There’s a particular kind of DJ whose sets feel less like a genre showcase and more like a map of everywhere they’ve ever been. Rakim Under is one of them. Raised between Memphis and Spain, with Lebanese-Chilean roots woven through both, his relationship to music was never going to sit inside one lane — and a decade into digging, producing, and building himself into one of our community’s most exciting artists, it still doesn’t.
Long before Rakim ever touched a mixer, his ear was already being shaped by geography. He goes on to explain how that mix of places and cultures shapes the way he hears music, “You learn a lot about different cultures really quickly. You understand from an early age that there is so much beauty in all corners of the world, with each one bringing something unique to the table. You also find similarities between them and begin to understand the connections. This has all shaped the way I hear and view music, where I draw inspiration from, and how that’s converted into a record or onto the dancefloor.”
That instinct for connection over categorisation is easiest to hear on M.A.D 005, the EP that swings from Latin house into Bollywood-tinged breaks and electro without pausing to explain itself. It’s a release that raises an obvious question about how deliberately — or not — Rakim thinks about genre while he’s actually in the studio. He gives his thoughts on dealing with genres while producing, “When I made those tunes around six years ago, I wasn’t really thinking about genre at all. I was thinking about sounds and palettes I liked and just having fun messing around with them. Nowadays, I try to find more of a balance. Sometimes it’s still about jamming and following an idea until you end up somewhere you never expected.
Other times, I like to picture a whole sonic world and then build a journey within that world. In the more recent years, I’ve loved making tunes that carry qualities from different eras, where you can hear traces of different times without the record necessarily belonging to any one of them.”
Rakim’s longest-running creative relationship is with David Triana, his partner in Soursopp — a project that started as a party and has since grown into a genuine institution within London’s scene. Behind the decks together, the pair have developed a kind of shared telepathy that’s become central to how they both DJ. Rakim goes on to explain his relationship with David Triana and their collaborative performances, “Playing b2b naturally takes you into places that you might not have expected to arrive at. There’s a shared sense of where you want to steer the ship, but you’re constantly handing the steering wheel over and receiving it back. Sometimes you’re leading, sometimes you’re following, and then one of you might suddenly make a turn that shifts the whole direction of the set. I love that unpredictability. It keeps you on your toes and forces you to react in the moment rather than getting too comfortable with where you thought things were going.”
That same instinct for evolution shows up in how the wider Soursopp project has changed over time — from a scrappy party series into something closer to an institution, even as the frequency of actual events has slowed right down. Having started as a party, it has now grown into something people talk about as a real fixture of London’s scene. It was interesting to learn how the project has evolved over the years, “The ethos will never change. At its core, Soursopp has always been about bringing people together through a shared appreciation of music. What has changed is where we put our energy. With our schedules now, we’re much more focused on DJing, producing and live projects than constantly producing events. We actually haven’t thrown one in a while… I think we’d rather do fewer — maybe one to three a year — and make each one special. I like the idea of an event having a reason to exist rather than doing one just because it’s time to do another party.
Moving on to his style as a DJ, Rakim has long resisted the idea that a DJ set needs to live inside one genre, and pressed on how he actually pulls that off without losing a room, his answer comes down to architecture as much as taste, “It’s about creating different palettes and finding the points where one can lead into another, even if on paper they belong to completely different genres. I’m always looking for those imaginary bridges between sounds, the little connections that let you move from one musical world into another without breaking the spell.
I’m carrying a lot of different sonic worlds in my bag, so part of the fun is figuring out how they can speak to each other. It doesn’t always work the way you intended, but when two seemingly distant worlds suddenly lock together, it’s very fulfilling. The type of production on a record also plays a big part in that. Sometimes you can get so caught up in the tune itself that you forget to think about how it physically sits in the room. It’s important to think of the system you’re on or the headroom you might lack when connecting a record made in 2014 vs 1989, let’s say.”
Few DJs move as fluidly between spaces as Rakim does, swinging from the scale and intensity of Fabric to the tighter, more intimate footprint of a room like Little Portland Street. Adapting between those extremes, he says, starts well before the first track ever drops. Rakim explains how he approaches each performance, “It’s a bit of everything. I start with the space itself and what kind of feeling it gives me. Is it industrial? Is it outdoors, surrounded by nature? Then there’s the lighting, the sound of the room, the way people are moving and how the crowd is occupying the space. If I’ve had the chance to dance there before playing, that tells me a lot. You can feel the energy of a room differently from the dancefloor than you can from behind the decks. From there, I start imagining what kind of musical world I want to bring into that space.”
Rakim’s collection has earned a reputation as painstakingly curated, and behind that description is a process that sounds less like casual hobbyist digging and more like a genuine, recurring ritual. He goes on to discuss his processes, “It comes in waves of inspiration. Over the past six months, I went back through basically my entire collection from the last ten years. It was a beautiful but long process. I was finding forgotten gems, but also discovering mixes and B-sides I’d overlooked a decade ago. Your taste changes, so sometimes you hear a record ten years later and suddenly a completely different part of it speaks to you. Bringing back old records into my bag has been really refreshing. I think I’ll probably do the whole process every couple of years now, just to listen again with fresh ears. I used to have records covering my bedroom floor to the point where I’d be stepping over them when I got out of bed.
At my new flat, I can finally organise everything properly and divide the collection into different sections. For sure it’s an obsession. Digging happens in every format for me, but I still prefer doing it physically and for long stretches of time. Going to someone’s house or getting access to a private collection and being able to spend a couple of days going through it. There’s something about losing track of time and not knowing what the next record is going to do to your facial expressions.”
With productions, two radio shows, and a label-turned-institution all competing for the same hours in the day, the closing question is really about priorities — and how Rakim decides, week to week, where his focus actually lands. Rakim’s creative life is an ever-expanding work in progress, he explains his next steps, “It’s always a bit of a juggling act. Since we’re spending much less time curating and producing events now, most of my energy naturally goes towards production and DJing. Whenever a project pops up that could be a good idea for Soursopp, we’re happy to shift time towards that.”
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