This week, Resident Advisor released its 500th podcast featuring mixes by Dixon, Steffi, Nicolas Jaar, Ben UFO and Omar-S. To celebrate the occasion, RA set up a microsite where the electronic music community can now (finally) stream all 499 previous installments of the podcast archive.
As Thump reports, the 499 podcasts translate into about a decade's worth of "club mixes that form the series' core, live sets, mixtapes, label showcases, sound collages and soundtracks for imaginary films." The first episode features Troy Pierce whereas the 499th episode features DJ PayPal.
Over the years the podcast has featured artists like Caribou, Joe Goddard, the Gaslamp Killer, Apparat, Pearson Sound, Black Coffee, Floating Points, Maya Jane Coles, Adam Beyer, Kode 9 and Nina Kraviz just to name a few.
While the podcasts have only just been unarchived and made available to stream, a few have been making their rounds of the internet over the years. Listen to Sasha's contribution below.
Resident Advisor has been actively dedicating its pages to all things electronic music-related since 2001, and like a lot of older online music magazines is designed more like a community resource complete with listings, directories and other industry tools than it is a straight-up newswire. When the site launched its podcast in March 2006, it was the first online dance music magazine with a podcast.
Richard Chinn launched the podcast and has remained central to it throughout the past decade of programming. His inspiration for the weekly podcast was Tim Sweeney's Beats in Space, which has been taking over the airwaves at New York City's WNYU every Tuesday night since 1999.
"When we started it was an interesting musical time," states Chinn in the introduction to the 500th podcast. He explains: "Progressive house was out. Electro house and new rave were in. Minimal was breaking. Genre cycles were speeding up."
Skimming through the entire list of shows, one cannot help but reflect on the past decade in electronic dance music. For example, the introduction to Four Tet's mix was in a way an introduction to the very concept of Four Tet being a DJ, which has long since become the expectation of him as an artist. Similar anecdotes abound.
While the scene has changed immeasurably and continues to change at a more rapid pace than ever before, the impetus behind the podcast has remained notably consistent. Every week Resident Advisor gets some of the world's biggest names in electronic music to submit a 60 to 90-minute mix.
Aside from a few early hiccups, the podcast has been going strong each and each and every Monday ever since the first show aired in 2006. Here's to 500 more episodes.
