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Plenty of labels have made their names among music obsessives by sifting through the stacks at flea markets and record shops and rescuing unheralded gems from the past.
None of them, though, digs quite as deep as Jed Bindeman.
Through the two labels he helps operate—Freedom to Spend, which he runs with Pete Swanson and Matt Werth, and Concentric Circles—the musician and co-owner of Little Axe Records in Northeast Portland has unearthed obscurities that aren’t just rare but practically unheard of.
Take, for instance, Carola Baer, a dream-pop artist whose work he discovered when his girlfriend found a cassette at the Goodwill Bins.
“She’s British but lived in San Francisco in the early ’90s and gave one-off tapes that she’d recorded in her apartment to prospective musical collaborators,” he says of Baer. “She only made one copy of that tape, which, if it had met its final destination of the dump, would have never been heard again.”
The latest Concentric Circles release, Jack Briece’s Heterophonious Fool, is equally esoteric. Self-released by the late composer in a run of 50 cassettes, the album’s pingponging rhythms and synth trills often sound like a lost Aphex Twin demo. Bindeman bought the tape as part of a large collection some years ago and was an instant convert.
With Freedom to Spend, Bindeman oversaw the repressing of Neighborhoods, a 1975 private press album by KBOO co-founder and musician Ernest Hood that presaged modern ambient by blending modular synth, zither and field recordings. It’s Bindeman’s most successful reclamation project yet: Pitchfork gave the record a coveted Best New Reissue designation, calling it “an album that kindles a sensation not unlike watching home videos of your own childhood.”
“There is a specific idea to release albums that people aren’t necessarily waiting around for,” Bindeman says. “It makes the entire label a really fun endeavor for me, as I’ve always been someone who enjoys turning people on to music they may not have known about previously.”
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