★Important Records
Being A Firefighter Isn\'t Just About Squirting Water
Ever since the days of Leonin and Perotin, people have been trying to pin down that special something that makes music so unique, with Andrew McKenzie of The Hafler Trio more ardent than most in his perusal. The lavishly packaged 5th instalment in this highly limited edition series of EP's, 'Being a Firefighter Isn't Just About Squirting Water' comprises a single 20 minute composition that is a dictionary definition of delicacy. Building upwards from spectral entities, …
Erroneous: A Selection Of Errors
Lovely collaborative project, result of the meeting of Italian cult band Larsen and Steven Stapleton’s ubiquitous creature Nurse With Wound. Almost 2 years of file swapping and occasional conceptual meetings led to a multi-headed collection of deformed sounds based on one long NWW piece and two Larsen tracks (that both bands have written specifically for this project) then deconstructed and rebuilt by each other into totally brand new opuses.Erroneous also features Neu! and Kraftwerk original me…
Guano Padano
Guano Padano, assembled by Alessandro Stefana, features guests Alessandro Alessandroni (renowned whistler of the immortal Ennio Morricone western soundtracks), Gary Lucas (Captain Beefheart/Jeff Buckley guitarist), Chris Speed (clarinet player with Tim Berne, Uri Caine, John Zorn etc.) and, last but not least, the legendary Italian singer Bobby Solo. Guano Padano's music is a kind of road movie, unfolding between the scorching asphalt of highway number 4 and the juicy smells of the peasan…
Dark Side Of The Black Moon: What Planet Are We On?
Awesome double set packaged in a deluxe tip-on style jacket, pressed on virgin vinyl, & includes an exclusive bonus D-side track, Finding the mighty Acid Mothers Temple in progged-up mode, Dark Side Of The Black Moon gets underway with tentative strands of feedback and echo-obscured vocals, knitting the usual AMT psychedelic tapestry but dividing it into discreet sections during 'Space Labyrinth Or Eclipse On Friday', which toys around with various different rhythmic patterns (which is very…
Black Tar Prophecies Vol's 1, 2, & 3
LP version: The collected Black Tar Prophecies ends up being a more idiosyncratic mission statement for future Grails recordings, revealing their fondness for the groundfloor '60s and '70s experimental artists that saw music as a process of discovery as opposed to the pre-conceived, pre-parametered, commodified sport that underground music has become. A parallel is now forming between Grails and old-school experimental bands like Faust who, rejecting their past, started over from the begin…
Viva Negativa! A Tribute to the New Blockaders Vol. III
Viva Negativa! A Tribute To The New Blockaders: Volume III: USA. Volume III in a series of UK-European-US and Japanese artists' tributes to the pioneering UK Noise group The New Blockaders including exclusive tracks by Z'ev, Keith Fullerton Whitman, Alan Courtis, Controlled Bleeding, Plethora, Macronympha, Prurient, Richard Ramirez, Blue Sabbath Black Cheer, Carlos Giffoni, AMK, Aaron Dilloway, Wolf Eyes, Idea Fire Company, Mnortham, Thurston Moore, Jim O'Rourke, Damion Romero, The Haters…
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…
HYDratioN
Super limited edition of 300 hand-numbered copies. Hand screened jackets printed by Neil Burke at Monoroid. For years, both Z'EV and Jon Mueller have explored these possibilities, both within traditional forms, and singling out specific elements within those forms. For Z'EV, an entire book, called Rhythmmajik, was written about the properties of rhythm, while his history pairs him with a wealth of collaborators, from Carl Stone, Glenn Branca, and many others, as he pursued the quest for rhythmic…
We Are All One, In the Sun: A Tribute To Robbie Basho
In Robbie Basho's lifetime he set out to champion the steel string guitar as an expressive and dignified concert instrument. His guitar playing was first brought to light in 1965, when John Fahey released Basho's debut The Seal Of The Blue Lotus on Fahey's own Takoma Records. Armed with a unique and powerful singing voice, his 6 & 12 string guitar and a collection of special guitar tunings that he created (even originating a unique chart titled 'The Esoteric Doctrine of Color and Mood,' d…
Pantheon Of The Lesser
Pantheon Of The Lesser was composed over a period of two years in Ocean's home studio in Portland, Maine. As the seasons passed each track was written, re-written, played and then re-played as layers were slowly stripped away until the true essence of the song was revealed. Once Ocean entered the studio it took another two years to deconstruct Pantheon Of The Lesser until they had found the essence of their writing. This disciplined deconstructionist approach to songwriting is how Ocean t…
