★Important Records

Shasta Cults' Important Records debut is not to be missed. A self-titled Shasta Cults will be available later this year, also on Important Records. A ship sinks beneath the silver mirror of the sea-top, temple gongs ring through an empty valley, industrial machinery sputters, heaves, lurches forward, stops, falls apart... These sound events may be the most acute musical referents of Shasta Cults, the music project of Canadian synthesizer technician Richard Smith. Using obsolete electronics, Shas…

It’s impossible to do the legacy of Pauline Oliveros justice. From her earliest tape works during the late 1950s and her emergence into the public eye as a founding member of The San Francisco Tape Music Center during the early 60s, until her passing in 2016, she was one of the great pioneering voices in among the American musical avant-garde, ultimately becoming its grande dame. There was, and will never be, anyone quite like her. Over the last decade, we’ve been fortunate to witness a growing …

Important Records announces Vibe, the new LP from Extended Organ, the Los Angeles-based quintet associated with the Los Angeles Free Music Society (LAFMS). Vibe, Extended Organ's first full-length studio LP since 2000's XOXO was recorded in April 2016 by members Joe Potts, Fredrik Nilsen, Paul McCarthy, Tom Recchion, and Alex Stevens. The album consists of two side-long tracks, Hate and Vibe, recorded live at LACM Studio in Pasadena, California by acclaimed engineer André Knecht. On Vibe, the gr…

**100 copies** The sound art of Jacob Kirkegaard explores ways to reflect on immediate complex, unnoticed or unapproachable aspects of the human condition or civilisation. His works have treated themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl and Fukushima, melting ice in the Arctic, border walls in Palestine, and tones - otoacoustic emissions - generated from the actual human ear. Currently Kirkegaard works on two projects, one on the sound of global waste and waste management, and the other on sound…

**300 copies** The sound art of Jacob Kirkegaard explores ways to reflect on immediate complex, unnoticed or unapproachable aspects of the human condition or civilisation. His works have treated themes such as radioactivity in Chernobyl and Fukushima, melting ice in the Arctic, border walls in Palestine, and tones - otoacoustic emissions - generated from the actual human ear. Currently Kirkegaard works on two projects, one on the sound of global waste and waste management, and the other on sound…

Anthony Burr and Charles Curtis present a collection of curated compositions from Alvin Lucier and Morton Feldman. Two Lucier pieces, "August Moon" and "Trio For Clarinet, Cello & Tuba" are presented here for the first time. Liner notes are excerpted from a lecture on Morton Feldman given by Alvin Lucier. A selection from Alvin Lucier's liner notes: "For Feldman, dynamics serve an acoustical function. When he mitigates a piano attack he reduces that spike of noise that's at the onset of every pi…

Orpheus Variations is a new composition by Alvin Lucier for solo cello and seven wind instruments. It is based on a particular sonority from the first movement of Igor Stravinsky's ballet score, Orpheus; a sonority that has haunted Lucier for decades. Orpheus Variations is one of eight large-scale compositions made expressly for Charles Curtis by Alvin Lucier in the last 15 years. This performance was conducted by Petr Kotik, with Charles Curtis playing solo cello alongside members of the SEM En…

One-time edition of 480. Eleh's Home Age series was composed and recorded over a period of five years and it reflects a search for color, form, connection, and growth. The handmade artwork contained in each package was created during the same period of time the music was composed and is an integral part of the meaning of Home Age. For this release, Eleh plays modular and analog synthesizers, piano, organ, bass, and symphonic chimes. Although Home Age is a two-part set, Eleh's upcoming Living Spa…

Hallelujah Mystic Garden Part Two contains a new deep-pocket groove disco version of fan favorite "Pink Lady Lemonade". Side two is a slick kosmiche-electro-disco number that unfurls over a period of 20 minutes and is periodically punctuated by Makoto Kawabata's unruly soloing. Recorded at Acid Mothers Temple, June 2016-March 2017; produced and mixed by Kawabata Makoto. Personnel: Cotton Casino - voice, astral mama; Kawabata Makoto - guitar, fretless bass, bouzouki, organ, rhythm machine, electr…

