Show Notes
90 minutes of trip-hop and electronica, as the elusive SUED founder walks down memory lane.
Everything is cyclical. Stick around long enough and what was new and thrilling, then gauche, comes back around, rediscovered by a generation seeing it with fresh eyes. The trip-hop revival of the 2020s is a neat example. But what does it sound like coming from someone who was there the first time?
SW., AKA Stefan Wust, has an answer. The producer co-founded SUED in 2011 with SVN, a label whose hypnotic, stripped-back records arrived untitled and unannounced, and disappeared from Hard Wax just as quietly. For his RA Mix, he reaches back to those formative years, digging through trip-hop, breakbeat and electronica. Famously elusive, he explains in a rare Q&A below that the mix isn't a historical reconstruction but "an attempt to bring that memory back to life through my perspective today."
Built from loops, delay and hard cuts, RA.1054 reassembles the music of his youth rather than filing it away. His Reminder series did the same for Detroit and Chicago; this goes somewhere he never has, to the trip-hop and downtempo end of the same decade. An excerpt of Rachmaninov's Liturgy of St John Chrysostom sets church-like choral vocals against decaying electronics from Twine and Gridlock, and of course it wouldn't be trip-hop without Tricky.
Find the tracklist and Q&A at ra.co/podcast/1073
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