Over the last couple of years, Freedom to Spend, the brainchild of West Coast musical mavericks, Pete Swanson and Jed Bindeman, has consistently thrown a wrench in the cogs of the reissue market. Each of their astounding, genre defiant releases - masterstrokes by artists like Michele Mercure, Marc Barreca, Pep Llopis, Richard Horowitz, Rimarimba, June Chikuma, and Ursula K. Le Guin & Todd Barton - has, in their own way, challenged long-standing historical perceptions of the global landscape of independent music, as well as the root definitions of experimentalism. Now joining this visionary catalog is the long awaited reissue of Ernest Hood’s legendary cult LP, Neighborhoods, privately issued in 1975.

Ernest Hood was a fascinating, obscure figure in American music - an accomplished, Portland, Oregon based guitarist whose promising career was cut short by polio in his late twenties, but who ultimately harnessed his subsequent limitations as a means to take him into remarkable and singular realms of creativity. Following his move to less physically-demanding stringed instruments in the late 1940s, Hood took the unprecedented step of implementing field recordings in his jazz ensemble collaborations in 1956, foreshadowing approaches and techniques which would appear on his lone solo LP, Neighborhoods, decades down the road.

Neighborhoods has few parallels - a sonic attempt to conjure a dream-like state of sensory memory and the joy in reminiscence. A nostalgic opus, built from intertwined, melodic lines of zither and synthesizer, threaded by a vast array of field recordings - screen doors opening and closing, passing motorists, crickets chirping, children playing, etc - the album is an undefinable hybrid of organized sound which stands outside of time - neither an ambient record, document, or work of musique concrète - a practice which Hood referred to as “musical cinematography” - the melodies and sounds of Portland taking the listener on an inward, imagistic journey through time.

Entirely unique - almost an entire genre of music unto its own, Freedom to Spend’s reissue of Ernest Hood’s Neighborhoods represents the first ever reissue of this highly sought after wonder.