Lawrence English and Alessandro Cortini issue Immediate Horizon, a live recording, made at the premiere of the piece, held at Kraftwerk in Berlin. Having become mutual admirers of each other's work; English of Cortini's Sonno (HOS 412CD, 2014) and Cortini of English's Wilderness Of Mirrors (RM 460CD, 2014), the pair were very pleased to receive an invitation to collaborate together. Following a number of months exchanging compositional ideas and materials, Cortini and English met in Berlin…

**Edition of 1000 copies**Eliane Radigue's Geelriandre / Arthesis is named for the pieces that fill its two sides. Geelriandre, realized on an ARP 2500 synthesizer in 1972, features Gérard Fremy on prepared piano. Arthesis, realized using the University of Iowa's Moog in 1973, comprises the full duration of side B. Eliane Radigue has received much deserved praise for her transcendent composiitions for tape, synthesizers, and acoustic instruments. Her work is deep, slowly changing, and timelessly…

In 2012 Important Records released Reverberations: Tape & Electronic Music 1961-1970 (IMPREC 352CD), a historic 12-CD box set compiling much of Pauline Oliveros' early and unreleased electronic work. Reverberations 1 is the first release in an ongoing series dedicated to releasing the entire 12-CD box set on vinyl. Organized chronologically by studio, the complete Reverberations not only documents Pauline's earliest electronic music but it also functions as an early history of electronic music i…

Phill Niblock's Music For Cello collects three pieces from the '70s and early '80s, performed by cellist David Gibson. This CD includes a 16-page unpublished interview with Niblock. Since the late sixties Phill Niblock has been composing long-form acoustic drones with a focus on the rhythms and overtones that rise from closely tuned instruments. His highly original and influential music is an exploration of timbre, microtonality, stability, duration and psychoacoustic phenomenon."3 To 7 - 196' i…

Home Age Sonambients: The Sound Sculpture Of Harry Bertoia is a deluxe CD/DVD package containing historic recordings made in Harry Bertoia's Sonambient barn. The DVD, a film titled Sonambients: The Sound Sculpture of Harry Bertoia, by Jeffrey and Miriam Eger, was shot in 1971 and follows Harry Bertoia in performance and interview throughout his Sonambient barn deep in the Pennsylvania woods. This film offers a rare opportunity to follow the artist in practice, listening carefully as he moves con…

Home Age is the first proper Eleh full-length since 2012's Homage To The Pointed Waveforms. These three new pieces seek to expose the inherent musicality of pure electrical currents via high resolution Serge STS synthesizers. Like early Eleh work, Home Age is inward looking, domestic, and deliberate, but also slowly emotional and revealing as if peering blurry-eyed through a window. Melody, harmony, and counterpoint are suggested but not revealed. Packaged in a deluxe gold-on-black, heavy…

Descending is a composition consisting of two movements for room resonance, triangles, shakers, and horns. The recording was made in August 2015, performed by the Aarhus Jazz Orchestra. Descending is Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard's and Jacob Kirkegaard's first collaboration. The sound artists and composers Jacob Kirkegaard and Niels Lyhne Løkkegaard are both renowned for their ability to convert sound into a form with the character of an artwork and a bodily dimension that can be experienced by m…

2023 Restock. Triple yellow LP version. Pressed on audiophile grade heavy duty vinyl. Else Marie Pade, born in 1924 in Denmark, is a precious golden gem in the world of contemporary electro-acoustic music. She is a true pioneer of electronic music and musique concrète. Pade is Denmark's first lady of electronic music and her piece "Syv Cirkler (Seven Circles)" became the first electronic piece performed on Danish radio. Pade's fascination with sound began in early childhood. Isolated in her bed …

