Freedom To Spend has a specific talent for finding records that fell through every categorical crack available. Jack Spence's Bamboo Sun — originally pressed in 1985 on the tiny Equator Music imprint — is exactly that kind of find. Flute, bongos, vocal harmonics drifting somewhere between choral and accidental, all produced with a sharpness that doesn't match the deliberately loose playing. Spence handled keys, drums, and flute himself. Bob Glaub — a session bassist who played on Jackson Browne and Lennon records — held down the low end. That combination shouldn't cohere. Mostly it does.

The cover tells you what territory you're entering — sepia, handmade, a figure that might be a bird or a body or both. I can't decide, and I don't think Spence could either.

Freedom To Spend's uncommon¢ series has quietly become the most reliable excavation project in experimental reissues. They don't surface lost tapes. They surface records that were pressed in small runs, sold a few hundred copies, and vanished because nobody knew where to shelve them. Forty-one years later, the shelving problem hasn't been solved. The music just found an audience that doesn't need it solved.