One of the best parts of December is knowing that we’ll get another Freecember from Fake Four. In case you’re not familiar, this is the tradition that Fake Four started a few years ago in which they release a free project each week of December. These are usually EPs from lesser known acts that Fake Four is trying to help promote, but occasionally there are some different releases as well. This year, they start the series off with a collection from Anonymous Inc. called Beta 1.

In case you are unfamiliar, Anonymous Inc. was the band that Ceschi started with his brother David Ramos back in the ‘90s, initially as a grunge band, but later expanded to include hip hop, jazz, prog rock, and psych. They released their first full length album in 2001. They continued to work after that, recording a lot and expanding the band to include Max Heath on piano, but there was never another proper follow up to that album. However, Heath recently dove back into the vaults and has polished up some of these lost recordings, and they have now been assembled four EPs worth of material to release. The first, Beta 1, is an interesting listen, in that it feels more like a demo, with just snippets of ideas, as opposed to an EP with five three-minute pop songs. If you’ve not heard Anonymous Inc. before, it’s fun to hear Ceschi performing in a different format, and to hear all of the different directions that sound of the band could go in. It’s only at the end of the very last song, “Reading Brecht & Feast,” that we get the folk-rap that Ceschi would go on to make his mark with.

It’s only a small window into the world of what might have been for Anonymous Inc. in the mid ‘00s, but Beta 1 is a crash course into a band that could go off into any number of directions without losing their identity. I’ll be curious to see how the rest of the EPs play out.