Important Records present Omminggg and Schlomminggg, the second release by continuous music pioneer Charlemagne Palestine and Grumbling Fur, consisting of London based multi-disciplinary artists Daniel O'Sullivan and Alexander Tucker; the Time Machine Orchestra being the extended drone arm of Tucker and O'Sullivan's experimental avant-pop conception. This double LP captures a performance of the trio at Copenhagen's illustrious Jazzhouse on November 28th, 2016. The pin-drop acoustic clarity of th…

Alessandro Cortini (Nine Inch Nails) and Japanese noise legend Massami Akita (Merzbow) bask in their mutual love for the EMS Synthi, a British synthesizer from the early 70's notorious for it's patch matrix, portability and distinct tone. Astonishingly, these two disparate artists meld into a single sound as they flex the analog circuitry of the EMS Synthi in new ways; giving this classic synth a modern workout and proving that, in capable hands, a 40 year old analog synthesizer is a tool for th…

Live At The Stone was intended to be Pauline Oliveros’ tribute to the life and work of pianist Connie Crothers who passed away on August 13, 2016. Sadly, Pauline Oliveros passed away on November 25, 2016. This CD, Pauline’s memorial for Connie, is now a memorial for both women. Pauline’s original dedication: “This recording resulted from my one and only performance with Connie Crothers at her invitation during her amazing residency at The Stone in August 2014. I was honored to play with Connie a…

Vergers is Sarah Davachi's third full-length release following Barons Court (2015) and Dominions (2016). It marks her second appearance with Important Records following 2014's August Harp cassette on the Cassauna imprint (SAUNA 017CS). In Vergers, she meditates on a single electronic instrument, the EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer, while also weaving sparse acoustic elements - her own voice and violin - into a series of three long-form, muted gestures. Elements of distance and alienation are certa…

Important Records present the first part of a re-release of Eleh's influential Radiant Intervals, originally released in 2010. Radiant Intervals is a meticulously nuanced and restrained exploration of the rhythmic and harmonic relationships inherent in pure analog frequencies, using a blend of intuitive and mathematically based tunings. Dense patterns of sound slowly unravel and are woven together again in new ways while harmonics hover and shift overhead. Radiant Intervals is a purely anal…

LP version. The New Backwards, created in 2007, was originally included in the Ape Of Naples box set released on Important in 2008 and was constructed by Peter Christopherson using material from the Backwards sessions (CSR 203CD/LP), recorded in the early '90s for a planned release on Trent Reznor's Nothing Records label. The New Backwards, like The Ape Of Naples, is an intense fan favorite and an essential part of the Coil catalog.

Eleh's Polarizer is a two part series focused on the instant, simultaneous reality of the analog world. Polarizer I and II can be played/mixed simultaneously.

Eleh's Polarizer is a two part series focused on the instant, simultaneous reality of the analog world. Polarizer I and II can be played/mixed simultaneously.

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…

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…

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 …

Tim Catlin built the vibrissa: twelve tuned aluminium rods, mounted vertically and stroked lengthwise by hand. Around them, quarter-tone bells, wine glasses, EBowed guitars and long wire instruments, with Philip Brophy and David Brown in the group.

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…

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 …

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…

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 …

A single forty-six minute piece recorded at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm in March 1976, during an eight-day festival Hennix organised and named after the intuitionist mathematician Brouwer. Two amplified Renaissance oboes and a sheng against sine wave generators she built herself. It was the group's only documented public performance.

"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…

2024 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…

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…

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 cosmic domain. Numerous Acid Mothers origi…

CD edition. "Bayou Electric" is the final installment in an unplanned trilogy, with "Feel Free " and "Bridges" making up the first and second installments in the series, respectfully. All three works share similar characteristics, compositional processes, alternate tuning schemes, instrumentation and a certain ethos that the composer views as cohesive whole. There is a progression toward refinement over the course of this trilogy, in the overall "sound" of the albums and in their dependence on o…

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.