An exciting new foray for me on this month’s Narr show, with my first ever guest slot, inviting my dear friend Arbitrage to take the reins for the hour. PR necessitates hyperbole, which makes it a little difficult to make statements like this in an honest way, but it's no exaggeration to say this mix affected me the most out of any I've heard this year. It's absolutely gorgeous and I couldn't recommend it more wholeheartedly. I know Raph from uni days and over the years we've shared music, ideas, and often bafflingly irreconcilable differences of opinion. But quite quietly he's developed the thing I'm drawn to the most in all my favourite DJs: a sound that's wide-ranging, hard to pin down, but instantly recognisable. It's also a sound that's *nice*. I'm drawn to the ecstatically beautiful and the ethereal, but these things appear to me as flashes of brilliance, all the brighter for the general malaise of an angst-ridden, terrifying world. I quite rarely feel compelled by DJs that have a generally positive sound, though the small handful of exceptions are people I listen to obsessively - Leif, CCL (sometimes!), and Nick Kagame spring to mind. Raph is amongst these exceptions and I think it speaks to a fundamental difference in our personalities. He has a (seemingly uncomplicated) love for life that's completely infectious and totally honest. Not the forced fun of Shoreditch cocktail bars and disco tunes in trainer ads, but a joyfulness that comes from the heart. I hope you enjoy this mix even a fraction of how much I did, listening for the first time in the sun outside SOUP on a Sunday afternoon, still glowing from a gorgeous weekend. It's got so many of my favourite things: a sense of wistful yearning, prominence of weird and wonderful vocals, a folky, rootsy attachment to disparate times and spaces, and a deep, meditative sound world. And none of the abrasive, angsty shit I usually throw in. Bliss xx Tomorrow 12-1 📻