★Important Records
Multivocal
Jessica Ekomane's debut LP, Multivocal, is brilliantly original, and will appeal to fans of Caterina Barbieri, Alessandro Cortini, Shasta Cults, ELEH, and the strand of minimal electronic music that runs through the Important catalog. Multivocal is a polyphonic maze that unfolds to both the body and the mind. A generative take on rhythm and spatial perception, it presents the same events in different configurations. The two pieces of the album, "Solid of Revolution" and "Never Odd or Even", mirr…
Configurations
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…
chry-ptus
Eliane Radigue's Chry-Ptus is her very first piece for the modular synthesizer. It was composed in 1971 using a Buchla 100 which had recently been installed at NYU by Morton Subotnick. 'Chry-Ptus' (1971). Originally two tapes which were to be played simultaneously, with or without synchronisation, which does not affect the structure of the work, but creates changes in the game of sub-harmonics and overtones. Three variations on this piece were performed at the New York Cultural Center in 1971, w…
Tara's Room + Sounding Way
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 …
Vibe
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…
Black Metal Square
**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…
Phonurgia Metallis
**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…
Orpheus Variations
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…
Chamber Music: Alvin Lucier & Morton Feldman
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…
Hallelujah Mystic Garden Part Two
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…
Home Age 2
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…
Immediate Horizon
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…
Geelriandre / Arthesis
**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…
Reverberations 1
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…
Music For Cello
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…
Sonambients: The Sound Sculpture Of Harry Bertoia
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
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
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…
Bayou Electric
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, respectively. 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 …
Omminggg And Schlomminggg
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…