Last Day On Earth: Sasha / Scuba / Guti [live] / Agoria / Kate Simko / Brad Miller / special guest Joris Voorn

If there are boundaries yet to be broken, then you can bet that Sasha has got them in the crosshairs. He's been battering them down since Shelley's, The Hacienda, Renaissance and Twilo; from Airdrawndagger to Invol3r. Since 2011, he's carved a new way with his increasingly pivotal Last Night On Earth imprint, the label that has introduced into its family fiercely forward-thinking producers like My Favourite Robot's James Teej, Simon Baker, ThermalBear, Ejeca, Ghosting Season, Max Cooper and Knox.

Then there was the arrival of the long-awaited third album in his 'Involver' series in 2013, the intricate and challenging 'Involv3r'. It combined on one disc Sasha's peerless command of dance floor sensibilities and on the other his skilful exploration of beatless soundscapes, featuring his exclusive interpretations of tracks from The xx, Blondes, Little Dragon, Benjamin Damage, Foals and ThermalBear. It also featured 'Shoot You Down', his own spine-chilling anthem with vocals from the beguiling Swedish chanteuse Kicki Halmos.

Boundaries out of the studio have been equally unsafe. Taking over with his Last Night on Earth parties around the globe, Sasha has brought nothing but the finest line-ups to clubbers around the world. Last summer he hit the world-renowned Space Ibiza with a monthly LNOE residency, which showcased the likes of Scuba, Catz & Dogz, Heidi, Magda and of course Sasha himself. He also hosted his first festival arena with Last Night on Earth at SW4 in the capital earlier this year.

It doesn’t stop here though. 2015 will see Sasha taking things to another level on and off the dance floor. Expect big things from his parties around the world, which he is running alongside his imprint label Last Night on Earth. In his own words, Sasha says, “We have some really exciting things planned for 2015, some great releases and I will be collaborating with some of the very talented artists we have championed”


Since 2003, Paul Rose – better known to the world as techno maverick Scuba – and his Hotflush imprint have shaped the direction of the electronic scene's bass-heavy landscape more than most.

Starting with the underground garage sound that became dubstep, and gradually teasing its dark, bass-heavy sonics through abstract electronica, jacking house and cavernous techno, they are the underground tastemakers behind era-defining club smashes like Joy Orbison's 'Hyph Myngo' and 2013's 'Untitled', the ubiquitous piano house banger by Paul Woolford. They also launched the careers of innovators as diverse as Mount Kimbie, George FitzGerald, and Sepalcure.

As a DJ and producer, meanwhile, Rose's personal achievements have seen him ascend to rank among the UK's electronic luminaries. He has released three artist albums, spun a mix for the esteemed DJ Kicks series, run a night at Berghain, and won a DJ Mag Best Live Act award in 2013.

A musical contrarian, Scuba has deliberately pushed against dance music currents, changing course when it suits him. After the melancholic statement that comprised his 2008 debut A Mutual Apathy, he released 2010's Triangulation, a widely acclaimed opus steeped in shadowy cross-genre electronics.

That was swiftly followed by excursions into deep 4/4 rhythms under the pseudonym SCB and then, almost out of nowhere, the release of 2011's Adrenalin EP which paved the way for the following year's jubilant 90's house-inflected Personality album. "Even though Triangulation was incredibly popular I made a very conscious decision not to continue in that kind of stuff" says Rose, "I intended for a good proportion of the people that were into Triangulation to hate Personality."

As a label, Hotflush's output has changed as much as the constantly developing Scuba sound. After a period where album projects were the norm on the label, the recent direction has been towards, as he puts it, "the grassroots nitty-gritty dance-scene stuff".

He continues: "We made a conscious decision to move away from albums and just release singles last year, which worked really well. We've released less and tried to make each single more of an event. In 2015 we're going to be back into albums though."

Moving forward, 2014 heralded a fresh musical approach for Scuba. Speaking frankly, he explains: "I felt that I'd taken that approach of being intentionally contrary to its fullest conclusion and that it was time to do something different." The Phenix series of EPs were the first sign of that: a darker, more introspective musical direction melding dancefloor dynamics with brooding atmospheres and spectral vocals.

With a new album scheduled for March 2015 those foundations look sure to be cemented in the months ahead, and with notable releases for Recondite and Locked Groove, the future for Rose and the Hotflush imprint looks as diverse and exciting as always.


A classically-trained jazz virtuoso and national rock 'n' roll hero in Argentina, Guti's double 12" pack for Desolat will leave you in no doubt of his ability to twist a snaking groove into something echoingly hypnotic. The tracks contained here are already a favourite in the record boxes of artists like Loco Dice, Seth Troxler and Marco Carola, while Guti's life story could itself be the subject of a story by Jorge Luis Borges: "I leave to several futures (not to all) my garden of forking paths."

Guti was born in an exceptionally musical, sprawling catholic family, which included orchestra directors, saxophone players and pianists. His grandfather and uncles emigrated from Russia after the war. His mother, an education consultant, is from Uruguay. On long hot summers in that neighbouring country, Guti would steal hours alone at the piano (first teaching himself how to play at the age of five) in a big house belonging to his uncle. Finally, some years later, the family accepted that he could really play — and at the age of 12 a friend of his mother gave him his first jazz shock by challenging him to match Oscar Peterson's performance on the Night Train record.

During the rule of the El Proceso military junta, Guti's family fled to cities in Venezuela and Costa Rica: a story arching across Latin America, France and Russia. As a child he soaked up poems and novels by Borges and Vargas Llosa and his father would sing him Cuban songs. He is influenced by the folk music of Argentina, which he says is both incredibly intri- cate and perfectly simple.

