It has been 11 years since we last spoke with DJ Rap. In that time the scene she helped build has changed shape more than once, as has the way music is made, released and heard. Her output has not slowed. Over the past year Propa Talent, the label she founded, has released a steady run of her work, from the solo single ‘Zeitgeist’ in January to collaborations with General Levy on ‘Junglist Nation’ and Tippa Irie on ‘One Door’ over the summer. The rest of her 2026 diary follows the circuit she came up in, with dates at Moondance, The History of Jungle and Jungle Mania meets AWOL.
Born Charissa Saverio, DJ Rap has been part of drum & bass since the early 1990s as a DJ, producer and vocalist. ‘Spiritual Aura’ is still being played and remixed more than three decades after its release. Her 1999 album Learning Curve took the sound to a wider audience at a time when very few women were given that kind of platform in electronic music. Her work since then has moved between jungle, house and breaks with little concern for where one ends and the next begins.
That movement is what brings us back to her now. On 18th September, Dirtybird released her liquid drum & bass remix of ‘Looking Through The Glass’, her collaboration with Sacha Robotti from his debut album I, ROBOTTI. It is the first official remix from the record, and it comes out on a San Francisco label better known for tech house than for breakbeats.
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Submit your Mix of the Month DJ Competition entryThe original came from a period when she was splitting her time between the United States and England, and between the two scenes she was working in. “I wrote ‘Looking Through the Glass’ while dividing my life between the USA and England, producing and playing both jungle and house,” she says. “I was living between two countries, two cultures and two sounds. For me, this song is about duality.”
Her remix takes the song back towards the sound she is best known for. Rolling breakbeats and a heavier low end sit beneath wide atmospherics, and her vocal carries the melody above them. It works less as a reinvention than as a second reading of the same idea: the drum & bass side of a track that first appeared in a house setting.
That fits the wider shape of I, ROBOTTI, an album on which Sacha Robotti looks back across the influences behind his 20-year career. He has described working with her as an honour, and he sees the remix as the track viewed through her own looking glass. Both artists have spent years working across the Atlantic and across genre lines, and ‘Looking Through The Glass’ sits where those two paths meet.
We caught up with DJ Rap to talk about the remix and the record, and about what has changed in the 11 years since our last conversation.
It has been 11 years since Decoded last sat down with you properly, and most of that conversation focused on how you got here. We would rather spend this one on where you are now. Looking at the last few years rather than the whole thirty, what has genuinely changed in the way you work?
Looking at the last few years, the biggest change is that I trust myself more and I have learned to do the opposite of a lot of what artists are traditionally told they should do. I have had to unlearn the idea that success is about chasing numbers, streaming figures, chart positions, likes or huge audiences that may not actually support you in any meaningful way. Those things are not what is important to me anymore. After COVID, and after coming back from America to the UK, I made a very deliberate decision to build a real community and focus on direct-to-fan relationships. That has probably been one of the best decisions I have made.
I would rather put my time and energy into a 1000 people who genuinely support what I do than fifty thousand people who casually like a post and disappear. Everything I do now revolves around that community. I spend a lot of time with them, they get real access and value from me, and in return I have a much stronger and more sustainable relationship with the people who actually care about the music. I have also remodelled the business around that, selling direct, creating systems that work outside of just doing gigs, and putting less energy into platforms that take a huge amount of attention but give very little back financially.
At the same time, creatively I second-guess myself less. I make decisions faster, I trust my instincts more, and I protect the creative part of what I do because there is so much business around it now. I am much more interested in whether it moves me. I still work incredibly hard, but I am faster at making decisions and more comfortable following instinct. I also wear a lot more hats now – artist, producer, label owner, mentor, A&R, everything – so the way I work has had to become much more focused.
When we last spoke you described the labels by genre: Propa Talent for drum and bass, dubstep and breaks, Impropa Talent for tech house and techno. More recently you have framed the split territorially: Propa as the UK facing side and Impropa as the American one. Has geography come to matter more than genre?
Yes, I think geography has become part of the identity in a way I did not necessarily understand back then. Propa has always felt very rooted in my UK history, in jungle, drum and bass and the culture I came from here. The American side of my life opened up a completely different network and a different musical language, especially around house and tech house and pop electronica (learning curve) was an example. I do not really think in terms of rigid genre walls anymore. I think more in terms of worlds, audiences and where a record naturally belongs. The common denominator is still me, but the context around the music can be very different.
