★Important Records
Far West
On "Far West," the Master Musicians of Bukkake mark a turn from their Totem Trilogy. If the Totems were an expression of yang energy, then the "Far West" cycle is the yin that took seed within the trilogy. What happens when you travel so far east looking for enlightenment that you pass your destination and are headed west again? The mania of being lost in the mountains of the Cascade Corridor, searching aimlessly for the Northern Pacific coast. A spiritual Donner party of sorts, feeding off fant…
Anoxia
LP version in combination offset/screenprinted jacket. Edition of 500. The second L A N D album, Anoxia, sees Daniel Lea return alone with an outing that marks a shift from the industrial-inflected jazz-noir of 2012's Night Within into distinctly new terrain. Mixed by Ben Frost at Greenhouse Studios, Reykjavík; mastered by Rashad Becker at D&M, Berlin. CD packaged in a combination offset/screenprinted jacket. "Anoxia" means "total absence of oxygen," and in Lea's hands the term heralds aural e…
Sonambient : Recordings of Harry Bertoia
Harry Bertoia's Complete Sonambient Collection features all 11 of Bertoia's original records newly restored from their master tapes and housed in replica jackets. A heavy duty box, printed with metallic inks, holds the 11 discs as well as a 100-page book containing a lengthy historical essay, an interview with Harry Bertoia from the Smithsonian Archives of American Art, exclusive Sonambient-era material from the Bertoia archive, modern and archival photos of the Bertoia barn, and reflections on …
Harry Bertoia 100th Anniversary
Experiential Recordings, Sonambient and Important Records are honoured to present a tribute to Harry Bertoia's 100th year anniversary. The project intends to celebrate the artist and his sound sculptures through a collection of recordings realised by EMG. The package consists of a limited numbered edition of 100 copies, 180g vinyl record and a DVD, both enclosed in a hand-crafted and engraved wooden box produced by an artisan located in Naples, Italy. A booklet giving an insight to the project i…
Stop Time
Robin Hayward plays microtonal tuba in Catherine Christer Hennix's ensemble and Stop Time is his first composition to be released on Important Records. Stop Time was commissioned for a festival of the same name taking place in Leuven in 2013. It is the first piece to use a subset of the three-dimensional physical version of the Hayward Tuning Vine, invented in 2012, as a musical score. The harmonic space implied within the four cubes contained within the subset, based on prime numbers two (octav…
New Songs Of The Humpback Whale
Packaged in a deluxe, heavy duty 6 panel digipak and insert containing an essay from David Rothenberg and Michael Deal designed whale song visualizations. What record album was so important that ten million copies of it needed to be pressed at once? You guessed it. Songs of the Humpback Whale. In 1979 National Geographic Magazine inserted a flexible "sound page" inside the back cover of all of its editions in twenty-five languages, and that is supposedly how many they printed. No human pop star …
A Room Listening to Itself
Adam Basanta is a Montreal-based sound artist and experimental music composer. His sound installations investigate intersections between sound reproduction, consumer technologies and the activity of listening. In A Room Listening to Itself, the artist produced sound exclusively through amplification techniques which make audible the physical relationships between microphones and reclaimed speaker cones within a gallery's surrounding acoustic environment.
 In this work, eight iconic SM58 mic…
Live At Issue Project Room
BLUES ALIF LAM MIM IN THE MODE OF RAG INFINITY/RAG COSMOSIS is a new composition from Catherine Christer Hennix's expanded just-intonation ensemble, the Chora(s)san Time-Court Mirage. This expanded ensemble includes vocalists Imam Ahmet Muhsin Tüzer, Amir Elsaffan and Amirtha Kidambi, an expanded brass section with the addition of Paul Schwingesnschlögl and Elena Kakaliagou as well as the additon of Marcus Pal and Stefan Tiedje on electronics.Packaged in a lavish, oversized letterpressed jacket …
Central Palace Music
Central Palace Music, performed by Catherine Christer Hennix's just-intonation ensemble The Deontic Miracle, is the first in a series of archival Hennix releases to be issued via Imprec. This previously unheard piece was taken from an eight day festival organized in the Spring of 1976 at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm. The group features Catherine Christer Hennix on Renaissance oboe and custom sinewave generators, Peter Hennix on Renaissance oboe and Hans Isgren on sheng.Central Palace Mu…
Ambient Loop for Vancouver
"Ambient Loop for Vancouver (2004) is a single, full length track (53'43"), with contributions from Alan Licht on guitar, Christian Marclay on turntables, and William Hooker on drums. It was originally assembled as the 'tape bed' for a performance in Vancouver, Canada of DRIFT, my collaborative film and music presentation with partner Leah Singer, in April 2004. This slowly changing, low volume ambience has since been used in various performance, reading and installation situations over the y…
Triptych
2021 small repress. "Back to music after three years of silence... On the suggestion of Robert Ashley, Douglas Dunn commissioned this piece from Éliane Radigue for choreography. Only the first part of Triptych was staged at the premiere at the Dancehall/Theatre of Nancy on February 27 1978. Recorded in the composer's studio in Paris. After the premiere of Adnos I (IMPREC 028CD) in San Francisco in 1974, a group of French students introduced Éliane Radigue to Tibetan Buddhism. When she returned t…
Vice Versa, Etc.
