For a lot of dance music lovers, podcasts are life. Regular transmissions from our favorite DJs & producers have become the best way to keep tabs genres of music & how certain sounds evolve over time. The big ones like Club Life, A State of Trance & Group Therapy are wonderful, but outside of the realm of crowd favorites, there are a number of fantastic podcasts that you may be missing out on. To fix that, here are 10 of the best podcasts you’re not listening to.
NOISIA has managed to create a dope little podcast with a lot of music that’s rare to hear outside of the UK. This neurofunky end of drum & bass, dubstep & bass music deserves way more exposure, as we could all use a little more drum & bass in our lives.
While everyone knows about A State of Trance, the trance podcast I never miss every week is actually the Future Sounds of Egypt by Aly & Fila. The track selection includes excellent classics and new Trance from all over the world. The picks from Eastern Europe, Russia & Southeast Asia are stellar, and I always hear tracks I end up buying/saving. Few podcasts can do that consistently, and Aly & Fila hit the mark every time.
Switching gears, for the fans of techno, tech-house and minimal techno, Umek & 1605 is a consistently quality podcast. Instead of focusing on a single artist, they skip around and bring a lot of undiscovered talent out for people to hear. In the one I linked, Agent Orange, who played at EDC Vegas last year, pushes an hour of techno & tech-house that brings you to the Brooklyn warehouses he spins in.
Monstercat is my favorite success story of the EDM era. They continue to feature forward thinking producers, giving them a platform to push limits of production & composition. I may not like every single release of theirs, but sometimes, it’s so transcendentally good that it couldn’t have come out on any other label. Their 2015 Staff Picks mix is a great round up of what the future sounds like, so don’t sleep on it y’all.
Boxed is not for the faint of heart. This dark, murky, bass-filled podcast brings in some of the heaviest, dirtiest sounds coming out of London right now. Named after a club night somewhere in London, this podcast will shove your face into grime, dubstep, garage and a bunch of sounds that might have the casual listener grabbing for their pearls. For everyone interested in the Gesaffelstein end of the pool, this is for you.
This next one, Aus Liebe zur Freiheit, doesn’t even have press materials in English, to give you a sense of how far out there it is. Electroswing continues to grow outside of the USA in leaps and bounds. I could eat this stuff for breakfast every day, and it seems the European DJs are light years ahead of us when it comes to fusing that vintage swing sound with funky house.
On the lighter side of things, Nora En Pure‘s podcast is a sunny but not quite tropical podcast that keeps the energy & mood up. It’s a great mix series for the winter, as it’s almost impossible to shiver while listening to this stuff. Don’t worry Northern Hemisphere people, summer is coming back soon.
As the dance music world retreats from Big Room/Anthem house, more and more of the deep sounds are finding homes. Eelke Kleijn is one of those German wunderkind that occasionally bless NYC with dope tech house parties. The podcast shows just how much you’re missing if you don’t go to ADE.
Continuing the deep house hype train, Sugar free Radio based out of Miami is another quality regular release. This one focuses a little more on the higher production values & club sounds as opposed to the dark warehouse vibe, but it’s all quality. Rony Seikaly is a great selectro that knows his market and delivers. If you need a little Miami beach in your day, he’s got you covered.
Last, but certainly not least, the Talon&Claw podcast, curated by whiteowljaguar, is one of a kind. They focus on a blend of forward looking sounds, but instead of getting bigger, the way Monstercat does, these sounds are smaller, more minimal, deeper & distinctly mature. It’s a global vibe, in a neat little package. This mix from Dopeshoes is a perfect example of what they’re trying to do, so show love to both!
