★Freedom To Spend
Pièces
Big Big Tip! Danielle Boutet’s Pièces is a mysterious artifact of Quebecois marginalia, self-released in 1985. Moving from languid ennui to high drama, Pièces is a dreamy gestalt, an album that borders Chanson, spoken-word, jazz noir, and minimalism, conjured from the chasm between acoustic and electronic realms. Pièces allows us a window into the highly intimate songcraft and compositional skill of an artist who longed to linger not in the public eye, but in relation with others and the world a…
Doctor Dancing Mask: Pianoisms
Neil S. Kvern’s Doctor Dancing Mask: Pianoisms is a near mythical marker on the map of late 20th century experimentalism transpiring in America’s Pacific Northwest. A sublime, spacious effort of left field DIY minimalism constructed from recurring piano pieces, hypnotic percussion, and a peppering of diverse instrumentation, vocals, and invisible effects, Doctor Dancing Mask illuminates a hidden but remarkable legacy of a young composer at the height of his creativity and consciousness.
Original…
Neighborhoods
2022 Repress expected to ship early November - Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods was released some two decades after the Portland, Oregon born and raised musician’s first forays into field recordings. These very recordings, and those captured over intervening years, define the universal sound and aural images of childhood, a theme memorialized by Hood’s privately-pressed opus of 1975.Sprawling through a haze of zither, synthesizer melodies, and foraged pedestrian sound, Neighborhoods is both a score …
Back To The Woodlands
Written and recorded between 1972 and 1982 in Western Oregon, Back to the Woodlands is a previously unreleased, and nearly lost, album made by Ernest Hood during the same era as his near mythical album Neighborhoods. A visionary combination of field recordings, zithers, and synthesizers, Back to the Woodlands offers an unprecedented depth of access to this singular artistic mind.
Born into a musical family, Ernest Hood began a promising career as a jazz guitarist during the 1940s, touring inter…
American Rituals
Tip! On the outskirts of late 1970s Olympia, Washington, something stirs, sings, and breathes. Cheri Knight, a music composition student at the Evergreen State College, is developing her practice in a quaint but adequately equipped campus recording studio, amalgamating with the sonic timbre of the surrounding time, space, and place, while devoting to her own inner maxims. At once performative and meditative, electronic and organic, collaborative and self-contained, Cheri’s early compositions are…
Communion: Jazz For A New Age
Communion, privately released in an impossibly small edition of twenty five cassettes in 1986, is a beguiling, politically underpinned meditation of cosmic improvisation and wayward folk music from Cleveland’s Universal Liberation Orchestra. The group’s name is, in one sense, a tongue-in-cheek reference to their changing membership, while also a proclamation of intention. Started in 1979 as a five-piece, first known as the Cleveland Collective, the group eventually whittled down to the duo of br…
Echolocation
**Natural vinyl with exclusive RISO reproductions of Pamela Z posters from the 1980s / 1990s. Print set includes four 8.5x11" prints in a stamped envelope, hand-assembled in Brooklyn** "Echolocation is the debut album by Pamela Z, the pioneering Bay Area intermedia composer and performance artist. Written and recorded over three years, and self-released and distributed on cassette in 1988, Echolocation is a genre-defying document of Z’s earliest experiments with live voice and delay, and the imp…
Sync or Swim
* Edition of 200 * A limited cassette replication of Felixstowe Rocks, a “compilation” primarily consisting of Robert Cox’s own music under several pseudonyms, will be offered as a mail order exclusive with the release of Sync or Swim. Pete Swanson & Jed Bindeman’s Freedom To Spend reissue a reel 1984 gem from Robert Cox’s (aka Rimarimba) Unlikely Records, refracting a spectrum of his musical alter egos over 10 tracks of lilting ambient, folk and synth wooze from the top shelf. Newly transferre…
Chaleur Humaine
Uman’s Chaleur Humaine, the debut album from the French duo of musicians and siblings Danielle and Didier Jean, resurfaces for the first time since its original release in 1992. While history, both private and public, is scattered with creative relationships between siblings that simply “did not work,” Uman’s story is uniquely different and defined by this bond, and a shared journey impressing footprints along an adventurous musical terrain. Prior to Chaleur Humaine, Danielle and Didier recorde…