2021 restock. "Includes liner notes & archival photographs. 1970 was an important year in Eliane Radigue's musical life since it was the year just before she acquired her ARP 2500 synthesizer. Since 1967, she had been using the feedback as a material; feedback from two tape recorders reworked through intensive studio techniques: slowing down, alteration, superimposition, montage. In 1970, the last year she dedicated to feedback, several milestone pieces saw the light of day: Omnht, a wonderful s…
Forse 1
Super limited 2015 repress! "Deluxe double LP. Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails/How To Destroy Angels) composed the Forse series using a Buchla Music Easel. Forse, meaning 'maybe' In Italian, is a series of three double LP releases Cortini recorded for Important to release in 2013. 'All pieces were written and performed live on a Buchla Music Easel, in the span of one month. I found that the limited array of modules that the instrument offers sparked my creativity. Most pieces consist of a…
Polarizer
Edition of 200 copies. Screen printed heavy duty white Polarizer jacket. Each record includes a signed/#'d screen print and blank, white, Polarizer cassettes. By purchasing Polarizer the buyer agrees not to reproduce any part of Polarizer digitally but unlimited analog duplication is allowed and white Polarizer cassette tapes are included to encourage duplication.
Eleh's Polarizer is a two part series focused on the instant reality of the analog world.
Mutei - Music for Davida Monk's Dream Pavilion
Since the mid-'90s, Seattle-based guitarist Bill Horist has been making music within and without convention in a wide variety of settings and genres and has worked with many notables in rock, experimental, and new music. He has played on dozens of records and has performed throughout North and Central America, Europe, and Japan, collaborating with numerous leading lights in a beguiling range of genres. He delivers an idiosyncratic and richly emotive take on the world's most ubiquitous instrument…
Celadon
A work of slowly evolving beauty that gradually unravels its meditative design. Recorded in 2013 in the mausoleum of Norwegian sculptor and painter Emanuel Vigeland (1875-1948) in Oslo, a recording space that is famous for its acoustics and its long and full-sounding reverb. These three tracks utilize both the delicacy and the power of acoustic instruments and human voice in relation to the unique recording space. Otherworldly and eerie but also with a great primal expressive force. Perfo…
Catch Me Daddy Original Motion Picture Soundtrack
"The crystal in men's heads / Blackened and fell to pieces. / The valleys went out. / The moorlands broke loose" --from "Heptonstall Old Church" by Ted Hughes. So begins Catch Me Daddy (2014), the award-winning feature film directed by Daniel Wolfe and written by Wolfe and his brother Matthew. The film's score consists of beautiful and bleak wind-ravaged music from Matthew Watson (aka Matthew Wolfe) and Daniel Thomas Freeman (whose 2011 debut album The Beauty of Doubting Yourself Norman Record…
Issa
Issa is the debut release from Bristol-based musician and composer Kit Wilmans Fegradoe. The magic in Issa comes from Fegradoe's powerful exploration of emotion and sensitivity, which leads to a deeply personal and revealing listen. The work evokes the scale of Michael Stearns's compositions for film, whilst eliciting a minimalist undercurrent throughout. The album is sculpted from guided improvisation sessions in the studio with fellow musicians, traversing around the narrative of Issa, a …
Benzaiten
Double LP version. Edition of 1000. Another smoker from Acid Mothers Temple & The Melting Paraiso U.F.O., in typically fine form. Benzaiten is an In C-style homage to the classic Osamu Kitajima record Benzaiten (1973). Acid Mothers Temple covers the title-track and reprise using Kitajima's original composition as a departure point to explore the outer realms of AMT territory. Further instrumental explorations reveal textures of the original composition while launching out further into the cos…
Divertissement
**2nd press** Divertissement is the third collaborative full-length from minimalist composer William Basinski and sound artist Richard Chartier. The duo utilizes electronics, piano, tape loops, and short-wave radio to evoke a dense atmosphere suggesting hundreds of years of history rising up from the depths of a reverberating cathedral. Subtle, buried, and intense murmurs of melody morph through this deeply consuming and slowly evolving composition in two parts. William Basinski is a class…