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Not bangers, but stories — music for dancers who listen and listeners who dance. Soulful house to broken beat, Johannesburg to Oslo to Medellín.
Robbie Duncan is a DJ, curator and selector based between Stroud and Bristol a listener first, dancer second, and digger always. For over two decades he has built a practice rooted not in trends, but in connection: connecting records, eras, places and people across a continuous musical conversation.
His sound sits at the intersection of soulful house, deep house, disco, broken beat, jazz-funk, Afro-electronic and global grooves, held together by an ear for soul, hip-hop, Latin and downtempo textures. This isn’t a playlist of bangers. It’s a listening-first approach for rooms that want to dance and think at the same time. You’ll hear a vocal cut that stops a room, then a percussive roller that moves it again — warmth, swing, and space over peak-time pressure.
“Not bangers, but stories — music for dancers who listen and listeners who dance.”
What sets Robbie apart is depth — of time and of geography. A typical set or ElecSoul selection might travel from 70s soul and jazz foundations — Isaac Hayes, Roy Ayers, Curtis Mayfield — through 80s boogie and disco touchstones like Loletta Holloway (1980), Change and Soul II Soul, into the foundational deep house languages of the 90s: the smoky, jazz-kissed French house of Soofle and St Germain (Ludovic Navarre), the raw New York swing of KenLou (Kenny Dope & Louie Vega), the emotive keys of Kings Of Tomorrow and Sandy Rivera. That lineage is then threaded directly into the present underground: Felipe Gordon bringing Latin funk from Colombia, Dwson’s deep, spiritual electronics from South Africa, Liv East and broken-beat science from the UK, Fred Everything and Kaytranada reframing soul through a Canadian lens, and a new generation of producers releasing on the fringes from 2010 to 2026.
Geography is methodology. Robbie’s crates deliberately map a world: Spirits Rejoice and Dwson from Johannesburg, Zap Mama’s Congo-via-Belgium polyphony, Quantic’s heritage of cumbia and jazz, Brazilian, West African and Afro-Cuban rhythms sitting comfortably alongside Detroit and Chicago heritage — the Glenn Underground and Theo Parrish lineage, Ron Trent’s deep spirituality, Kevin Yost’s musicality — and the distinct dialects of the UK: Bristol bass weight, South London broken beat and jazz, and the soulful continuum from Brit-funk to street soul.
ElecSoul, his weekly show at djrobbieduncan.com/elecsoul, is where that research becomes practice. Now over 200 episodes deep, it is less a mix series than a curation lab — a weekly discipline of deep digging, vinyl to digital, new promos to forgotten B-sides, where eras and regions are allowed to talk to each other. You’ll hear a 1975 Roy Ayers Ubiquity groove answer a 2024 Dwson dub, or a 1993 St Germain demo sit next to a fresh South African deep house white label. The show is how he finds the threads, and how listeners learn to hear them too.