Oh wow, this'll be quite the archive to pull from. One to slot alongside my BBC Essential Mix archive.
posted by CrystalDave at 11:25 AM on August 15 [1 favorite]

Excellent. Thank you.
posted by the sobsister at 11:37 AM on August 15 [1 favorite]

I've been listening to RA mixes and reading reviews since my college freshman random roomie told me about the website in 2006 or something. I have a couple of mixes that I had burned onto CDs and were almost always in my CD changer. One of which is RA.147, DJ Pete -- give it a listen, still holds up. Since I've had a career, I've started so many weeks of work with the most recent RA mix and have discovered countless albums I adore from their reviews. It's lovely to see this kind of solid continuity of quality on an internet that grows increasingly shitty. Props to RA to for keeping rolling for so long. Thanks for the post.
posted by sewellcm at 2:26 PM on August 15 [3 favorites]

You might also be interested in THIS. Steve Boyett has a similar amount of mixes he¡¯s been posting since 2006. Or if you run, you might try Podrunner once again, a similar amount of mixes separated into mixes for different running speeds or types of workouts.
posted by evilDoug at 4:16 PM on August 15

Last year I downloaded ~950 RA mixes from A Torrent Site and have been enjoying *immensely* just playing them on random. Such variety. Great stuff. Still nowhere near finished. This archive's availability is wonderful.
posted by meehawl at 8:08 PM on August 15 [1 favorite]

RA podcasts have been a deep inspiration for years! Some - off the top of my head - that have been longtime repeat players for me are Greg Wilson, Laraaji, Brothers Bouaziz, Thomas Brinkmann, Ren¨¦ Breitbarth, Lee Jones ... agh so much great stuff in this archive!
posted by niicholas at 9:13 AM on August 16

I've had the good fortune of hearing DJ Sprinkles live several times. Always a journey worth taking.
posted by 1adam12 at 9:24 AM on August 16

Thanks for the Thaemlitz
posted by They sucked his brains out! at 11:10 AM on August 16

I felt sorta torn posting this because 1000 episodes of the RA podcast is a big deal, but also that new Thaemlitz mix is a stunner of a thing that deserves its own post.
posted by Going To Maine at 2:10 PM on August 16

It's really interesting going back through these because a the first decade of them blasts straight through blog house, french/electro house, indie dance, etc.

The reason i think this is significant is a ton of music from that era is really hard to search through and discover nowadays unless you already know track/artists names. It lived on myspace, blogs, and agregator sites like hypemachine. In a meta sense, a lot of really iconic dj mixes were also entirely debuted and discussed on blogs. Basically all of these blogs are gone, and the aggregator or meta discussion sites, forums, etc are either in busted states of disrepair or gone as well. These mixes(like this, or this, or this, or this, or this, or this. You get the idea, i'm kind of shocked they never had like, The Twelves do one)

It gets especially funny when you realize at a certain point they decided the whole "hipster" blog house thing was like, Too Gauche and purple pants and effette and they needed to focus on Real Club Music not stuff to slam PBRs to.

You also get some iconic mixes from that same era by classic 90s artists like this, or some of the final work by some of them like the Frankie Knuckles mix

At the other end, you get mixes like Jam City, Bok Bok, and Om Unit which pointed the way forward where club music was headed for the 2010s.

I could probably geek out on this for hours to a bunch of different directions or genres, eras, whatever. This is a decent resource for what feels like kind of a lost era of the internet though.

As a bonus, here's another mix from that early 2010s era i found really influential to my cohort of producers/DJs back then... and i could have sworn was an RA mix, not an essential mix. I looked for it on this list a lot, confused.
posted by emptythought at 4:13 AM on August 19 [1 favorite]

Pitchfork, which has been on a real streak of naming albums as ¡°best new music¡± lately, has just reviewed Thaemlitz¡¯s Mix and declared it ¡°best new music¡±. This is, I think, the first time they¡¯ve ever reviewed an episode of the RA podcast, and maybe any mix in a series.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:01 PM on August 28

O, but ugh, the idea that you must pick up on whatever puns Thaemlitz is suggesting! The mix might have layers, but it sounds good on its own, even if you aren¡¯t playing spot-the-oblique-idea.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:03 PM on August 28