For RA.1000, DJ Sprinkles' first mix in over a decade is a powerful meditation on the genocide in Gaza.

Dance music often relies on simple narratives: release, escape, unity. But those narratives can often feel inadequate, and even at times, hollow. Or, as Terre Thaemlitz might bluntly put it, just "shitty."

For her first mix in around 15 years, Terre Thaemlitz AKA DJ Sprinkles - who formerly mixed the beloved RA.188 - challenges us to think differently. "I felt this 1000th podcast should reflect the moment in which it was made," she told us in her Q&A.

And what is this moment? Every day since Israel's current assault on Gaza began, an average of 28 children have been killed. That's an entire classroom, every day, for over 600 days (at the time of writing). It's a staggering figure that only captures a fragment of the listless cruelty imposed on the strip, and leading human rights groups across the spectrum now echo what Palestinians have long said: Israel is committing genocide.

Faced with such horror, what can music really do? How political can it truly be? For RA.1000, Thaemlitz gives us an unflinching rebuke to the idea that music should provide escapism. Running just over 70 minutes, their mix weaves ambient fragments and jazz passages, woven around samples from regional media and the voices of outspoken Jewish critics like Gabor Maté and Norman Finkelstein.

If you're familiar with Thaemlitz's work, the impact of her RA.1000 will come as no surprise. Born in Missouri, Thaemlitz followed the "typical queer migration story," moving to New York in 1986. In the midst of the AIDS crisis and Reagan-era culture wars, Thaemlitz would get her start making mixtapes for the anarchic AIDS activist group, ACT UP, as well as a residency at Sally's II, an infamous midtown transsexual club.

"House wasn't so much a sound as a situation," she wrote in the liner notes for her seminal Midtown 120 Blues, our album of the year in 2009. "The majority of DJs - DJs like myself - were nobodies in nowhere clubs: unheard and unpaid. In the words of Sylvester: reality was less 'everybody is a star,' and more 'I who have nothing.'"

Thaemlitz would lose that Sally's II residency for refusing to play "the typical wailing diva vocal tracks," and her body of work has carried that same uncompromising streak ever since. She has advocated for offline digital culture long before it became fashionable to boycott streaming platforms, and her musical catalogue resists simplification - whether through a 29-hour piano solo on Soulnessless or the sample-heavy, politically charged deep house of DJ Sprinkles.

As DJ Sprinkles, Thaemlitz explored house music without the frills of narrative, rejecting the utopian fictions and spiritualised fantasies offered up by the music industry. "The house nation likes to pretend clubs are an oasis from suffering," she said on Midtown 120 Blues. "But suffering is in here, with us."

For Terre Thaemlitz, music is never just music. Her RA.1000 arrives as a document of its time, a reminder that in an age of relentless human suffering, the most political act is to refuse the illusion of escape.

Can you tell us the idea behind this mix? What do you hope listeners will take away from it?

I felt this 1000th podcast should reflect the moment in which it was made. And I think nothing more clearly typifies the maddening hypocrisies of our current global political climate than Jewish people who are critical of Israel and Zionism being branded and penalised as anti-Semitic. If the cultural undercurrents weren't so macabre, it would be slapstick.

Debates around Israel have been going on for more than a century. Palestinians have been continuously subjected to unspeakable cruelty since before myself and most listeners were even born. The ideological hoops people around the world are tirelessly programmed to jump through in order to keep the colonial violence going has been an ever present shadow over so many of our lifetimes - regardless of ideology, nationality or faith. What world powers (particularly my home country the United States) have enabled and continue to facilitate in Gaza is unforgivable.

This multi-generational reality undercuts any claims to human social progress, and reveals how modern social advancement is an illusion reliant upon the displacement of suffering beyond one's own borders. The methodical practices of violence used in Gaza have also foreshadowed many other forms of social control. Today in the West, that previously exported tyranny and chaos inflicted upon the Middle East for centuries by Western powers is finally coming home to roost. Not through foreign terrorism, but through our own domestic policies. Not through "Trump," but through those with even greater and more perverse powers who control all major political parties. Powers so strong that they can keep the Palestinian genocide going despite overwhelming public outrage.

It is an Orwellian era where more and more people are realizing that there are no democracies, only oligarchies. Every hope is ultimately revealed to be manipulative propaganda. The only coping mechanism we are given is Two Minutes Hate, as described in George Orwell's prophetic novel 1984. In the book, the character of O'Brien described the future to Winston:

"Always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - for ever. And remember that it is for ever. The face will always be there to be stamped upon. The heretic, the enemy of society, will always be there, so that he can be defeated and humiliated over again. Everything that you have undergone since you have been in our hands - all that will continue, and worse. The espionage, the betrayals, the arrests, the tortures, the executions, the disappearances will never cease. It will be a world of terror as much as a world of triumph."

How heartbreaking that such a grim vision of the future so accurately describes the historical reality of Israeli policies in Gaza up to now. How scarring that promises of Palestinian freedom and self-determination always prove to be nothing but strategic bait and deception. How tormenting are the majority of futures offered by the world to Palestinians. How fitting that all of our futures will echo the future of Gaza.

Can you share a mix that's particularly special to you? What makes it a stand out?

I actually don't listen to online mixes or streamed music.

In a world where technology is rapidly changing the way we DJ, how do you see the future of DJing and mixing evolving?

