Rave Curious Podcast

Curses Discusses Moving to Berlin, Trouble & Bass, and a Crazy Shower A talk with Trouble and Bass founder and former Drop the Lime, Luca Venezia. Following a great talk with Radio Slave, the curiosity continues on the second episode of the Rave Curious Podcast with host Joshua Glazer. This time around, Joshua sits down in Berlin with New York native Luca Venezia, who is probably best known as the founder of seminal NYC label Trouble & Bass (RIP), as well as for his artist project Drop the Lime, which is currently on hiatus as he explores deeper realms of house and techno under his new DJ and production alias, Curses. Following the saddening discontinuation of T&B, Luca recently made a move towards a permanent residence in Berlin. Check out the conversation as these two Berlin expats talk about the DJ-producer's recent move to the techno capital, Luca's early days being raised by artists in a pre-gentrification downtown New York, and his early career as an abstract electronic artist before breaking out in Brooklyn with the now-legendary Trouble and Bass parties. You might even hear about that time he found himself playing rockabilly to EDM fans in Las Vegas. We also learn about a particularly amazing bathroom that Joshua is personally familiar with, as well as Luca's new label, Safer At Night. On the flip side, Joshua tells Luca some tales about coming up in Detroit's legendary 90s techno scene while the two laugh about trap music.

Tommie Sunshine Is Just Trying Fix the World's Problems The Chicago-born DJ is ready to revolt and Underground Resistance's label manager gets real about race on the Rave Curious Podcast. This week's episode of the Rave Curious Podcast goes beyond the usual dance music discussions and tries to tackle some serious issues facing the world in 2016 with two of the scene's most outspoken individuals, Tommie Sunshine and Underground Resistance label manager Cornelius Harris. Tommie Sunshine is an American rave icon with a 25-year history as a DJ, producer and provocateur. He's also something of an oddity in his ability to move easily between the underground scene and mainstream EDM industry as an unparalleled authority on all things dance music. In conversation, he veers from drugs and art to club culture's attempts to overthrowing the system—or as he put it "solving the world's problems." It's one of the most enthusiastic Rave Curious chats to date. We also speak with Cornelius Harris, the label manager of Detroit's legendary independent techno label Underground Resistance, regarding the recent debate about race triggered by techno pioneer Juan Atkins' outspoken objections to The DJ List, as well as Harris' own concern about how Detroit's unheralded artists are portrayed in the media.

Jean Michel Jarre Reflects on His Life as One of Electronic Music's First Superstars Think EDC is huge? The French electronic pioneer once played for 3.5 million fans. Everybody likes to talk about how huge EDM has gotten, but you'd have to take the single day attendance at EDC Las Vegas (134,000) and multiply 26 times to reach the 3.5 million folks who witnessed Jean Michel Jarre's 1997 concert in Moscow. The event marked the fourth time Jarre broke his own world record for largest outdoor concert attendance and capped off a career that began during the infancy of electronic music of the 1960s. "Electronic music is not born with Avicii," he says of EDM's current dominance of the cultural conversation on the latest episode of Rave Curious Podcast. Jarre reveals the thoughtful foundation that propelled him to reach the absolute heights of fame, from his early years helping to invent the very idea of synthetically produced music as part of Paris' musique concrete community, to his current undertaking of two albums, Electronica and Electronica 2, that see the legend collaborating with artists as diverse as Cyndi Lauper and Jeff Mills.

Cassy Dug Deep Into the Heart of Techno and Instead Found Soul The European techno favorite talks about the challenges of getting funky. As the daughter of an Austrian mother and Barbadian father, raised in Vienna with a British passport, the appeal of Cassy as an international DJ has always matched her own global upbringing. Yet in practice, the DJ born Catherine Britton's experience as a resident DJ at Panorama Bar has led many to associate her singlehandedly with the underground Berlin scene of the early 2000s. That's about to change, with a new album titled Donna, that breaks free of the conventional European techno tropes and replaces them with rich Americanized soul music. "Do I have the courage to be a soulful musician?" she asks herself on the Rave Curious Podcast, in a conversation that touches on her multicultural upbringing, the salad days of Berlin's minimal techno scene, and her current quest for a (semi-)permanent home.

How Drumcell Helped Turn Los Angeles Into A Global Techno Capital How the Droid Behavior co-founder built a scene from scratch. For all its reputation as a rave and EDM capital, Los Angeles never had much resembling an international techno scene until Drumcell and his Droid Behavior posse started throwing event in the early 2000s. For 16 years, the LA-born producer Moe Espinosa and his partners Vidal and Vangelis Vargas (who produce techno as Raíz) made bringing techno to Tinsel Town their life's mission. And it worked, with LA now hosting multiple techno events every weekend, while the Droid Behavior crew tour their brand of decidedly non-West Coast sounding techno around the world. Espinosa sat down with Rave Curious at the Vice studios by the beach in Venice, over an hour's drive from his end of East Los Angeles, to talk about what it took to build a scene from scratch, about this inspiration he took from Detroit and Chicago, and about the endless flights back and forth to Europe while keeping what he built at home alive.