In 2016 you told Decoded that Detonate was about taking control of your own art rather than leaving it in the hands of corporate labels. Ten years on, did independence give you what you wanted, and what did it cost you that you had not budgeted for?
Independence absolutely gave me what I wanted creatively. I own my decisions, I decide when something comes out, how it is presented and what compromises I am or am not willing to make. That freedom is priceless. What I did not fully budget for was the sheer amount of work that comes with it. When you remove the corporate structure, all those jobs do not disappear, they land on you.
Distribution, marketing, artwork, admin, accounting, manufacturing, customer service, all of it. Independence gives you control, but it also gives you responsibility for everything, including the mistakes. I would still choose it, but I understand the true price of it much better now.
You are now going back through the whole catalogue for Propa Legacy. Remastering your own records in a modern room with modern tools, what surprised you, and was there anything you could not bring yourself to touch?
What did not surprise me was how much character some of those records had precisely because of the limitations we were working with. That will always be the case. Older music will always have a different feel to the new, I made two very different albums, Propa Legacy, and this year ‘Luv&Bass’ to showcase where I came from, and where I am now as a producer and to bridge that gap so they are not worlds apart in character, but respectfully upgraded.
You could argue that, you open them up now with modern monitoring and modern tools and technically there are things you could clean up, widen, tighten or make louder, but sometimes that actually removes the thing that made the record special. I have been very careful with Propa Legacy because I do not want to rewrite history. The remixes however are beautiful upgrades while leaving the classics untouched.
The point when it comes to the classics, is to reveal what is there, not modernise it to death. My ‘Luv&Bass’ album however, is all about modern jungle, so two very different perspectives….two very different albums. There are definitely moments where I have thought, technically I could fix that, but emotionally I do not want to, because that imperfection belongs to the record. Most of my fans bought both albums from my website and have commented on while they are both different albums, you can still tell its got that ‘DJRap’ sound, so retaining your character throughout your career is important to me. Keeping your ‘Sound’ is authentically you and must be protected.
Which brings us to this week. Sacha has said he has been a fan since “Spiritual Aura” and that having you on I, ROBOTTI felt surreal to him. How did “Looking Through The Glass” actually come together, and what did he ask you for?
It has quite a long history, which is one of the things I love about it. The original idea goes back 14 years and was a demo I wrote with Static Revenger. Mark Bell from Shaboom helped reconnect the dots, and eventually Sacha came into the picture. What made it interesting was that he already had a relationship with my music from the outside, because he had been listening to records like “Spiritual Aura” long before we ever worked together. So when we finally connected, there was already that mutual respect there. He was not asking me to become someone else for his world. He wanted to keep the original vocals, the original vibe….The interesting part was finding the place where my writing and voice could live naturally inside his sound.
You told us in 2015 that you took a lot of heat at home for making a record with vocals, and that seeing everyone else doing it fifteen years later made you feel justified. You are now singing on a Dirtybird record about learning to let go and finding lightness in the dark. Does that old argument feel settled, and where did the lyric come from?
Completely settled for me. I took a lot of criticism years ago for putting vocals into my music, and now it is completely normal for electronic artists to move between being producers, DJs, writers and vocalists. I never saw those things as mutually exclusive. Same when for genre hopping which I loved to of….God the crap I got for doing that.
“Looking Through The Glass” is much more reflective lyrically. It is about perspective, about what happens when you stop fighting everything and start accepting that sometimes letting go is actually a form of strength. I think I write very differently now because I have lived more.
The actual lyrics came from a period in my life when I was being pulled in two directions in almost every sense. I had just got my Sony deal and knew I needed to move to America, but England had been my home for twenty years, so I was leaving friends, familiarity and one version of my life behind to start another one in the States. Musically, I felt that same split.
In England I was deeply rooted in Hardcore & jungle, while in America I was making electronic pop with Learning Curve, playing house music and moving through completely different scenes. So a lot of the song is about that sense of duality and duplicity, looking through the glass at two different lives and not quite knowing where you belong. There is definitely darkness in the lyric, but there is also acceptance in it. It is about learning that sometimes letting go is not giving up, it is making peace with change.