In the Woods
On Rimarimba’s 1985 album In The Woods, Robert Cox has made his music kit, an odd assortment of new and old technologies, lately fixated on the digital delay, and programming technologies, sing his own song at its most articulate clip. The songs seem more developed, fluent, like mini-suites in some sense. By his third album, it’s clear Cox has recognised just how liberating technology can be – “All these intricate layers of things that I was trying to play, and didn’t have the musical ability to…
Les Archives
Les Archives is composed, arranged, and produced by the elusive Japanese artist June Chikuma. While Freedom To Spend’s reinvented edition bares little visual evidence of its origins in the composer’s name, title, or sleeve design, the album, a whooping gonzo of synthesizers, samplers, drum machines, and a mysterious string quartet, remains as vibrant now as it did when released on Toru Hatano’s Picture Label as Divertimento in 1986. In fact, the music of Les Archives now glows with a different p…
On Dry Land
For Rimarimba’s 1984 album On Dry Land, Robert Cox advances along the terrain explored on Below The Horizon. It’s an enchanting album, one which, at times, seems to comment on its own practice; a picture of everyday life in the hobbyist’s, or part-time musician’s, recording studio. Some moments point towards the tourist-explorer aesthetic that would eventually coalesce under the banner of Fourth World music. Other moments where Cox seems to be channelling an otherness, a kind of hauntological re…
Rimarimba Collection (4Lp) Second Edition
** Second Edition of 200, packaged in a large polybag with a multi-colored screenprinted cover ** Freedom To Spend’s first catalog wide deep dive into an artist’s career focuses on four albums from Rimarimba, beginning with 1983’s Below The Horizon, followed by 1984’s On Dry Land, 1985’s In The Woods, and finally, the once-imagined, now-realized assembly of 1988’s Light Metabolism Number Prague. Somewhere out there around the turn of the 1980s, to the left of the post-punk crew, to the right of …
Below the Horizon
Some of the most gorgeous, little heard DIY music of the early ‘80s finally surfaces with Rimarimba’s ‘Below The Horizon’, the first in Freedom To Spend’s reissue series of work by Suffolk, UK’s Robert Cox - all massively recommended to followers of Colin Potter, Woo, General Strike, Konrad Sprenger and homespun electro-acoustic music of all stripes! Committing its first appearance on vinyl, ‘Below The Horizon’ documents Robert Cox in freehand exploration of his modestly built, four-octave Marim…
Rimarimba Collection
** Edition of 250 screen-printed canvas carriers, with a signed and sealed Certificate of Absurdity from Robert Cox ** Freedom To Spend’s first catalog wide deep dive into an artist’s career focuses on four albums from Rimarimba, beginning with 1983’s Below The Horizon, followed by 1984’s On Dry Land, 1985’s In The Woods, and finally, the once-imagined, now-realized assembly of 1988’s Light Metabolism Number Prague. Somewhere out there around the turn of the 1980s, to the left of the post-punk c…
Music and Poetry of the Kesh
CD edition. Buchla synth supremo Todd Barton’s hyperstitious soundtrack to Always Coming Home, an ‘80s American sci-fi novel by author Ursula K. Le Guin, is yet another ingenious recording dug out for reappraisal by Pete Swanson and Jed Middleman’s Freedom to Spend label - a division of RVNG Intl. Expect alien folk songs in made-up language, set to richly evocative backdrops of location recordings subtly gilded with self built instruments and synth contours. Properly immersive, otherworldly - th…
Eros In Arabia
This year has been an incredible period for avant-garde, Minimalist, New Age, ambient, and electronic reissues. One after another, many of the most coveted and rare LPs from these movements have emerged from the shadows. While each of these movements had a tendency to avoid easy categorization, the reissue market has largely veered toward those whose location can be easily understood, offering less attention to those members whose work fell into the spaces between. With their fourth release sinc…
Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes
Over the past decade or so, there has been a strange, idiosyncratic bubbling from New York - sonic adventures emerging under the banner of Rvng. The imprint was founded quietly during the mid 2000’s, gathering ever increasing note and renown, while never allowing themselves to be easily defined. Genre and association mean little, in the face of the guiding light of discovery, integrity, and surprise. A short while back, we caught wind of a new sub-label, emerging under the banner of RVNG - Fre…