The drum & bass veteran talks about bass music eras, dance culture in America and his new album, Contact.
British artist Nicolaas Douwma, AKA Sub Focus, has been steadily putting out big-room drum & bass since the early 2000s. In more recent years, he's become staggeringly popular, releasing a string of Top 40 UK pop hits that have made him synonymous with a more mainstream sound. His influence looms large across a whole generation of young producers, particularly in the US.
In this Exchange, Douwma sits down with Resident Advisor editor Gabe Szatan at the beautiful Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. They speak about how he hit number one in the US dance music charts last year, as well as how drum & bass moved from being popular with a "secret clique of people" to becoming what, for lack of a better term, could be called "brostep."
There's a new Sub Focus album dropping on November 21st called Contact, which includes collaborations with Grimes and Katy B. Grab your copy when it comes out. Watch this interview in full on our YouTube channel, or listen to the audio via SoundCloud, Spotify or Apple Music. -Chloe Lula
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The drum & bass veteran talks about bass music eras, dance culture in America and his new album, Contact.
British artist Nicolaas Douwma, AKA Sub Focus, has been steadily putting out big-room drum & bass since the early 2000s. In more recent years, he's become staggeringly popular, releasing a string of Top 40 UK pop hits that have made him synonymous with a more mainstream sound. His influence looms large across a whole generation of young producers, particularly in the US.
In this Exchange, Douwma sits down with Resident Advisor editor Gabe Szatan at the beautiful Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. They speak about how he hit number one in the US dance music charts last year, as well as how drum & bass moved from being popular with a "secret clique of people" to becoming what, for lack of a better term, could be called "brostep."
There's a new Sub Focus album dropping on November 21st called Contact, which includes collaborations with Grimes and Katy B. Grab your copy when it comes out. Watch this interview in full on our YouTube channel, or listen to the audio via SoundCloud, Spotify or Apple Music. -Chloe Lula
Andrew Weatherall's first official posthumous mix. The only b2b DJ Harvey ever agreed to. Six hours at Trouw. The rarest of rare for RA.1000: this one's special.
When mulling which direction to go in for RA's 1000th mix celebrations, many options came to mind. Some shadowy character 2-stepping around the fringe of our collective consciousness? An impossible-level IDM icon?
All tempting. But, ultimately, we are a DJ-forward publication and this is a DJ mix series. It felt truer to the history of the RA Podcast to release deep vault material from a time when the world of niche records felt different, tighter, more discrete.
The fourth-longest mix in the RA Podcast's history is an unrepeatable marathon set recorded in 2012 at a superclub that no longer exists. (2012, incidentally, is farther away from 2025 than 2012 was from 2000; if we have to clock it, so do you.)
It's the coming together of one British icon who passed away in 2020, and another whose time on the road has scaled back considerably as of late. DJ Harvey agreed to exactly one b2b set in his life: this one, with Andrew Weatherall.
The night took place at Trouw, an Amsterdam club already considered legendary before it shuttered its doors in the opening hours of 2015, as part of RA VS, a series anchored around start-to-close combinations. Harvey was at the peak of an irresistible career second act, which dovetailed with a disco revival that dominated clubs for years. Weatherall, with infinite brownie points stockpiled from the '90s, remained everyone's favourite debonair psychonaut.
What follows is 385 minutes of arpeggiated chug and slow-cresting climaxes, chronicling a moment when the resting heart rate of dance floors plunged lower than potentially any comparable point in the 21st century.
If you've got time to spare, a fun side game is sussing out who plays what. The goosebumps-inducing slide into a disco-dub cover of Echo & the Bunnymen? Smart money's on Weatherall. Exuberant EQ'ing of the comically overripe bass on The Isley Brothers? Gotta be Harvey. As for the low 'n slow, lightly spangled house that was all the rage in the early 2010s (think Maxxi Soundsystem, Disco Bloodbath, Rub & Tug, C.O.M.B.I. and Full Pupp), it's anyone's guess. The pair putter around the 100 BPM range for so long that nudging up to 127 by the double encore feels practically like flooring it down the highway.
When we kicked off our RA.1000 campaign, we outlined a few goals: tick off a handful of long-awaited dream guests, honour architects who shaped the world around us and deliver recordings you truly can't hear anywhere else. We sought to render an accurate picture of DJ culture in 2025 for posterity, and get arms around some of the key storylines since we went 5 for RA.500.
DJing and the mythology around it has undergone a quantum leap since 2012, let alone 2006, 1996 or 1989. It's a scarcely-recognisable scene. For those of us who were kicking around in the former, there's a creeping melancholy that our prime is fast becoming a matter of historical record. The killing moon really did come too soon.
Yet a sense of accomplishment is bundled within that melancholy. Appreciation, too. 1000 episodes is great innings, and we're thankful for every contributor and facilitator who built this series, week by week, mix by mix. Where will DJ sets—or any of this—be in 2044? Hard to say; best not to overthink that one. Instead, enjoy luxuriating in the company of two of the greatest to ever do it, together, for the first and last time. – Gabriel Szatan, Editor (RA)
@andrew-weatherall
Read the interview with DJ Harvey and Andrew Weatherall's family at https://ra.co/podcast/1016. Listen to all RA.1000 mixes, as well as the complete history of the RA Podcast, at 1000.ra.co
RA Podcast
The drum & bass veteran talks about bass music eras, dance culture in America and his new album, Contact.
British artist Nicolaas Douwma, AKA Sub Focus, has been steadily putting out big-room drum & bass since the early 2000s. In more recent years, he's become staggeringly popular, releasing a string of Top 40 UK pop hits that have made him synonymous with a more mainstream sound. His influence looms large across a whole generation of young producers, particularly in the US.
In this Exchange, Douwma sits down with Resident Advisor editor Gabe Szatan at the beautiful Red Rocks Amphitheater in Colorado. They speak about how he hit number one in the US dance music charts last year, as well as how drum & bass moved from being popular with a "secret clique of people" to becoming what, for lack of a better term, could be called "brostep."
There's a new Sub Focus album dropping on November 21st called Contact, which includes collaborations with Grimes and Katy B. Grab your copy when it comes out. Watch this interview in full on our YouTube channel, or listen to the audio via SoundCloud, Spotify or Apple Music. -Chloe Lula
