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The Watchers
The Watchers is a historic collaboration between Lubomyr Melnyk and James Blackshaw. These new pieces are being released as a CD/LP with material exclusive to each format. LP is pressed in an edition of 500.
"I first met Lubomyr Melnyk at a festival called Hea Uus Heli in October 2008. We were both scheduled to play that day and I was very excited to see him perform. Before the show I bought several LPs from him and mentioned as much. Lubomyr (more than modest and courteous, as he always is) as…
New York Nuts & Boston Baked Beans
Violinist/vocalist C Spencer Yeh & unrivaled saxophone elder-titan Paul Flaherty team up without the assistance of acclaimed drummer Chris Corsano for the first time.Along for the jamz is bonkers Boston trumpeteer Greg Kelley. After performing numerous times and honing a distinct group dynamic as a trio over many years with celebrated percussionist Chris Corsano, Yeh and Flaherty decided to try it out one-on-one. The record comprises of the best from two live sets from a short duo tour in the No…
Tryptichs: Variations On A Melody
Aidan Baker's (Nadja) Triptychs takes inspiration from Erik Satie's compositions Gymnopédies and his notion of "furniture music," which many consider a precursor to contemporary ambient music. Each "triptych" is based around a simple, slow-moving melodic line, which repeats three times with the addition of a harmonic line upon each repetition, culminating in a three part harmony. Various musicians from different ensembles and musical backgrounds -- Peter Broderick, Julia Kent, Leah Buckaref…
Drifters Sympathy
Brand new full length from Grails/Om member Emil Amos. While burying himself in old books on Cold War espionage and '70s Italian horror soundtracks, Emil Amos logged many hours into the night layering endless tracks of improv and then editing them into a cohesive sonic blanket over 2 years time. He emerged with his sixth full length record under the name Holy Sons called Drifter's Sympathy. Listeners will recognize Amos' signature hallucinatory/LSD-inspired mixing-style, heard on records like Bl…
Birchville Cat Motel & Yellow Swans
Yellow Swans & Birchville Cat Motel is the first collaboration between these two underground phenomenons. Both groups have amassed sturdy back catalogs and a great deal of critical acclaim. This collaboration was recorded entirely in New Zealand both live and in the studio.
The Golden Hour
Portland guitar wizard Marisa Anderson's long-awaited solo guitar record. Marisa has been a fixture on many a music scene for years and years, playing with everyone from the Evolutionary Jass Band to Tara Jane O'Neil to The Dolly Ranchers. In any context, she can't escape her rag/blues/folk roots, no matter how hard she tries. On this LP featuring only guitar, no vocals, no overdubs, we are treated to a very intimate-sounding home recording filled with delicate grace. Comparisons to John F…
I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed
Aidan Baker's I Wish Too, To Be Absorbed is a 2-disc compilation of tracks from various out-of-print, limited edition releases spanning the last 10 years of Baker's output, ranging from his very first release to material that was featured on the soundtrack to a book of his poetry. Toronto based composer Aidan Baker works under his own name, under the name Nadja along with bassist Leah Buckareff and also with the trio ARC. Hailing from the Great White North, Baker incorporates guitar, drums, bass…
Untitled #274
Untitled #274 was composed by Francisco López and performed by Kasper T. Toeplitz at GRM Studios in Paris, France. Francisco López is internationally recognized as one of the major figures of sound art and experimental music. For more than thirty years he has developed an astonishing sonic universe, absolutely personal and iconoclastic, based on a profound listening of the world. Destroying boundaries between industrial sounds and wilderness sound environments, shifting with passion from th…
Songs About Fucking Steve Albini
A collection of psychedelic love songs paying tribute to all things analog. Similar to older Kid606 releases like PS I Love You, GQ on the EQ, The Soccergirl EP and Why I Love Life. This album was carefully constructed to be the soundtrack for the peak 72 minutes of your next trip. The songs all linger on too long but just long enough, you hear voices you can't understand, but you will know what they're saying. Every track has its distinct identity and direction to completely throw you from one …
Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death
Important is proud to welcome back James Blackshaw for his first full length on Important since his breakthrough album O True Believers was released in 2006. James has since forged a remarkable career achieving critical praise for his dexterity, his deep, connected songwriting and his beautiful arrangement.
