Some of the best reissue labels, like Soul Jazz, Numero Group, and Light in the Attic, made their mark by unearthing sounds that most of us never knew existed. They give names to them and put frames around them—a taxonomical project that has brought us essential compendiums of Ohio proto-punk, private-press new age music, and psychedelic country from the early ’70s, to name just a few pins in our ever-expanding musical atlas. RVNG Intl.’s Freedom to Spend imprint takes the opposite tack. Instead of creating alternative canons, it’s plucking obscure records from the ether and presenting them as standalone curios. Co-founders Pete Swanson, Jed Bindeman, and Matt Werth are interested, they say, in confusing the timeline, in sidestepping the historical frame to engage strangeness and wonder head-on.
For its first few releases since re-launching earlier this year, after a trial run nearly a decade ago, Freedom to Spend has swung its lens widely. First there was Eye Chant, a 1986 album of synthesizer music recorded in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania by Michele Mercure (aka Michele Musser); then came the Seattle electronic musician Marc Barreca’s Music Works for Industry, a 1983 cassette of sleek electro and wry anti-capitalism. The label’s third release stems from the same time period and thousands of miles to the east: the Mediterranean city of Valencia, Spain. Pep Llopis’ 1987 album Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonautes makes for a good opportunity to meet the label’s challenge of listening without prejudice. Mixing the sounds of classical minimalism with period electronics, folk melodies, and chanted poetry in Catalan, it’s the most unusual thing they’ve put out yet.
Long a sought-after prize by record collectors, the album is, fittingly enough, driven by the spirit of the quest. Llopis began writing the music after the dissolution of his previous band, the progressive rock group Cotó-en-Pèl, sent him sailing across the Mediterranean, island-hopping from Menorca to Crete, Lesbos, and Santorini. Inspiration from Wim Mertens and Philip Glass spun in his head along with the Greek music he had brought back from the Aegean; it was an encounter with the Valencian poet Salvador Jàfer’s collection Navegant obscur that pointed him toward the final form of the piece, in which Jàfer’s poetry—not so much spoken as chanted—infused the music with the dark, swirling pulse of the open sea. Llopis and his ensemble performed a version of the piece at Valencia’s Poiemusia, a 1986 festival of contemporary composition and poetry, and he recorded the album in early 1987, utilizing a limited set of instruments—cello, flute, clarinet, vibraphone, marimba, and keyboards—and with Jàfer himself reciting the text, accompanied by the late actress Montse Anfruns. The album was released later that year on Madrid’s Grabaciones Accidentales, home also to the Iberian Fourth World sounds of Finis Africae.
All these points of reference can help orient you within Poiemusia’s waters, but the listening experience itself requires few footnotes. Llopis’ work makes no secret of its debt to composers like Glass, Mertens, and Steve Reich: Throughout most of the album’s five tracks, contrapuntal arpeggios spin like wheels within wheels, with diverse acoustic and electronic timbres fusing into a sumptuous sound as dynamic as the play of light on choppy water. (The lone exception is “Nits de Cristall,” a beautiful, piano-led piece that brings Satie and Debussy to mind.) Minimalism’s sense of moving while standing still is balanced by a forceful compositional hand that emphasizes major shifts from passage to passage—not unlike jibing and tacking in the wind.
Both individually and as a set, the five tracks have a strong narrative feel, with chapter-like arrangements and mirroring sections. “El Vell Rei De La Serp” begins with a lengthy passage of bowed cello and gentle flute before shifting into tumbling pulse-minimalism mode; after five minutes of rising pitch and growing complexity, all the instruments drop out save a faint whistle, and a two-minute coda brings us back to the flute-and-cello theme of the opening. In a similar maneuver, the whole album is bookended by the drifting synths that suggest the stillness of the harbor that lies on either side of the journey.
The text, however, is not narrative. Jàfer’s impressionistic poetry emphasizes striking visual imagery—“Bees and slugs, honey and liquefied wax”; “Mysteries, algae, lips”—and its incantations begin to assume an almost liturgical feel. You don’t need to understand Catalan to appreciate the sonority of the voices, particularly when they are subtly processed through vocoder-like effects. Swirled into the music, the voices contribute to an overall effect that is like painting in sound and word, and just enough of the text cuts through to trigger unexpected associations in the listener’s mind. (“Moriré amb l’enyorança/De no ser un jaguar,” goes one particularly potent line which is bound to resonate, whatever your degree of exposure to various Romance languages.) Poiemusia La Nau Dels Argonauts is an album of oceanic currents, of cultural exchange, with a shape dictated by the rhythms of both the sea and the journey. Despite its late-’80s provenance, it still sounds both futuristic and faintly medieval. It might as well be a message in a bottle washed up with no returning address—a fine example of Freedom to Spend’s vision of historical music that strikes home like a bolt from the blue.