Dirtybird is a label with a very particular culture. What did being in that room with those people give you that a drum and bass release would not have?
It gave me a different conversation. Exposes me to new audiences, but it doesn’t take anything away.
Drum and bass is home to me and always will be, but when you step into another musical culture you hear yourself differently. Dirtybird has its own personality, its own sense of humour, groove and community, and that changes the way you approach a record. You are working with people whose reference points are different, and that is creatively healthy. I love being put slightly outside my comfort zone because it stops me repeating myself. It is not about leaving drum and bass behind, it is about allowing another side of me to have somewhere to exist properly.
The remix package landed on the 18th September, and you have had Bladerunner and Aries rework your own material this year, so you are on both sides of the process at the moment. What does a remix package do for a record in 2026 that it did not do in 1996, and when somebody takes on one of your tracks, what do you actually hope they destroy?
In 1996 a remix could introduce a record to a completely different DJ circuit or give it another life on vinyl. That still happens now, but in 2026 it is also about crossing ecosystems. A remix can move a record into another genre, another algorithm, another audience, another set of DJs and another cultural space entirely. When somebody remixes one of my tracks, I do not want them to be too respectful. I already made my version. Unless I’m asking for an upgrade like when I work with BLaderunner and Aries…outside of upgrades, I want to hear theirs. Keep the emotional DNA, keep the thing that made you want to remix it in the first place, but after that I am quite happy for you to break it, rebuild it and surprise me. Just don’t do it without my permission, I will find you, I will hunt you down.
We would like to get properly into the studio, because it is the part most interviews skate over. What does your room look like now compared with the room you were making records in during the nineties, how much of that change is real rather than cosmetic, and what is the one piece of gear you have never replaced?
You should now me well enough to know I’m 100 percent real not cosmetic! Lol. Let’s talk studio. It’s fully loaded same as it was back in the day, full of gear from go pros to laptops, I’m a nerd and that will never change, I love it!
My laptop is fully stoked with essential plugins (Serum, FabFilter for EQ, compression, limiting and saturation, Waves for dynamics and utility work, plus the usual reverbs, delays, filters, distortion, transient shaping, stereo tools and modulation plugins). Basically everything I need to build, shape, mix and finish a record without relying on a room full of hardware.
The biggest difference is access. In the nineties you needed rooms full of hardware to do things that now happen inside a laptop in seconds. Sampling, editing, automation, recall, even the speed at which you can audition an idea has completely changed. But the important part has not changed at all. You still need taste. You still need to know when something is exciting and when it is just technically impressive. A beautiful studio does not write a record for you. The modern room is faster and more flexible, but the real work is still listening, making decisions and knowing when to stop.
I still have my Akai sampler, my NS10 speakers, and to be honest I hoarded pretty much everything I thought was important. My room is full of DATs, cassettes, DAT players and old bits of equipment and archive material. So in some ways the room has changed completely, but in other ways it is still full of the history that got me here.
When you are working a break today, how much of it is chopping and how much is resampling and rebuilding from the ground up? Has the method itself changed, or have the tools simply got faster?
Both. The basic instinct is still the same. You hear something in a break, you find the part that excites you and then you start pulling it apart. What has changed is how far you can take that process and how quickly. I might chop something, resample it, process it, layer it, rebuild the transients, replace parts of it and then resample the whole thing again until it is almost a new instrument. In the old days you were often making creative decisions because of limitations. Now the limitation is almost the opposite – you can do anything – so the skill is knowing what not to do. The tools are faster, but the ear still has to make the decision.
On the low end, are you still constructing Reese sounds from detuned layers, or has that moved on? And how are you handling phase and mono compatibility when you know it has to survive a proper system?
I still love the principles behind a Reese, but the way I build bass has definitely moved on because the tools give you so much more control now. Sometimes I will start with detuned layers, sometimes with Serum or another synth, and quite often I will resample, distort, filter and rebuild it until the original source is almost irrelevant. The important thing for me is still movement and character. With the low end I am much more disciplined. The sub has to translate properly, so
I am constantly checking what is happening in mono and making sure the really low frequencies are not fighting themselves. You can make something sound enormous in headphones, but if the phase is all over the place it will disappear on a proper system. The club tells the truth very quickly.
