Release date: October 9, 2026

— Limited supply of original cassettes available only from Freedom To Spend
— Cassette purchase includes a multi-format download redeemable via Bandcamp

In the late 1980s, many years into separate and accomplished careers, Norma Tanega and Aida Pavletich embarked on a series of extraordinary homespun sound collaborations. Using a Roland W-30, a smattering of drum machines, a few mics, and a four-track cassette recorder, Tanega, on instruments and backing vocals, and Pavletich, on vocals, spent their weekends over several years creating a trio of operettas, song cycles which they released as short-run tapes. Nearly four decades later, these utterly distinctive, effortlessly experimental albums re-work their charms on new sets of intrepid listeners.

Norma Tanega, the musician, painter, and vibrant spirit whose 1966 international pop hit “Walkin’ My Cat Named Dog” is only the best-known of countless creative achievements, spent her career’s second act cultivating an unassumingly non-commercial, wildly prolific community-based art practice in her home of Claremont, California. In addition to her own astonishing painting practice, she co-founded an art gallery, taught music and English as a Second Language, collaborated widely and selflessly, and ran what was effectively a hub of the area’s freewheeling arts scene out of her sprawling modernist home on Mt. Baldy. She was already longtime friends with Aida Pavletich, the author of the books Rock-a-Bye, Baby and Sirens of Song: The Popular Female Vocalist in America, when the pair decided to make combined use of Tanega’s richly diverse home studio.

As Pavletich tells it, each of her and Tanega’s albums features a “buried storyline”: 1988’s Saturday Dancer is a “rap opera” whose titular protagonist hits the town “filled with hope and illusion, looking for true love at the dance hall”; 1989’s Ways Away evokes family memory in the tale of a traveler set in motion by a folk song from old Slovenia; and 1993’s Run Runner conjures the story of the runner Jamie, who crosses an apocalyptically devastated Los Angeles to find the beloved Christina. But of course, for all its vividness, Pavletich’s storytelling proceeds along gleefully, blessedly nonlinear poetic paths, finding room for irreverent lyrical observations on such topics as the perils of feline companionship (Saturday Dancer’s “Why I Don’t Sleep with Twenty Cats”), interfaith romantic longing (Ways Away’s “Testaments”), and morning-after body-mod regret (Run Runner’s “Tattoo”).

And that’s to say nothing of the operettas’ instrumental accompaniments, which draw on Tanega’s long explorations of musical mischievousness to punctuate, counterprogram, and draw out the ironies and intricacies in Pavletich’s lyrics. From flourishes of digitally-sampled percussion to quick snatches of folk melodies to madcap use of her keyboard’s loop function, the recordings marry the capacities of the era’s home-recording technology with its creators’ most audacious visions, and even their liveliest expressions are also documents of Tanega’s rigorous musicianship. According to Pavletich, “Sometimes I would sing a phrase, and Norma understood the music… she made beautiful, evocative music for every line, each piece.”

Like the best collaborations, Tanega and Pavletich’s melding of sensibilities achieves something greater than the sum of its writerly wit and instrumental chops, considerable though they may be. There is, for one thing, the obvious joy the recordings document; as Pavletich remembers it: “with the sounds, trills, grace notes, croons, whispers, howls, rattles and snaps we produced, there were roars and hoots of laughter. I hope that everyone who collaborates has a scintilla of that delight while working alongside a peer.” 

Still more affecting, there is the work’s free embrace of improv and synchronicity, its decidedly instinctive use of the home cassette format, and the palpable trust of its creators’ casually brilliant collaborative process. Saturday Dancer, Ways Away, and Run Runner offer up visions of inspiration unbound by expectation or external concerns, freely paired perspectives “twined”—as Pavletich remembers it—”like garlands.”

Norma Tanega and Aida Pavletich’ Saturday Dancer, Ways Away, and Run Runner will be released in newly transferred and remastered digital editions, alongside a small inventory of original cassettes, on October 9, 2026 via Freedom To Spend.

CS

Side A
01. Photographs of You (4:48)
02. The Big One (2:58)
03. Prison (2:42)
04. Last Request (1:22)
05. Fur Elise (8:15)
06. Los Angeles (2:20)
07. Extra Extra (4:39)
08. Diva (2:15)

Side B
09. Ways Away (3:05)
10. TV (2:10)
11. Highway (3:06)
12. Captain’s Log (2:55)
13. First Line of a Mystery (3:00)
14. Picasso (1:06)
15. Testaments (3:44)
16. Blue (10:25)