This past February, Tesfa Williams released his debut album—over 20 years into his career. Raves Of Future Past distilled decades of experience on London dance floors into a potent and powerful blend of grime, house, rave and techno. Made with an Elektron Digitakt to imitate the rough textures of early '00s UK dance music, the LP is an anachronistic history lesson that throws everything in a blender, imagining what gqom might sound like as an Eski track and giving new life to the short-lived "sublow" sound Williams helped invent with classic tracks like "Invasion," released under his earlier alias DJ Dread D.

Since the sublow days, however, Williams has become a torchbearer for UK house music and African diasporic sounds like Afro house and gqom in London. He's put out soulful hits like "Heartbeat"—recently reissued by Local Action—and released a steady stream of dance records for PMR and Strictly Rhythm. He's what you might call a jack of all trades, except for that he's actually a master of them all.

His RA Podcast charts his musical journey in reverse chronological order, starting with smooth, African-influenced sounds and winding through grime and dubstep, eventually landing at jungle. He threads a needle through diverse genres (and eras), and posits that the traditional UK hardcore continuum is a bigger spectrum than you might think, with gqom's heave and amapiano's log drum equally important in the musical equation. It's nearly two hours of UK dance music past and present, from a DJ who has lived it all.

@twilliamsmusic

at https://ra.co/podcast/935

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