This issue of Ignition Sequence is brought to you in partnership with Blast Box: The World's Smallest Broadcast Studio

In Ignition Sequence an artist picks five records and tells you what each one does. This one came with a coincidence nobody planned. One of the records below has already appeared in an Ignition Sequence, picked by a completely different artist, in a completely different version. That means it is certified by world leading experts in their field as a killer cut.

The curator is RARÓG, out of western Poland. Two of his five are his own, which he is upfront about, and one of those is not in the shops yet. The rest run from a Berlin record shop owner to a Sheffield label with roughly thirty followers on Instagram. All five have Bandcamp links attached.

Anyway, commencing countdown…

RARÓG works out of Gorzów Wielkopolski, an industrial city in the west of Poland, and he puts that down as a direct influence on how his records come out. Antimodus has been the main home, and consistently so: 'Exposure Incident' in 2024, 'Chains' in 2025 and 'Dark Sun' in 2026, three EPs in three consecutive years. [R]3volution Uncod3d has had him as well, and the name, for the curious, is the Slavic fire falcon.

He also heads his own label, Profanum Records, which is where that SoundCloud handle comes from. Techno is the spine of what he releases, though ambient, IDM, drone, EBM and metal all feed into it. He is on SoundCloud and Instagram.

On how he puts a set together, RARÓG says: "In my selections, I focus mainly on atmosphere and building a story. I often use individual tracks as tools, but sometimes I also play just for fun. And these are five of my dancefloor bangers."

Here are his five.

Kill Your Algorithm.

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We have been here before. Cailín opened this whole series with Luis Flores' remix of this exact track. RARÓG has gone for the original. Both versions sit on the same 2021 twelve, 'The Lion And The Mouse', on Denise Rabe's own Rabe imprint, which means two curators from different countries have independently reached for one record and taken opposite ends of it. Nobody planned that.

RARÓG: "This track is as strong as a Siberian cigarette with an asbestos filter. I love this kind of music, but I don't often get the chance to play it. This is heavy even by techno standards. To play music like this, people have to know what they came for. This isn't music you can play to a random crowd.

First you have to earn the dancefloor's trust in order to be able to take people that far. It's time-consuming work, but also extremely rewarding. For me, this is high art and the destination. To put together selections like this in a way that works and doesn't make people shout that it's too heavy. Finding productions like this isn't easy either."

Pick it up over on Bandcamp.

His pitch for this one is an underground label’s follower count, so here is the rest of it. Wolf:Gang is a Sheffield operation run by Nightwolf, and 'Black Dragon' comes off Senka's 'Psyops', out on the label in 2025. Which puts the label in the same city that produced Warp.

RARÓG: "If we're talking about the underground, and Spotify isn't really our thing, let me introduce one of the productions from the Wolf:Gang collective from Sheffield, UK. They have about 30 followers on Instagram. No pressure.

This EP makes my head implode. It's a collection of tracks somewhere on the border between drum and bass, electro, techno, tekk, or whatever you want to call it. You can play it as DnB and you can play it as techno. When you put tracks like this on the CDJs, the crowd has two reactions. Either people randomly start pogoing in front of the stage, or they gather at the back and stare. They don't leave, which is good, but a DJ set isn't a concert.

The most surreal moment is when you DJ and people stare at you in amazement, and the more you try to get them to dance, the more they turn into stone. You don't know whether you should be happy that they're not leaving or sad that they're just standing there. To this day, I still don't know what happened that night or whether it was my fault. Maybe I should have dressed better. They did ask for the track ID, though."

Grab it now on Bandcamp.

The first of his own two, and by his own account the one that got away. 'Unknown Call' is on the 'Chains EP', out on Antimodus in 2025. What he says below is the interesting part: listeners handed him a reading of the track he had never intended, and rather than correct them he decided he preferred not knowing.

RARÓG: "As they say, out of all the tracks I've produced, the ones I like the most are usually the ones that don't quite get the recognition of a wider audience. Unknown Call is, to some extent, one of those tracks. I think it deserves more love. There was a time after the record came out when, listening back to it myself, I was discovering additional layers of sound that weren't entirely intentional.

Speaking of listeners, some people told me that they knew exactly what I was trying to say, because during the day, when their phone rings and they don't yet know who's calling, they feel what can be felt in Unknown Call. That interpretation isn't actually what I had in mind when I was making it. I don't want to explain to listeners what they're supposed to feel, because it's nice when they discover their own truth.

A sense of uncertainty and everyday anxieties were, however, embedded in this track. They came from the point in my life I was at when I made it. The fact that people can pick up on this unspoken message is a huge compliment to me, and part of the magic of music."

Get it direct from Bandcamp.

Cinthie has been in Berlin long enough to have run illegal raves in the 2000s and held down a residency at Watergate, and she now sells records as well as making them: Elevate is her shop, which is why her Bandcamp is filed under Cinthie / Elevate.Berlin. 'No Need To Worry' is on '803 Crystal Grooves 001', the 2020 release that opened her own label. The 001 is doing exactly what it says.

RARÓG: "I'm impressed by its simplicity and by the understanding of what the dancefloor expects from electronic music producers and DJs. I chose this track mainly because I have a sentimental attachment to it.

After an entire night of playing from midnight until 6 in the morning, switching throughout the night between B2B and playing solo, at 6:00, I'm not going to lie, I was ready too. The people on and off the dancefloor were as well, while there was already a brawl going on in the smoking area between tourists and migrants.

I was playing a minimal selection. Suddenly, the club owner ran onto the stage and started shouting: 'Kill the party now, because it's gonna blow!' But people were having fun, maybe a lil too much fun, but still. So I put on No Need to Worry on my Technics. I thought the simplicity of the track would send everyone off to bed, but the opposite happened. The dancefloor exploded. The owner of the venue was DIS-APPO-INTED!"

It is available from Bandcamp.

The only record here you cannot buy yet, and he has still ranked it above the other four. 'Dark Sun' is the title track of the EP he has coming on Antimodus on 26 September 2026. He is the first curator in the series to put one of his own records at the top, and it is an outlier in a second way: every other pick above gets explained by what it does to a room, while this one gets explained by the place he was trying to build.

RARÓG: "Dark Sun is a track from my upcoming EP, rooted in a certain pop-cultural bubble I've been living in for years. I wanted to capture the rawness of a post-industrial, post-apocalyptic fictional world, a place where, according to some prophecy, after the final collapse people return to spears and stones. A world that combines rusted technology with superstition.

I wanted to create the feeling of a dense, suffocating atmosphere in a deserted world, and for the music to work almost like a portal into it. That's also why I moved away from big drops and a modern groove. Instead, I focused on atmosphere and on building this imaginary world through sound. It is personal, but this time it has more to do with my way of portraying the world than with internal emotions."

Pre-order it over on Bandcamp.

Number four in the bag. Massive thanks to RARÓG for the Siberian cigarette line, for being honest about which of his own records he thinks got overlooked, and for pointing a few thousand people at a label with thirty followers. Every pick has a Bandcamp link attached, so go and put some money in those artists' pockets.

The next Ignition Sequence comes from Marcos Baiano, with the best part of two decades behind him. Same five slots.

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