Freedom to Spend Announces Trio of Norma Tanega and Aida Pavletich Releases + Shares “Saturday Dancer" and “Danse Macabre"

Norma Tanega and Aida Pavletich’s Saturday Dancer, Ways Away, and Run Runner are a series of extraordinary homespun albums and sound collaborations, resurfacing this October on Freedom to Spend.

Using a Roland W-30, a smattering of drum machines, and a four-track cassette recorder, Tanega and Pavletich spent their weekends in the late 1980s creating a trio of operettas, song cycles which they released as short-run tapes. Now, nearly four decades later, these utterly distinctive, effortlessly experimental albums re-work their charm for 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. She was already longtime friends with Aida Pavletich, the author of the books Rock-A-Bye, Baby and Sirens of Song, when the pair decided to make combined use of Tanega’s richly diverse home studio on Mount Baldy.

Today, we share “Danse Macabre,” two pieces for their Tanega and Pavletich's first album, epitomizing the incorrigible irreverence and fluent experimentalism of their creators’ collaboration. Twin exercises in mood, tension, and avant-garde sonic contrasts, the tracks provide a dizzying introduction to the world Tanega and Pavletich conjured.

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