Rejoicer

Yuvi Havkin performs his solo material under the moniker Rejoicer and ranks among the central voices shaping Tel Aviv’s beat-driven music community. He established the Raw Tapes imprint, an association that unites beatmakers, rappers, jazz vocalists, and instrumentalists. His productions fuse hazy psychedelic hues across instrumental soul, abstract hip-hop, and fractured rhythms while drawing from cosmic jazz and Bollywood film scores alike. After issuing more than twenty albums in multiple projects and settling in Berlin, Havkin joined the Stones Throw roster and delivered the album Energy Dreams in 2018.

London-born, he relocated to Tel Aviv at age five. An avid vinyl collector from his teenage years onward, Havkin began crafting drum’n’bass tracks in 2006 before pivoting to hip-hop and issuing beat collections as Guadaloop. He launched Raw Tapes in 2009 to present both his own experiments and those of other forward-thinking beatmakers and musicians active in the city. In 2011 he formed Buttering Trio alongside Beno Hendler and KerenDun. The trio’s left-field pop aesthetic surfaced on the 2013 debut Toast, after which the group shared stages with Black Milk and Hudson Mohawke. All three members contributed to the Live Beat Tapes collective, which released The Singles in 2015. Rejoicer also collaborated with downtempo and house vocalist Bajka as well as left-field hip-hop producer Free the Robots.

Having performed with Peanut Butter Wolf and worked alongside Dudley Perkins and Georgia Anne Muldrow, Havkin’s jazz-and-hip-hop-rooted yet boundary-crossing approach aligned closely with Stones Throw’s ethos. His first release for the Los Angeles label, Energy Dreams, arrived in 2018. The six-song Heavy Smoke EP followed in 2019. His second album, Spiritual Sleaze, which merges cosmic ambient layers with relaxed, hallucinatory R&B, appeared in 2020.