Last Night On Earth: Sasha / Scuba / Agoria / Ashwin Khosa

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.


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.


Ashwin Khosa is a young recording artist and DJ, born in Hong Kong but ethnically Indian. He came to the USA in 2010 to study at the University of Pennsylvania and eventually moved to Brooklyn to pursue his dream and talent for electronic music production and performance. Originally listening to his father's trance collection at a young age, his curiosity led him deeper into the underground house