The Gentle Architect of Groove
By Rafi Mercer
New Listing
Ray Mang is one of London’s most quietly influential selectors — explore more in our London Music Venues guide.
DJ Name: Ray Mang (Raj Gupta)
Base: London, UK
Instagram: @ray.mang
Resident Advisor: RA Profile
SoundCloud: Ray Mang
Spotify: Ray Mang
There are DJs who chase the future at dizzying speed, always sprinting after the next track, the next trend, the next fleeting moment of hype. And then there are DJs like Ray Mang — selectors who carry whole histories in their record bags, who treat music not as disposable product but as living, breathing culture. Mang, born Raj Gupta and raised in London’s endlessly eclectic sonic stew, has long been one of those figures you might call the gentle architects of groove. A man less concerned with spectacle and more with subtle shifts, his work has been about weaving a lineage of disco, house, and Balearic rhythms into a timeless continuum.
It begins, as all stories of vinyl devotion do, with an obsession that seemed harmless at first. Mang spent his youth orbiting London’s record shops, an era when the racks were stuffed with imports from New York, Chicago, Lagos, and Rio. The 1990s were fertile ground for a certain kind of London DJ-producer: labels like Nuphonic and Output Records were cracking open new seams of house and disco, and across Soho basements, there was a sense that you could press up a 12-inch one week and have it circulating around the globe the next. Gupta caught that wave with the precision of someone who understood that production is also curation. His early tracks, stamped with the Mangled label he founded in 1998, were warm, percussion-rich, and brimming with low-end swagger. They carried a depth that set them apart: not just music for the floor, but music that understood the floor — how it breathed, how it needed release, how it could be stretched and coaxed into euphoria.
In London’s dance music ecology, Ray Mang has always felt like connective tissue — someone who linked house back to its disco roots, who knew how to slip rare groove into a set without it feeling nostalgic, who could let a Brazilian cut unspool alongside a DFA production and make it all make sense. You could stand in a club and listen to one of his edits and not know whether the record was 40 years old or freshly pressed that month. That’s the quiet genius of Mang: he erases the timeline, makes music ageless.
There’s a humility in the way he works. For all his credentials — remixes for the likes of Roxy Music, Gorillaz, and even Lady Miss Kier, releases on heavyweight imprints like DFA and Eskimo — he doesn’t cultivate the celebrity DJ persona. Instead, Mang carries himself like a craftsman, someone more interested in chiselling away at groove until it shines just right. His sets reflect that philosophy. They’re not pyrotechnic explosions, but carefully plotted journeys where the architecture of sound is allowed to reveal itself slowly. You lean in. You trust the ride. He knows how to let a bassline breathe, how to let a percussion loop become hypnotic without ever growing stale, how to choose just the right moment for a vocal to slip in and change the mood entirely.
In recent years, London has seen a resurgence of the listening bar and audiophile scene — Spiritland, Brilliant Corners, and countless smaller offshoots. Mang is perfectly at home in those spaces. His style is one of attentiveness: he reads a room not by watching arms in the air but by sensing the subtle shifts, the nods of approval when the groove lands just so. This is music as dialogue, not dictation. And when you hear him in that context, you realise why his reputation has endured. He doesn’t bulldoze a crowd; he converses with it.
There’s also the matter of Mang Dynasty — his project with Bill Brewster, a fellow custodian of London’s disco heritage. Together, they embody a spirit of playful scholarship, unearthing records with histories that span continents, then recontextualising them for new ears. It’s about preservation, yes, but also renewal. A Ray Mang edit isn’t about polishing the past into something fashionable. It’s about letting the original’s spirit breathe, respecting its flaws, its texture, its humanity. In an era of slickly digital production, that kind of care stands out.
Festivals across the world have caught on. From Croatia’s Love International to the Balearic sunsets of Mareh in Brazil, Mang has become a fixture in global lineups that prize depth over bombast. There’s something transportive about seeing him work in those settings — the sea air, the warm dusk, the sense that you’re not just dancing but participating in a ritual of shared memory. His music feels tailor-made for that atmosphere: expansive, generous, unhurried.
What keeps him consistent is that he’s never been in a rush to reinvent himself. That’s perhaps the strongest testament to his artistry: in a world addicted to novelty, Ray Mang has kept his compass steady. He plays disco, house, boogie, Balearic, and yet each time, it feels renewed. Because for him, it’s not about genre but about feel. That’s why his records still pop up in the sets of younger DJs who weren’t even born when Mang first pressed vinyl. They recognise that there’s something enduring in his touch.
If you had to place him within the constellation of London DJs, he’d sit alongside the likes of Idjut Boys, Ashley Beedle, and Greg Wilson: selectors who built reputations not on marketing but on the enduring trust of a dancefloor. People know what they’ll get with Ray Mang — not predictability, but quality. The kind of set that makes you leave the club feeling restored rather than exhausted.
To scout him is to realise that London’s strength has always been its curators, the ones who stitch together influences from everywhere and make them cohere into something distinctly of this city. Mang is one of those quiet weavers. His star rating, then, must take that into account: he might not be the headline festival closer, but he’s the DJ’s DJ, the one other selectors listen to, borrow from, respect. That’s worth more than hype. It’s the foundation on which sonic culture rests.
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Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