Written at a time of great emotional disquiet, the hauntingly beautiful and bittersweet ninth full-length studio album, Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, from British guitarist-composer Ja…
Vague
The duo appearing on "VAGUE" is Scillia Lorage and Kiko.C.Esseiva. The encounter between them gave birth to this project in springtime 2008 in which their intentions lie in experimental free improvisation. On this recording, Kiko C. Esseiva played live tape manipulations and Scillia Lorage weaves, with her voice, sounds that are manipulated live on her sampler. With spontaneity, they attempt to build soundscapes and sounds character; sometimes by walking on eggs, some other times trying to save …
The Cassiber Box 1982 - 1992
Milestone reissue! In 1982 Cassiber (phonetically: ‘a message smuggled out of prison’) crashed like a locomotive into the Deutsche Neue Welle. Founded by Heiner Goebbels, Alfred Harth, Christoph Anders and Chris Cutler, Cassiber managed to fuse materials and attitudes drawn from experimental rock, fringe jazz, punk, pop, plunderphonics, improvisation, close structure and musique concrete with an energetic and complex form of studio (and then concert) composition that was unique in its comb…
Historia
This box collects and restores two legendary Música Urbana mid-70s releases, both met at the time with extravagant critical acclaim but with few sales outside of Spain, and presents for the first time a set of previously unknown studio recordings by the otherwise undocumented Trio Altisent – which features members of both other projects - alongside a substantial and comprehensive book of background materials, newly conducted interviews, rare unpublished photographs and a general overview of the …
We Are Still Wild Horses
Tip! MF Tomlinson's second album We Are Still Wild Horses stands partially as a document of the year after ‘the year everything changed’, necessitated as a way out of the "the deep sadness in the winter of 2021". Written in the time when the days were the shortest, it speaks in the language and logic of dreams. In the dramatic sonic landscapes in which these songs unfold; a remarkable journey deep into the self is taking place. Tomlinson says of the album: “At both ends of the album there is an …
A Hilliard Songbook - New Music For Voices
*2024 stock. Deluxe packaging* Although by now almost habitually referred to as Britain’s foremost early music vocal group, the Hilliard Ensemble (founded 1974) has long had an equal, and complementary, commitment to contemporary music. Its members have sought out new music that adapts itself to the group’s blend of voices and, where necessary, commissioned works from composers they admire. In their recitals, century-spanning leaps – from John Cage, say, to Josquin Deprez (or vice versa), from P…
Paul Hindemith, Alfred Schnittke, Anna Gourari, Markus Poschner, Orchestra Della Svizzera Italiana Lugano
Paul Hindemith / Alfred SchnittkeAfter three acclaimed solo piano programmes for the label, here Anna Gourari widens the instrumental spectrum with the Lugano-based Orchestra della Svizzera italiana under Markus Poschner’s direction in striking performances of Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto for Piano and String Orchestra and Paul Hindemith’s The Four Temperaments. Gourari’s pianistic command is one of “virtuoso polish and with flawless action”, to quote the German daily Süddeutsche Zeitung, and her holistic, wide-reaching grasp of…
Piano Songs
Celebrating Meredith Monk as composer, these Piano Songs give us a world at once playful and earnest. Written or derived from work composed between 1971 and 2006, the pieces inhabit Monk’s unique universe, as played by two of new music’s most distinguished interpreters, pianists Ursula Oppens and Bruce Brubaker. These pieces are ‘songs’ because they have strong roots in Monk’s pieces for voice, and because they are direct, specific, and imagistic. Meredith Monk on composing for two pianos: “I de…
Silent, Listening
Silent, Listening is a major addition to ECM’s distinguished line of solo piano recordings, featuring one of the outstanding improvising pianists and jazz masters of our time: Fred Hersch. The album features seven original creations and a handful of well-chosen standards, including Billy Strayhorn’s “Star-Crossed Lovers”, Sigmund Romberg’s “Softly, As In A Morning Sunrise”, Alec Wilder’s “Winter Of My Discontent” and Russ Freeman’s “The Wind”, all played with the focus, sensitivity and gracefuln…
Gateway
With “daring and visionary spirit”, to quote a Downbeat review from the year of this album’s release, master improvisers John Abercrombie, Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette forged a unique vision of trio interplay on their first joint effort under the Gateway moniker. The trio tackles Dave Holland and Jack DeJohnette originals with a visionary idea of what three-way conversations in jazz could sound like. As The Observer remarked in an article of the time, “the telepathic ensemble playing and per…
Octet • Music For A Large Ensemble • Violin Phase
*Includes 24-page booklet with photos and liner notes* Steve Reich's commercial success had ballooned after his prior release on ECM, Music for 18 Musicians, and this collection of three compositions, two new and one from 1967, was the follow-up. Music for a Large Ensemble is very much of a piece with the prior work, using extended melodic lines, a larger palette of sound colors, and key changes every several minutes. It's charming and pleasantly busy in an industrious way but really covers litt…