Guti loves adventures — the spark of discovery seems to be a driving force for him. In 2009 he bounced between Berlin, Athens and Paris, making tracks as he went. Although he plans to move to Düsseldorf in 2010 to hunker down in the studio to concentrate on the Guti techno and house project, it's unlikely he'll leave behind the spirit of the Latin America he knows. "I love Buenos Aires. It's a huge city… a huge jungle. Really fast, really crazy, dirty, messy. But really creative: amazing musicians. That happens with all the poor countries. We don't have money, so we play music. We write books."

As a teen, after getting into blues he began hanging with successful Argentine rock bands like the Black and Blues, Ratones Paranoicos, Viejas Locas and Los Piojos. "We were jamming, and I discovered that energy." Before long, his own band Jove- nes Pordioseros were playing to 10,000 people from Thursday through Saturday.

But it's not in Guti's nature to stay locked in one mode of music. He made time to study salsa from a Cuban teacher on the side, as well as studying jazz under various teachers including internationally-renowned pianist Ernesto Jodos.

It was in the studio of Latin Grammy-nominated producer and friend Leandro Martinez that Guti began experimenting with making house beats and singing on top. And having grown up with music, it didn't take long before he was banging out several tracks a day without breaking a sweat.

A heartbeat later, he'd landed a hit with Damian Schwarz on Frankfurt label Raum…Musik, and the tune was licensed by Loco Dice for his compilation The Lab. Guti passed a handful more tracks in Loco Dice's direction, and the die was cast. Guti's electronic career began to ignite.

Just two years after his first live sets in Europe, Desolat is proud to present Guti's Las Cosas Que No Se Tocan. The beats follow Guti across continents: Mr Good Vibes was composed in a hotel room in Stuttgart after an argument with a friend, while the serious dancefloor vibes of Sasa, the Hustler and Leuuu were channelled in Martinez' studio. Leuuu and the Hu- stler feature slices of glamorous, haunting vocals by Jason Walker, a British singer that Guti discovered on Myspace.

And Sasa boasts Guti's own vocal touches. Meanwhile, the track Aguanile is inspired by one of his favourite melodies as a child, one that he's collected many versions of. The last track on the release, El Campeon, reaches a bittersweet ending in the wide open space between percussive trills and a cut-out refrain, inspired by Guti's favourite Latin storylines of "broken hearts and pain".


Sébastien Devaud, aka Agoria, entered the world of electronic dance music at a peculiar moment in time. Unlike the first generation of techno producers, he's too young to have been actively listening to early 80's electronic pop by groups such as Depeche Mode or New Order. But unlike younger DJs and musicians, he's been exposed to house and techno more or less since the start of these genres.

Living in rural France, Agoria first got hooked to electronic music through listening to Kevin Saunderson's classic "Good Life" on the local radio as a twelve-year-old kid in 1988. He was so impressed by the Inner City hit that he spent the following afternoons washing his neighbours' cars to earn enough money to buy his first 12´. His next revelation came a few years later when one of the first DJ sets he experienced happened to be from Jeff Mills in nearby Lyon. « It was the first time that I saw a DJ using three turntables and a drum machine. He really created something completely new rather that just playing records. And the way he moved, his precision and speed,impressed me. »

Agoria started out as a DJ himself, quickly followed by organizing his own parties together with a group of friends (who also gave Séb Devaud his artist moniker loosely named after Agora – the title of their party series, meaning "meeting place" in ancient Greek). He started producing and releasing his own tracks in 1999 and first gained international recognition with a series of 12´s on
Pias Recordings in 2002, which were followed by the acclaimed album Blossom a year later. Since then, Agoria has released two more long-players The Green Armchair (2006) and soundtrack Go Fast (2008), all showcasing Agoria's talent for creating deep, stripped-back, melodic, techno tracks.

In addition Agoria has compiled three mix-cds that present his unique ability in pairing tracks of very different origins and layering them in creative, sometimes even awe-inspiring ways. Deservedly so, Resident Advisor named his contribution to the At The Controls series from 2007 as one of the best mix-cds of the past decade.

Apart from his own work as a DJ and producer, Sébastien Devaud has also helped to establish Nuits Sonores, an ambitious electronic and indie event that takes place all over the city of Lyon every Spring and has, over the last ten years, become one of the best European festivals.

Another important contribution has been the start of InFiné in 2006, a label that Devaud founded together with his friends Alexandre Cazac and Yannick Matray. InFiné is a label that follows no rules, shies away from trends and features young, new talents, from various parts of the world. Its releases – from Francesco Tristano's piano treatments to Danton Eeprom's sensual productions or Bachar Mar-Khalifé's dramatic arrangements – continue to surprise and have made InFiné a platform for new music that always challenges and excites it's listeners.

Heiko Hoffmann.


Getting her start stateside alongside Matthew Dear, Ryan Elliott, and the Spectral Sound crew, Kate Simko has quietly, yet consistently, established herself as one of dance music’s rising stars. A diverse musician, Kate's projects range from remixing Philip Glass, to composing film scores, to rocking jackin’ DJ sets, and producing her melodic, Chicago-flavoured take on house and techno.


A staple in the underground scene for over a decade - Brad Miller has consistently played alongside some of the biggest names in dance music including Sasha, Gui Boratto, Eric Prydz, Guy J, Chris Liebing, Adam Beyer, Guy Gerber, Paco Osuna, James Zabiela, and Hernan Cattaneo - in addition to being called on by top tier promoters and shows such as the Carl Cox & Friends stage at EDC, Electric Deluxe, Verboten, Made Event, and Dance.Here.Now.

His own Push The Night events have seen multiple residencies at award-winning clubs such as Sullivan Room, Verboten, Cielo, and Santos Party House - with his podcast of the same name breaking the Top 20 on iTunes. With over a decade of experience both behind the decks and on the front lines of the industry - Brad Miller is one to watch.