informed by soundsystem culture as they do by the stranger corners of the British underground.

That restless curiosity carries over into his DJing. As comfortable reaching for a dusty breakbeat obscurity as he is a dubbed-out chugger or leftfield club tool, Miles approaches selection with an instinctive sense of movement rather than genre. "Someone once told me there are no rules in life," he says. "I think about that a lot when putting music together."

The mix that follows reflects exactly that mindset: a winding trip through dub pressure, punk energy, B-boy tackle and plenty in between, stitched together with the sort of individuality that's become synonymous with his work.

With a new EP for Long Gone Are The Old Traditions, further Crying Outcast releases and a debut album on the horizon, Miles J Paralysis continues to emerge as one of the most distinctive voices operating on the fringes of UK dance music. Enjoy.