Protoculture

Nate Raubenheimer has been making electronic music professionally for over two decades, and the career that's resulted is genuinely hard to categorise. He started in the South African psytrance scene in the early 2000s, released two albums on Nano Records — Refractions (2003) and Circadians (2006) — and made his international live debut at Glastonbury before most producers his age had their first release. The Binary Finary '1998' remix put his name on trance playlists worldwide and introduced him to a generation of DJs, Armin van Buuren and Paul Oakenfold among them, who would become both collaborators and champions of his work.

The transition from psytrance to progressive house and trance wasn't a reinvention so much as a natural drift. The melodic instincts were always there. What changed was the tempo and the audience, and both turned out to be considerably larger. Armin van Buuren has said that "everything he touches turns to musical gold," which is a generous thing to say about anyone, but it does reflect the consistent quality that's kept Protoculture relevant across multiple shifts in what electronic music sounds like.

Alongside the artist career, Raubenheimer runs Marula Music, an independent label focused on progressive house and trance, built around a deliberate approach to what gets signed and why. He's also one of the more in-demand sound designers working in the space, having designed factory presets for u-he, Xfer Records, UVI, Plugin Alliance, Sonic Academy, and Black Octopus, among others. He's a Certified Bitwig Partner and runs an active YouTube channel covering production technique, sound design, and workflow, with a following of producers who take the technical side of this as seriously as he does.

The name came from Robotech, the 1980s anime. Protoculture was a mysterious energy source in the show. He liked the sound of it, picked it as a project name at 20, and it stuck.

Based in Cape Town, South Africa.