A D&B record at 174bpm and a house record at 124bpm are almost different jobs. What changes in your arrangement thinking when you drop the tempo by fifty beats, and which of the two is harder to keep interesting across six minutes?
They are completely different conversations. Drum and bass gives you so much energy simply from the tempo, so you are often controlling that energy and deciding when to release it. With house there is more physical space between the events, which means the groove, the sound choices and the subtle movement become incredibly important. You can let things breathe much more, but that also means there is nowhere to hide if the groove is not working. I probably think more patiently when I am making house. A tiny change every eight or sixteen bars can be enough. With drum and bass you can create contrast much more aggressively. I do not know that one is harder than the other, but keeping a six minute house record compelling without throwing unnecessary things at it is a very particular skill.
Streaming normalises everything anyway. Has that changed how you master, are you still cutting a separate club master, and as a label owner do you let your artists deliver their own masters or do you insist on running them yourself?
Ahh streaming…..Killer of all dreams, lol (shakes head)
Streaming has changed the conversation around loudness, but I do not think it has removed the need for records to sound powerful. I loathe over crunched compresses records, they sound bloody awful, I won’t play anything that sounds like that. Quality over loudness is completely achievable while competing with what’s out there.
I am much more interested in dynamics, translation and whether a record actually feels good than in chasing a number for the sake of it. A club record still has a different job to do, particularly in the low end and the way the transients hit, so I absolutely think about where the record is going to be played. As a label owner I am happy for artists to bring me their own masters if they know what they are doing, but I am very particular about quality control. If something is not translating properly, I would rather address it than put it out because somebody has already called it finished. The label name is on it as well.
Out of the studio and onto the floor. How has your approach to DJing changed? You are moving between a UK drum and bass audience and an American house audience, sometimes in the same month, so how much do you prepare, how much do you leave to the room, and what do you know within the first ten minutes of a set?
I prepare, but I never want to prepare myself into a corner. I want enough music with me that I can go in several different directions because the room is always more important than the playlist I imagined before I arrived. Within the first minute I can normally tell how adventurous I can be, how quickly the crowd wants me to move, how much they know, and whether they want familiarity or whether they are happy to be taken somewhere. The UK drum and bass crowd and the American house crowd obviously speak different musical languages, but the job is still the same. You are reading energy. The best sets happen when you stop thinking about what you planned and start responding to what is actually happening in front of you.
You have spoken before about burnout, about taking years off, and about the power of saying no. Now that you are active again on both sides of the Atlantic, how do you protect that, and would you tell a younger artist to do the same?
I protect it much more seriously now because I know what happens when you do not. When you are younger, you think saying yes to everything is how you build a career, and for a while it probably is. But there comes a point where constantly saying yes can destroy the very thing you are trying to protect. I am much more selective now about where I put my time, who I work with and whether something actually makes sense for me. I would absolutely tell a younger artist to learn how to say no, but not from fear. Say no because you understand what you are building. Burnout does not make you more committed to your art. It just makes it harder to make any.
While you have been doing all this, the genre you helped build has gone overground. Chase and Status are playing mainstages, “BACKBONE” went to number one, Nia Archives is on Island and picking up Mercury nominations. Does that mainstream success feed the underground or drain it, and is the pressure on those artists the same pressure you were under when you signed to Sony?
I think mainstream success can absolutely feed the underground because it creates new entry points. Somebody hears a record on a huge stage or through a major artist, gets curious and then starts digging backwards and sideways into the culture. That is healthy. The danger comes when the industry starts treating the successful version of the sound as the only version worth investing in.
The underground is where the mutations happen, and you have to protect that. In terms of pressure, I think some things are probably very similar to what I experienced with Sony. Once serious money and expectations arrive, there are suddenly a lot more opinions in the room. The difference now is that artists also have direct access to their audience, which gives them a kind of leverage we did not have in the same way.
At the same time there is a lot of looking backwards. Tim Reaper and Dwarde pulling it toward 1993, breaks being elevated again, amen worship everywhere. Is that nostalgia, or is the sound genuinely reloading?
