★Important Records
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
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…
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…
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…
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 …
Wizards
This CD reissue of JD Emmanuel's Wizards contains two tracks excluded from the original 1982 LP due to master tape problems. "Wizards was my first deep trance electronic music album. This album was inspired by Terry Riley, one of the earliest people ever to compose and perform long, extended, cyclic pieces in the electronic format. This music was composed and performed in '81 and '82. I consider this album my best work. The instrumentation is three Sequential Circuits PRO-1s, Crumar Traveler…
Homage
Eleh's Homage series is remastered and on CD for the first time. Certain frequency combinations that were impossible to cut on LP are effectively presented in this digital edition. Packaged in a heavy duty 6 panel fold out jacket with inner printing and a matte finish. Eleh, an artist who flourishes in restraint, uses a reduced sonic vocabulary to highlight delicate intricacies in a logical path toward harmonious satisfaction. The organization of hypnotic square waves, rippling sine waves and tr…
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…
I Line My Days Along Your Weight
LP edition. Brooklyn duo Mark Rogers and Mary Byrne recorded their debut, I Line My Days Along Your Weight, as a true duet: facing each other inches apart, intent upon listening. They wove together archaic instruments -- baritone acoustic, tricone resonator, golden-era flattop, space-age lap steel, upright piano, and hundred-year-old mandolin -- into a new and vibrant third voice. All the songs were recorded live to two-inch analog tape, the studio equivalent of tightrope-walking without…
Feel Free: Live At Cafe Oto
Beautiful ensemble performance of Duane Pitre's Feel Free including James Blackshaw on hammered dulcimer. LP pressed in an audiophile grade edition of 1000 copies.
Shortly after the release of Pitre's Feel Free, the composer set out for a 2012 solo tour in select European cities. To start off this tour he staged an ensemble performance of Feel Free, at London's renowned Cafe OTO. For his ensemble, Pitre chose to utilize only one veteran of a Feel Free performance (Jesse Sparhawk) and for th…
Melodies For A Savage Fix
Steve Gunn and Mike Gangloff (Pelt) combine six-and 12-string guitars with gongs, tanpura, singing bowls, shruti box, and banjo fora gorgeous collection of improvised compositions. The two artists took it pretty far off the beaten path for Melodies for a Savage Fix, sequestering themselves for an overnight session in the remote farmhouse/recording studio of noted roots-music engineer Joseph Dejarnette (Carolina Chocolate Drops, Bruce Greene, Curtis Eller) in the countryside of Floyd County, Virg…
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…
Mercury
CD version of the 2009 Mississippi Records release. Highly recommended to followers of the Blackshaw/Wissem line of acoustic instrumental composition that runs through the Imprec catalog. From the original notes: "Portland guitar virtuoso Marisa Anderson is back with a new set of home-recorded instrumentals. This time around we find Marisa exploring structures more based on the Appalachian folk tradition. The bluesy cadences of Marisa's other previous release -- Golden Hour -- are still the…
Blood/Lines
Blood Lines is Emily Jane White's first album for Important since 2009's Dark Undercoat. Featuring vocal contributions from Marissa Nadler. This American version of the CD contains two bonus tracks not available elsewhere.
After releasing three albums in three years, Emily Jane White wrote over 100 sketches between January 2011 and October 2012. Her new album "Blood / Lines" is a selected compilation of these songs. Recorded in a secluded studio in Sonoma County, California, the quiet envi…
Liebestod
Liebestod, by Polish composer Stefan Wesolowski, consists of repetitive compositions written for piano, brass instruments, strings, and electronics. The title itself is derived from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde, which says a lot about Wesolowski's primary inspirations. Liebestod shows a tremendous amount of respect for classical music but Wesolowski is far from making literal references to it. He shows his own unique musical language; rough and radical at some points, yet full of intense nos…
Jeff Burch
Jeff Burch's first solo full-length album is comprised of two expansive instrumental compositions anchored by beautiful old acoustic guitars and a modular synthesizer. He hoists his sounds up through the remnants of the 60's downtown drone spirit, through the fetid fruits of post-war central Europe and the scattered output of present-day suburban outsiders. The arrangements shift gracefully from floods of lush string texture to driving guitar and drum motif, from ebbs of brass and deep electric …
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…
Heat Source
Ashley Paul's Heat Source was recorded during a challenging year of transience between New York and London. During this year of impermanence Paul performed regularly and the effects of frequent performance and traveling can be heard in the intentionally pared back emptiness of Heat Source. making it an emotionally challenging and fascinatingly personal listening experience.Heat Source finds Ashley Paul working using her brilliant ears to find a zen like balance between her voice and a sp…