RVNG Intl.

It gets harder for an artist to truly startle in the 21st century as every evolutionary niche gets filled, and every obscure genre becomes familiar, but New Yorker in Berlin Colin Self manages it and then some. This is their first album proper, but also the culmination of a three-year long creative project that began with 2015’s self-released Elation. On Siblings you can hear the radical disjunctions and hyper-synthetic tones of 2010s deconstructed club, the high drama of 80s stadium pop, the constant queer pulse of hi-NRG, and a kind of alien gospel: massed voices raised in celebration and ritual, but voices processed and harmonised into something post-human. Its imaginings of new possibilities for community will give you future shock and nostalgia all at once, even as you feel compelled to find out what is at the heart of its sci-fi bacchanal. 

It’s common for musicians who are also writers or academics to join dots between styles but few do it with such delirious style as Washington DC’s Andrew Field-Pickering aka Maximillion Dunbar. Across a smorgasbord of tastemaker labels — L.I.E.S., Berceuse Heroique, Hot Haus, Trilogy Tapes — he has consistently taken base crate digger materials and transformed them into plutonium. This album for RVNG Intl. is a perfect showcase of his methods. Field-Pickering has an unerring ear for similarities in synth tones or rhythms, so he understands for example how a breathy artificial flute can be both Balearic and grime at the same time, or how the mischievous disjointedness of Yellow Magic Orchestra maps perfectly onto that of modern deconstructed club styles. It’s extremely clever, but never clever-clever: for every “I understood that reference” moment there’s a dozen just plain “wow that’s great” ones. It’s also a perfect fit for RVNG, sharing as it does their facility for rewiring lines of influence and musical genealogy, making the familiar sound new and the unknown sound natural.

The context of this record is heartbreaking. In 2020 Pauline Anna Strom, at the age of 74, had just completed her first new collection of music in over 30 years — thanks to RVNG Intl. finding a receptive audience by compiling her rare and beautiful new age recordings from the 1980s — when she suddenly died. However it’s hard to feel sad while listening to this album, released posthumously the following year. Despite the passing decades and technological leap from analogue synths to all-digital setup, it’s like she picked up just where she left off with cosmic explorations of endless delight and benevolence. As in all her work, there’s a fascinating contrast between Strom’s natural compositional richness — with narratives unfolding through tracks — with a sense of infinite patience and delight in the moment, which lets you feel like you could float there in bliss for ever. We’re in the territory of early Tangerine Dream, of The Orb at their most cosmic and least foolish, of Pete Namlook, of Steve Hillage‘s Rainbow Dome Musick — and easily matching any of those for sheer beauty - but really this is, as Strom’s dream of being “trans-millennial” suggests, music way outside of space and time.

Californians Sun Araw and M Geddes Greengras have spent untold time in Jamaica working with a wide variety of reggae and dancehall artists via their Duppy Gun project but this is probably their most intense collaboration of all. Veteran vocal trio (and Lee “Scratch” Perry muses) The Congos, and the hand percussion of Niyabinghi drummers feel like ancient features of a landscape, but the production is not over-faithful to reggae technique: it’s dub, for sure, but fractured, fragmented, perhaps very true to the jarring cultural interface of the musical hook up. Whatever, it is a truly hallucinatory experience — there are very, very few records that can give you a contact high as potent as this one.

The mix album is no longer the pillar of culture it was in the 1990s — how could it be, when Soundcloud, Mixcloud and YouTube are flooded with DJ mixes? But sometimes one comes along that exemplifies something very special in modern culture — and so it is here. This mix shows Londoner Josey Rebelle’s breathtaking scholarship of many, many genre strands, but also her laser focus. Its key rhythmic touchstones are Hot Mix 5 style Chicago house, Underground Resistance inflected electro, raging Belgian style 1991 hardcore, and turn of the millennium broken beat — but as often as not versions of these forms made by contemporary Londoners. She circles these styles, weaves back and forth between them, finds records that are perfect midpoints between them, moves elegantly from elemental fury to the ultra-refined and back, and in so doing, reveals the deeper currents of soul, cosmic thought and technology that underly all these styles. This is not eclecticism for eclectism’s sake: there’s a golden thread to follow all the way through, and the finale - of skyward jungle from Rogue Unit (aka Nookie) into Lex Amor’s neo soul then pure abstraction by Dutch outsider’s outsider DJ Marcelle / Another Fine Mess collaborating with Rebelle herself - extends the narrative logic outwards in ways that will take your breath away. A masterclass in harnessing the mass availability of the past and using it to make a distinct cultural and personal statement.

Holly Herndon has become a defining presence in 21st century music, as theorist and practitioner — not just using AI and other emerging tech, but making it and its repercussions comprehensible to a broad audience. Her work is experimental in the truest sense: testing, iterating, developing practices based on results. And that very public experiment started here with a debut album that arrived sounding like nothing else on earth. Its deconstruction of avant-garde and pop, of electronic and “real,” of what a voice (both literal and figurative) is, all still have power to startle, even though she may have since gone on to more complex and advanced experiments. It was a milestone release for RVNG Intl., too, making ultra clear that they weren’t just releasing leftfield dance / ambient and archival material, but were pushing into the future, too.

