Norma Tanega's Saturday Dancer: A Lo-Fi 'Rap Opera' Reissued

Freedom to Spend is reissuing Saturday Dancer, the first of three albums Norma Tanega recorded with writer Aida Pavletich between the late 80s and early 90s on a four-track machine in Tanega's home studio.

Most listeners know Tanega from a different register entirely. Her chirpy 60s folk pop, including Walkin' My Cat Named Dog, charted in the US and Canada. Her swooning 70s ballads have enjoyed a streaming-aided resurgence in popularity in recent years. Far less familiar are the wonky, nocturnal keyboard and drum machine experiments she made with her friend Pavletich, a writer, in the decades after her commercial peak.

Together the pair produced a trio of tapes. Saturday Dancer, the first of the three, now arrives in reissue billed as a "rap opera" — a label that, as the Guardian's Safi Bugel notes in her experimental album of the month review, conveys the record's theatrical tone rather than any straightforward genre claim.

The album runs to 19 scuzzy, shapeshifting vignettes. Across them, the duo narrate a noirish night out on the town. The scenes range from stripteases and sticky tables to the dread that seeps in when the lights come on, with what Bugel calls "some frankly bizarre tangents" along the way.

The lo-fi instrumentals match that delirium. Clattering, likely improvised percussion sits beneath eerie synths that lurk, in Bugel's phrase, "somewhere between strange and seductive." Swampy textures and sardonic showtune gestures complete a record that sits at a stubborn distance from everything else in Tanega's catalogue.

For an artist whose reputation rests on two distinct eras — the 60s hits and the 70s ballads — Saturday Dancer opens a third, stranger chapter. With the remaining two tapes in the trio presumably to follow, the reissues promise to redraw the map of Tanega's late-career work for listeners who thought they knew it.