Split
Despite the fact I've always had a liking for Pan Sonic I recently found out that Mika Vainio isn't actually the one with the fringe. Oh well, that's faceless leccyblokes for you. The one without the fringe is on spectacularly uncompromising form here, beginning with a nasty bit of high-frequency blasting before crashing into a heavy, ultra distorted 'tone' that could almost pass for Sunn 0))) being processed to within an inch of their lives. A temporary respite eventually arrives in the …
Thaumogenesis
"Limited to 1000 copies. Double LP packaged in a gatefold LP jacket. Designed by Seldon Hunt. Bonus D side of James Plotkin's exclusive 'ThaumoRemix.' and bonus live CD." "One single 62 minute long track, bass, guitar and drum machine, all woven into a slowly undulating soundscape of blissy drone and monstrous pummel...It's like some Frankensteinian collage of Godflesh, Jesu, Sunn O))) and old Swans. It's heavy and bleak and doomy, but like Jesu, the sound is imbued with a strange warmth,…
Black Tar Prophecies Vol 4
While Grail’s studio records are expertly crafted affairs, full of expert production and cinematic flair, but the Black Tar Prophecies series has been the set of songs which has brought Grails to the forefront of the instrumental scene. Lo-fi and bared back, it gives the band a place to experiment outside of the norm. Volume 4 of the Black Tar Prophecies series utterly drips in dark atmosphere; opener I Want A New Drug starts with a tape recording which slowly descends into warbling, becom…
VII
The seventh album from Montreal's harbinger of blackmetaldoompsychedelia appears on Important. Of the two sides of Aun's bi-polar output this falls into the cataclysmic doom zone, full of downtuned scorched-earth riffage and ominous ambience. The inclusion of drummer Away from Voivod lends a thunderous motorik propulsion to 'Falcon' and punctures 'Broken Bill' with neck snapping weight. For fans of Earth, Sunn 0))), Pelican, Gnod - Recommended.
In O To Infinity
Having previously embarked upon a cover version of Terry Riley's perennially popular minimalist opus 'In C', Japanese psych-rock legends Acid Mothers Temple return to the concept, this time offering slightly more... esoteric readings of the text with extended improvisations 'In 0', 'In A' (ok, so that one's not all that weird), 'In Z' and 'In ∞'. As the various titles suggest, this is a mightily weird album - yes, even more so than the usual AMT freak-outs - and it's great to hear the ba…
Burners
Like this week's brilliant Sun Araw release, On Patrol, Robedoor's Burners is vying for sleeve art greatness, truly looking like something that's arrived from another age and most probably another dimension. Recorded and mixed last year at the same studio that birthed the band's formidable Raiders long-player, this new album joins some of the dots between the group's menacing drone past and their recent turn towards more confirmedly song-based material. Pick of the tracks has to be the …
The weird wide world of Henry Jacobs-The fine art of gooding off
When Important Records originally released (in 2005) Henry Jacobs 'The wide weird world of Henry Jacobs / The fine art of gofing off”, it was met with instant acclaim and a lengthy, nationally broadcast feature on NPR. We are happy to announce the reissue of this out-of-print CD/DVD set. Over forty years ago, Henry Jacobs left a large collection of his recordings underneath his house in Mill Valley, CA only to have it discovered in the past decade. Restored, sequenced and mastered by prod…
Around The World With Henry Jacobs
Absurd folklorist Henry Jacobs returns with a selection of rare interviews, odd loops, sales pitches, early synthesizer demos, an ether-infused evening, and more! Produced in San Francisco and New York City, Around The World With Henry Jacobs is a travelogue that continues the story begun with The Wide Weird World of Henry Jacobs, mixing archival material from the 1950s with recent improvisations by Jacobs. Guests include Stan Freberg and Dr. Irwin Corey, with Alan Watts returning for a visit, t…
S/T
This follows NHK's sold out 12" on Raster Noton. This is Important's final release in a 4 record series featuring the work of the enigmatic Japanese artist Kouhei Matsunaga. NHK began in Osaka in 2006 between Kouhei and Toshio Munehiro. Their previous work, titled Unununium, can be found on the Raster Noton label.These experimental electro-rhythmic compositions sound incorporate beats, noise and a modern aesthetic.