When Christina Gauldi joined RVNG Intl., one might have expected her to continue with her rippling, cosmic new age experiments. Through the late 00s, the Parisian-trained, Dutch resident musician had been “unlearning” her classical conditioning in a series of gorgeous, floating, instinctual synth jams that saw her becoming part of an influential musical community with the likes of Oneohtrix Point Never, Emeralds and James Ferraro. But instead, she took another sharp left turn on purchasing a Roland TB-303 Baseline Generator, and her debut RVNG album Joy One Mile was deeply rooted in the most heartfelt Chicago house music. Her adoption of the geometries of house worked well, but it was bettered by a follow-up EP two years later. Nite Glow is a work of acid house high art, never taking its feet off the dancefloor, never letting go of the strobelit disconnection of conscious thought, but nonetheless creating stunning cubist portraits of cities at night and more abstracted concepts as its metallic synths play against the burbling 303 like straight lines and curves in a Kandinsky painting.

The whole of RVNG Intl.’s FRKWYS series — which has been connecting generations of exploratory music via collaborative commissions since the moment RVNG transformed from a mixtapes-and-edits imprint into a record label proper — is remarkable. But this truly is a jewel in its crown. Composer/producer Yoshio Ojima and pianist Satsuki Shibano were both established names in Japan’s “environmental music” scene of the 1980s and 90s — while Portland, Oregon’s Spencer Doran and Ryan Carlile aka Visible Cloaks are distinctly future-facing sound designers exploring generative techniques in often extreme abstraction. Together, they clearly found the highest common factor between their mutual approaches: while this isn’t without its similarities to 80s ambience, really it sounds like the future that you imagine the 80s producers were trying to manifest. VC’s fathomless subsonics and mutating glassy tones are perfectly held in place by Ojima and Shibano’s exquisite sense of space and patience. It feels like your mind is being cleaned moment by moment as you soak it in.

Kai Hugo said he conceptualised this alias, and album, while watching X-Files in his mother’s attic in Amsterdam in the early 2010s… and it sounds like it. Everything here is eerie and wrong, it’s acid house and 80s soul/pop viewed through the wrong end of a dirty telescope, hazy memories of being a 90s teenager dreaming of aliens and raves. It came right in the middle of an explosion of “outsider house” where dozens of people were making a name with detuned synths, cassette hiss and retro weirdness – but it stands absolutely alone among the generic, thanks in part to a natural facility for spooky melody, but also because it’s not just about signifiers, it’s genuinely very weird and emotional.

Myth and vocoders, modernist theatre and conversational wit, soundscaping and pop: this is the moment that all the elements of Holter’s talent coalesced into something singular, pure and perfect. The Milwaukee-via-LA auteur had already demonstrated the breadth of her ambition on a variety of CDRs and live recordings, but this album — three years in the making — applied discipline and technology to truly realise it. The shine and totality of her sounds and (self-)production sound as expensive as, say, Fleetwood Mac, Paul Simon, Isaac Hayes or 10cc, but while there are wisps of nostalgia floating through the song structures — not to mention Holter’s habitual references to Greek myth — it’s entirely 21st century, entirely sci fi as well. There’s film noir, there’s Twin Peaks, there’s Edward Hopper atmospherics, there’s grand sweep and the most fragile of intimacy. The greatest artists are those who build entire worlds that you can only choose to enter fully or not, and with Ekstasis Holter proved herself to be more than capable of that.

Among the vast selection of dreamy post-classical mood music that arose in the 2010s — think Max Richter and Nils Frahm — this album by a collective led by New York pianist / composer David Moore stands out as capturing a particularly deluxe but bittersweet ambience. Like so much in this sphere it works like perfume, Moore’s endlessly rippling piano arpeggio repetitions and rarefied shoegaze haze hanging in the air, subtly transforming the space around you, with deeper tones sneaking up on you and hitting buttons to evoke memories and trigger buried emotion. It is also a potent addition to the beatless zone of RVNG Intl.’s catalogue — its elegant urbanity forming a counterpoint to the expansive romanticism of new-agers like Pauline Anna Strom and the austere futurism of Visible Cloaks and co.

Sometimes it can feel like this digital age is glutting us with anything and everything from the past being available all at once. But then a gem like this will be unearthed, and all the noise falls away, and you realise how privileged we are to live in a time of such archival. This was originally released in 1985 as a companion cassette with early editions of the great author Le Guin’s Always Coming Home: a sprawling but rigorous ethnography of a far-future, low-tech society in Northern California. For it she created an entire language and alphabet as well as traditions and myths — and with the analogue synth explorer Todd Barton, she helped translate this into startlingly convincing songs. Combined with field recordings of nature, these gentle, considered ritual songs have the extremely potent effect of transporting you to a different Earth, dislodging you from aesthetic preconceptions and placing you entirely in their small, simple but very strange world. Lovingly repackaged on LP with liner notes in 2018, this is an unearthed treasure from a past future — or is it a future past?