I think it is both. Every generation eventually becomes curious about what came before it, but the interesting part is what happens when people do not simply recreate it. The early jungle records were made with enormous limitations, and those limitations created a sound. Younger producers can now take that language and manipulate it in ways we simply could not. So yes, there is nostalgia in hearing an Amen or a certain type of 1993 atmosphere, but when it is done well it becomes a new conversation rather than a museum piece. I actually love hearing people rediscover the rawness of those breaks because for a while electronic music became almost too polished. Sometimes you need the dirt back.
Can you walk us through the room itself? Not the philosophy of it, the actual kit. What is in there now, what do you reach for first when an idea starts, how seriously do you take monitoring and treatment compared with the boxes everybody obsesses over, and if you had to rebuild from nothing tomorrow, what are the pieces you genuinely could not work without?
The centre of the room now is obviously the computer, because so much of what used to require racks of equipment can now happen inside the aptop. As mentioned above, It is stocked with the essentials: Serum, FabFilter for EQ, compression, limiting and saturation, Waves tools, plus all the usual reverbs, delays, filters, distortion, transient shaping, stereo tools and modulation. But I have also kept a lot of the history.
I still have my Akai sampler, my NS10s, DAT machines, DATs, cassettes and a ridiculous amount of archive material because I hoarded pretty much everything that meant something to me. Monitoring matters enormously to me because none of the expensive boxes mean anything if you cannot actually hear what you are doing properly. If I had to rebuild tomorrow, I would want a powerful laptop, monitors I trust, a good interface, like my Scarlett, a controller and the core software I know inside out. Everything after that is luxury. I could not live without serum or my fully loaded laptop!
Where do you stand on AI in the music industry? You teach it, you run two labels signing other people’s work, and you are still making records yourself, so you are seeing it from three directions at once. And the larger question, given the rate at which it is being adopted: do you think we will still have electronic music as we understand it in five years, or does something fundamental change before then?
AI is not going away, so I think pretending it does not exist is pointless. I am interested in it as a tool, particularly for helping people move through ideas faster, learn, experiment or break through a creative block. I openly admit I use it for vocals, it’s amazing….Where I become uncomfortable is when the technology replaces authorship rather than assisting it, especially when the source material and the rights around it are unclear. From a label point of view I still want to hear identity. I want to know why that record exists and what that artist brought to it that somebody else could not.
I think electronic music will absolutely still exist in five years, but I do think our definition of authorship is going to be challenged. The value may shift even more towards taste, curation, performance, personality and community, because generating sound itself is becoming easier. Making something people genuinely care about is still much harder.
Finally, two things looking forward. Who should we be paying attention to, not the names on every festival poster but the ones turning up in your demo folder, and what are they doing technically that you rate? And where does drum and bass go from here? Five years out, what does it sound like?
The people I get excited about are not necessarily the ones with the most polished demos. I am listening for identity. I want to hear somebody make a decision I would not have made, whether that is an unusual drum treatment, a strange arrangement choice, a bass sound that should not work but does, or simply somebody who understands restraint. Technically, everybody has access to incredible tools now, so technical competence alone does not impress me as much as it used to. Taste does.
As for where drum and bass goes in five years, I think it will continue fragmenting and recombining. You will have people pushing it further into live music, pop, jungle, house, techno and things we probably do not have names for yet, while another part of the scene keeps digging back into the rawness of the original sound. That tension between the future and the past has always been part of what keeps it alive.
One producer I am very excited about is Ben (Konetix). He is not a student of mine, but someone I have worked with and rate very highly. Beyond that, some of the most exciting music I hear now actually comes through my mentoring and the student that I work with.
I teach a lot of artists privately, and I am constantly surprised by the level of the tracks people bring me. Sometimes I genuinely think, I wish I had been that technically accomplished at their age. I would not want to name individual students without asking their permission, but there are people coming through my sessions with really strong identities, excellent production skills and, most importantly, their own ideas, so watch out! That is one of the reasons I enjoy mentoring so much. I get to hear talent developing before the wider industry necessarily knows those names, and help artists refine what is already unique about them, and offering them a platform on my label and exposure.
I think the future of drum and bass will come from exactly that kind of individuality. The tools are available to everyone now, so the artists who stand out will be the ones with taste, identity and something personal to say with them.
DJ Rap new remix of Sacha Robotti’s “Looking Through The Glass” available to stream and download here
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