Within my lifetime, electronic dance music has already become the de facto soundtrack to shopping malls and daily commercial transactions. That includes previously "underground" genres like deep house. Sometimes I will be in a store, and some algorithmically-composed house track comes on, and I'll think, "Wow, thirty years ago that would have actually sounded amazing." But it is not 30 years ago, and it does not sound amazing.

The current situation makes it impossible. I suspect the future of DJing will continue this path of distribution and marketing algorithms, with less and less connections to socio-material sites. Most mixes will be auto-generated. The remaining actual DJs themselves, like everyone else, will be socially conditioned by those algorithm-driven environments, and not even realize how culturally programmed, vacuous and alienating their musical choices have become. Even today, DJing is increasingly a culturally celebrated performance of "making choices" with no actual choices being made. That trajectory will continue. It will all be utterly symptomatic of the situation at hand, as DJing always is.

You're often described as an experimental musician. Does that label feel accurate to you, and how would you define your own practice?

I have always tended to call myself a "producer," which is an attempt to minimise creative blah-blah by emphasising notions of labor and production when making audio under capitalism. My main interests are more generally focussed on cultural criticism, the culturally minor, alternate histories and strategies of the closet - all of which have more to do with social relations, rather than individual "talent" or other things typically associated with conventional musicology. But of course, just by cultural association, it makes sense that a majority of people see me as a musician, just as a majority of people presume I care about what pronouns people choose to use when talking about me. So I just let people label as they like - and watch as they even sometimes start imposing rules on others about those labels - all the while personally not really caring, other than to state what I am saying here when directly asked.

You continue to tour as a DJ, and in past interviews, you've said it feels "grotesque" when audiences stare at the DJ instead of dancing with each other. How has that shift in attention changed your experience of performing?

That shift happened in the 1990s, so it has been the standard for a majority of my career. It is not surprising at this point. But still boring, and representative of the long ago death of a particular moment in sexual cruising on the dance floor.

Your RA.1000 mix weaves in media clippings and political voices, echoing the sample-based approach of your earlier work. How do you think about choosing, framing, and layering spoken material in your music today, and what role does context play in that process?

Well, my early work used a lot of digital processing on voices. Between the loss of my favourite software to technology upgrades, and the popularisation of such processes in pop music - things like the overwhelming use of autotune - digital processing no longer holds the same sonic relationships to cultural peripheries they once had. So as the years have passed, I have been doing less processing, and allowing quotes to play out at length. Particularly in this podcast, I refrained from editing and just let the quotes play through, only adding a little delay here and there.

Over the years I have followed Jewish debates around Israel and Zionism, which resonate in certain ways with debates between sects of Christianity that were a massive part of my upbringing in a deeply Catholic family living in the Evangelical bible belt - including how various sects approached notions of freedom, pacifism and warfare. I find the arguments of critical Jews really unpack the Zionist weaponisation of accusations of anti-Semitism for ulterior motives. They make it easier for all of us to think about what is happening in Palestine and Israel not as a timeless battle of faiths (as the Zionist narrative insists), but as the result of a specific twentieth century colonial project.

Of course, my emphasis on critical Jewish voices in this podcast is not intended to minimise or distract from the voices of Palestinians and others suffering under Israel's attacks. Rather, as a producer outside of that region and experience, I have personally found them very informative and wanted to highlight some of them here.

When thinking of this podcast as a piece of media, focusing on Jewish critical voices also complicates likely accusations of anti-Semitism towards myself and RA, which will certainly come. I know from experience that it is unavoidable. For example, in the early 2000s, any time I mentioned "Marxism" in the press, I was spammed with accusations of anti-Semitism. I eventually discovered those emails all traced back to Canadian Zionist student groups who had been indoctrinated to believe any interest in Karl Marx was inseparable from an endorsement of Stalin's persecution of Jews. Today, as more and more Jewish people critical of Zionism find themselves branded anti-Semitic, the power of such false accusations seems to be diminishing on a cultural level.

Most people can tell the difference between actual anti-Semitism and weaponised accusations of anti-Semitism. Simultaneously - and as a direct result of that growing awareness - in places like the US, UK and Germany, on a legal level we find accusations of anti-Semitism being weaponised for greater and ever-broader censorship and punishment of people who criticise the industrial military complex's endless bloodshed throughout the Middle East. While this tension around accusations of anti-Semitism has always been a part of debates around Israel, it has become exponentially intensified in recent years. Until now, most people felt too intimidated to even mention this dynamic. The fact that today more people are recognising and publicly speaking about it invariably makes those in power who back Zionist and Western military agendas desperate to restore intimidation and silence in any way they can. Ironically (or not so...), their own tactics increasingly lean towards the fascistic. I felt if I was to make a podcast about Gaza in 2025, it should transparently document and incorporate these dynamics.

Tracklist

Future Islands - Tybee Island (DJ Sprinkles Extended Edit)
Billy Paul - I See the Light
Pieter Nooten & Michael Brook - The Choice
Susan Alcorn - Dancing
Ludvig Cimbrelius - Langtan Efter Att Leva
Loren Mazzacane & Kath Bloom - It's So Hard to Come Home
Terje Rypdal, Miroslav Vitous & Jack DeJohnette - Uncomposed Appendix
Cortex - Go Round
Vladislav Delay - Stop Talking
Badgerlore - The Crops That You Tend
Bing and Ruth - go on.

With the voices of Two Good Jewish Boys (Naor Meningher and Eytan Weinstein), Stephen Kapos, Eran Efrati, Norman Finkelstein and Gabor Maté.