Bleep

The only explicitly historical wing of RVNG Intl. is the archival series of Freedom To Spend and ReRVG. This is given a less regular run out, yet releases that find their way into the world tend to be minor revelations. As a result, the works of auteurs like Pauline Anna Strom, K. Leimer, Peter Ivers and Michele Mercure have been presented to a considerably broader, and younger, audience. In a sense, that is a process of collaboration too: musicians of the past who were ahead of their time meeting a present moment that is ready for them.

Though the profound disruption of 2020 has warped any sense of time – and thrown a bag of spanners into the mechanics of pressing and distributing records – RVNG Intl. and Beats In Space have kept on keeping on. One of this year’s standout mixes, Josey Rebelle’s Josey In Space, arrived in spring through Beats In Space and had a telling kernel of information buried within. Early on, Josey sets out her stall with Tenesha The Wordsmith and Daniel B Summerhill’s ‘I Dream So Loud’, a tale of Black dreams deferred and standing tall in the footprints of ancestors. Those four words could just as easily be recast as a mantra for RVNG Intl. at large – reflecting the brilliant and phantasmagorical feel of the label’s music, which often seems to be reverberating from a different plane of existence entirely.