Floridian-born, Brooklyn-resident Roberto Carlos Lange is the model of a modern journeyman musician: finding his own way to his own voice outside the cycles of hype and diktats of genre. He’d been working at combining his own Ecuadorian heritage with classic singer-songwriter styles and leftfield production techniques over copious releases on his own and as a contributor to Savath & Savalas for nigh on a decade before signing to RVNG Intl. On his RVNG albums, and particularly this second one, you can hear true maturity: a delicate balance between personal and political, artsy and rootsy, Spanish and English. A gentle record but one that can hit home hard.

In a sense the father and son duo of Fluxus artist Yoshi Wada and ultra minimalist Tashi Wada — with their supergroup including Julia Holter, Corey Fogel and producer Cole MGN — make the slowest jazz you’ve ever heard. The nine tracks here find spaces in between the deep-listening tonescapes of Pauline Oliveros, Éliane Radigue or Eleh, the freewheeling intercontinental spiritual exploration of Terry Riley, and the shimmering fog-scapes of latter-day Ryuichi Sakamoto - with even a sublimated hint of the doom-drone of Boris and Sunn O))). But as they slowly — so slowly — unfold, you can hear very specific musical personalities responding to one another, ideas being born and interacting within a musical dialogue. It sounds, for all its ritual intensity, like it was fun to make.

This album is a beautiful illustration of the depth and consistency of the RVNG Intl. label. The initial seed came with FRKWYS, Vol 4 in 2010, when Butthole Surfers‘ Gibby Haynes was brought in to remix Psychic Ills (the NYC duo of Frank “Tres” Louis Warren III and Elizabeth Hart), alongside Detroit techno legend Juan Atkins and Hans-Joachim Irmler of Faust. But RVNG has never been about one-offs: rather they love relationship building and shoring up connections between scenes and generations, so this led, 12 years later to a collaboration. And what a collab it is — a dark, strange voyage through gothic space rock, dub, electronics that never alights on obvious genre signifiers and echoes with Haynes’s abyss-dark humour.

Anna Homler is a Bohemian of the old school – someone who sees the entirety of life as an artwork, and whose creative and occult investigations since the 1980s feel like a continuation of the work of beat generation affiliates like Burroughs and Brion Gysin. The Bread Woman was an eerie mythical archetype that came to her in a spontaneous musical ritual, and she has channelled her in costume and song – using a “discovered” primal language of her own discovering. The songs of the Bread Woman certainly feel like they could come from some lost civilisation (from Atlantis?), touching on blues, folk and ritual music of all continents and none. Steve Moshier provides crackling looped rhythms, radiophonic swoops and vocal processing, but the whole thing sounds distinctly ancient, distinctly like you recognise it from somewhere in a repressed genetic memory.

Dalt’s work over multiple albums and soundtracks has always had the influence of her native Colombia, but it’s been incorporated as an essence within complex abstractions. Here, though, on her second album for RVNG Intl., the bolero, mambo, salsa, and merengue are vividly present – albeit slowed down, stretched and dubbed out, turned otherworldly. Oddly, in doing this she has happened on the same very late night fantastical interzone as the slower end of Tom Waits’s junkyard percussion records.

There’s a very special category of electronica that’s heavy on melody, influenced by New Age music, and very conspicuously exudes geniality. Quirky British acts like Plone, the Ghost Box stable when they’re at their least spooked, and Four Tet at his gentlest all touch on this — and Californian E Ruscha V is absolutely steeped in it. As his tracks wash gently by there’s loads of Les Baxter type exotica, a lot of endlessly-unfolding new age guitar noodling, hints of the Balearic aesthetic, but Ruscha has so much personality as a composer that each time the melodies lift you up above and beyond any piffling stylistic concerns. This is a record that treats you like a treasured friend: a record that looks after you.

As dance music exploded in fragments in the early 10s — the relentless stimulation and blinding dayglo laser colours of EDM, US dubstep and future bass leaving us dazzled and baffled — a tendency arose that went back to basic values. It was about a never ending four-to-the-floor kick drum at the lower end of house’s tempo range — or even slower — with chugging percussion and riffs / arpeggios layered up with dubwise echo to create something gorgeously hypnotic and rewarding to the patient. It was most associated with the UK, with Andrew Weatherall and Sean Johnston’s A Love From Outer Space sessions the epicentre and names like Cottam and Tusk Wax prime proponents. But maybe the defining album of this style came from a duo who met in Ohio. The stark black and white artwork and single word tracks show just how about-their-business Sam Haar and Zach Steinman are: each time, the track begins, it chugs, it hypnotises, it stops. Yet they demonstrate each time just how much richness there is in the template — once you step into this world of dancefloor mesmerism, you realise it’s as many-splendoured and as colourful as any flashier style.

Syrinx were never really meant to be a band — but somewhere in between the heyday of Warhol style loft studio conceptual art, academic tape and synth experimentation and the birth of prog rock, the Toronto trio did achieve short lived success. This RVNG Intl. compilation of released and unreleased material shows just how much ground they covered in two years: psych-rock, proto-ambient, global influences, jazz, extended classical compositions, and a funkiness that very few of their prog rock or fusion contemporaries could match all pile together with seriously memorable hooks and a devil-may-care charm.