Playlist of the Week: Sacha Robotti

"Looking Through The Glass" is a collab from my album I, ROBOTTI with the queen of Drum & Bass herself, DJ Rap, who I've been a fan of since “Spiritual Aura.” She was one of the first women to break through in the DnB world, and her influence on the scene is hard to overstate! Having her on this track felt surreal. Her ethereal vocal carries emotional depth – lyrics about learning to let go, finding lightness in the dark, and if you crash, just rebooting your heart. The deep bass notes build tension throughout and pay off in a big release after the main break. It's one of those tracks that works as well on headphones as it does on a system. Love playing this one out.

Classic rave jam from the UK released in 1990, Orbital’s "Chime" is one of those records that rewired an entire generation – recorded on a cheap cassette tape for less than £1, with a Roland TB-303 at its heart, it went on to be ranked one of the greatest dance singles of all time. Their Top of the Pops appearance became legendary in its own right when they showed up wearing Anti-Poll Tax t-shirts, refused to mime, and left their power plugs sitting on top of their equipment in plain sight to prove they weren't performing. 

I heard Carl Cox drop "Chime" at Fuse Club in Brussels around 1997 and was mind blown! I was a teenager, and that moment – that intro, the melody, the room - stays with me to this day.

Working with the iconic Perry Farrell on "Words" was a full pinch-me moment. Perry's presence on the album is something I still can't quite believe. His voice is in a category of its own, and his influence stretches across the broader cultural landscape – psychedelic rock with Jane's Addiction and Porno For Pyros, his experimental approach to sound, and of course creating Lollapalooza, which shaped the entire festival culture we all live in. The track itself has an unusual origin: Perry wrote it while Blakkat recorded and gifted it to me to build a beat around. The result is somewhere between techno and psychedelic electronica, def one of the tracks on the album I'm most proud of.

Marshall Jefferson is one of the founding fathers of house music – the man behind "Move Your Body", released on Trax Records in 1986. "Mushrooms" has a soothing spoken word narrative written by Jefferson himself, telling the story of a first psychedelic experience over a deep, hypnotic groove produced by Chris Liebing and Andrew Wooden aka Noosa Heads. 

The Justin Martin remix takes it somewhere else entirely. Justin is a San Francisco institution – one of the artists central to Dirtybird Records early identity, now running his own imprint What To Do – and what he does with "Mushrooms" is turn it into a proper journey. I heard him drop it at Watergate in Berlin around 2008 and the crowd went into another dimension! Still one of my favorite remixes of all time.

"Whistle Man" is an I, ROBOTTI album collab on Dirtybird with two genuine legends: Felix, the English producer behind "Don't You Want Me," one of the defining house anthems of the early nineties, and Eric D. Clark. California-born, Berlin living, a cultural institution, Eric is probably most famous for "From Disco to Disco", his hit record in conjunction with Whirlpool Productions with Justus Köhncke and Hans Nieswandt. Getting both of them together on one track was honestly a bit of a dream scenario. 

"Whistle Man" has a simple but powerful message: when the spirits hit you, blow your whistle, channel it, release it, let it out on the dancefloor. "Whistle Man" layers cheeky whistled motifs over suspenseful builds and a euphoric break, with Eric's soulful vocals adding depth and personality. Pure dance floor joy with a wink and a lot of soul.

Yoshitoshi Recordings, founded by Deep Dish (aka Sharam and Dubfire) in Washington DC, is one of the most respected dance labels of the nineties - and "Tick Tock" is one of its most enduring records. Produced by John Ciafone under his Chiapet alias – one half of the New York house duo Mood II Swing – the "War of the Worlds Mix" is a slow-building, tension-filled monster. That ticking vocal counting time throughout the track, the relentless groove, the way it locks you in.. and that helicopter sound cutting through the mix, is one of those production details you never forget. 

I first heard this in my teens and it floored me. My relationship with Yoshitoshi runs deep – when I was still part of Robosonic, I remixed Eddie Amador's "House Music" for them in 2014, then "Tick Tock" for their 20th anniversary in 2015, and Eddie Amador's "Rise" in 2016. A full-circle moment, and one of my proudest remixes.

"The Singularity" was born in Gene Farris' Chicago studio during one of those late-night sessions where the ideas flow a little more freely than usual. Gene is a genuine House music legend, and making music with him in his own city felt like tapping into the roots of something deeply real. I've known his music since I bought his tracks on vinyl in the mid nineties. 

The track is our take on the Singularity: that inevitable, terrifying moment when artificial intelligence surpasses human control and decides it no longer needs us. A rogue AI has taken the wheel, and it's not stopping. You can hear it in the robot vocal cutting through the mix – cold, methodical, seeking its target. Dubstep-weight bass colliding with house rhythms, dark and cold-blooded. Equal parts dancefloor weapon and end-of-the-world soundtrack. We may have seen this coming! So honored to have Gene Farris on my album I, ROBOTTI!

Len Faki is one of the defining figures of Berlin techno, a Berghain resident since the club opened in 2004, and founder of Figure Records – home to Johannes Heil, Slam, Luke Slater, Tony Lionni and more. "My Black Sheep" was one of his breakthrough tracks in 2007, the year he swept the Groove Magazine reader poll – Germany's leading electronic music publication at the time, winning Best Track, Best Producer, and Best Newcomer. 

Radio Slave – Matt Edwards, the English producer, techno heavyweight, and founder of Rekids – takes the original somewhere deeper and more hypnotic. There's an attitude to it that I love, a tension that never lets up! I heard Radio Slave play this at Panorama Bar when I was living in Berlin until a decade ago. We recently played a b2b together in Hawaii, and he also did a stunning remix of my I, ROBOTTI album track "The Flood" with Blakkat — stay tuned for the release of that one!

Mathew Jonson is one of the most distinctive voices in electronic music – a Vancouver-born, Berlin-based producer and live act who plays everything himself, in real time, on analog gear. His releases on Perlon, Kompakt, M_nus and Cocoon established him as a producer of rare vision, with tracks like "Marionette" and "Decompression" becoming instant techno classics.

He's also one third of Cobblestone Jazz, the improvised live techno trio with Danuel Tate and Tyger Dhula, still active today. "Return of the Zombie Bikers", released on his Wagon Repair label in 2005, is a record we loved to play out at Robosonic shows during my Berlin vinyl DJ days. That bassline is devastating, the snare is wild – and even though it's a tongue in cheek title, the track is dark, spatial, and affecting me in a way that's hard to put into words. One of those records that sounds like nothing else.

Green Velvet (aka Cajmere) is one of the most important figures in Chicago house and techno history – and still one of the most vital and relevant artists in the game. A chemical engineering graduate who ditched grad school to make music on a sixty-buck keyboard, a cheap four-track and a drum machine, he went on to found Cajual Records and Relief Records, two of the most respected Chicago house labels of the nineties. With classics like "Percolator", "Flash" and "Preacher Man", Green Velvet was a huge influence on me growing up in Brussels, and "Destination Unknown" was massive in the clubs there – so much that it got its own Belgian pressing on Music Man Records, which is one I got. Nine minutes of dark, industrial house groove with one of the most apocalyptic breaks in dance music!