New Arrivals
Sounds Of Iceland
This recording takes you on a round trip of Iceland. The aural journey starts westward from the island’s south in the cold early spring. After a side trip into the West Fjords, our route traverses the north of the country at the height of summer, followed by an excursion into the interior highlands before a short stop in the East Fjords. As the sound trip nears its geographical starting point, autumn and winter make their appearance before the journey comes full circle.The recordings do not feat…
Poésie Action: Variations sur Bernard Heidsieck
This documentary film directed by Anne-Laure Chamboissier and Philippe Franck, in collaboration with Gilles Coudert, brushes an intimate portrait of Bernard Heidsieck, pioneer in the sound poetry movement since 1955 and founder in 1962 of action poetry. The film takes viewers into Heidsieck's 'double life' as an artist and a banker, exploring his work through a series of conversations and seldom-seen audiovisual archives. Interviews with other major figures from sound poetry add to viewers' unde…
They made us climb up here
“They made us climb up here” is the third album from Satan is my Brother. Five tracks of noisy jazz, or jazzy noise or none of the two. Melodies built on sax and trombone, struggle to surface from layers of electronics, groovy bass lines and free form drumming.
Ebb & Flow
Formed in November 2006, Dream Weapon Ritual is the duo of Simon Balestrazzi and Monica Serra. They play free-form music that draws equally from droning electronica soundscapes and imaginary folk visions.Simon Balestrazzi is an electronic/electroacoustic composer and sound artist active since the 80's. He released many albums and performed live around Europe under various names. Monica Serra is a talented actress whose artistic research led to double as vocalist since 1999. Both are member…
Suijin
Komodo Haunts is the psychedelic drone solo project of Ollie Tutty (aka Mt. Tjhris), from Lincolnshire, UK. With his music he explores drone structure, sonic textures, meditative zones and personal fictions. Making use of analogue and digital technologies; tape jams playing on human familiarity, natural ambiances, faux-exotica, mythologies, "reality therapy".
Taking inspiration from drone masters and new age wanderers the Suijin album is all about getting into "the zone” and could be the so…
Five Lines
The meeting of heavyweights of electroacoustic improvisation from Europe and the Pacific United States happened during MKM trio tour in Northern America. This recording, at CalArts in 2010, yielded interesting results: a nervous displacement of noises and rich sonorous timbres. Casey Anderson, from Los Angeles, works with sound in a number of media from composition and improvisation to installations. On Five Lines he played a combination of digital and analog instruments of his own design…
It's About Time
Pioneering synthesizer soundscapes originally issued in 1974, available again. The electronic duo of Robert Margouleff and Malcolm Cecil aka Tonto released their influential debut, Zero Time, in 1971, showcasing what they described as "the world's first and largest multi-timbral polyphonic analog synthesizer." Three years later, they released this classic follow-up, recorded in Malibu. Building on their earlier achievements, it incorporates guitar, bass and drums into the unique sound of Tonto: …
Five Fizzles For Samuel Beckett
"Is there a better all-around bassist with a bow than Barry Guy? That query may scream sycophantic hyperbole, but in taking stock of the British improviser's discography it's an interrogative that can't help but manifest repeatedly.
On Guy's end the distinction of best isn't even a peripheral consideration or goal. He's placed his instrument in near-countless contexts, bringing to it a perfect sense of pitch and dynamics. Five Fizzles for Samuel Beckett is right in line with that sterling…
Erfolg
"Erfolg" is the second solo album of the exceptional musician Hans Koch, released 25 years after his first solo work ("Uluru"). "Erfolg" documents Hans Koch's experimental examination of his three instruments bass clarinet, soprano and tenor saxophone. The pieces are state of the art instant composing and sound research. Besides numerous collaborations - in the trio Koch-Schütz-Studer, with musicians like Barry Guy, Cecil Taylor, Han Bennink, Fred Frith, Urs Leimgruber and many others - Ha…
Time Machine Volume IV
Fourth Volume of the series recorded directly from the Time Machine, a magic case containing an array of home-built oscillators activated by Renato Rinaldi to create pulsing rhythms and noise patterns using the mixer feedback. Edited and mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi.
"The Time Machine project was conceived in order to find a simple and immediate way to work with rhythm. I built two cheap and imprecise, almost-square wave oscillators with a wide range of frequencies. These oscillators can …
Home Handover
2025 stock ** "In 2010, Jean-Luc Guionnet and Éric La Casa were invited by Arika to the Uninstal festival in Glasgow (Scotland) to carry out a series of recordings with some inhabitants of this city, in their home spaces. Based on predefined rules, including the single-sequence shot as a recording method, these people became the actors in a story about their everyday life. Guionnet and La Casa considered this work as a composition under the form of a score with four phases."
Everybody Digs Michel Doneda
A collection of solo pieces from forward-thinking French soprano saxophonist Michel Doneda, using extended techniques and utilizing every inch of the horn, creating unconventional and captivating sonic expressions from the instrument.
M. Doneda, soprano saxophone, born in 1954, comes from the French South-West. He is a self-taught musician.In 1980 he founded in Toulouse a reed trio: HIC ET NUNC, a group that toured quite a lot in France, playing mostly improvised music. At the same time he fo…
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…
I Line My Days Along Your Weight
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 a net. Mar…
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…
Surrealism Reviewed
Surrealism Reviewed is a collection of spoken word recordings by Surrealist artists, writers and poets. Made between 1929 and 1963, these historic audio recordings include poetry readings, interviews, lectures and manifestos. Most are in the English language, though some are in French (marked FR below). The remarkable contributions by Robert Desnos and Herbert Read were feared lost for several decades, unheard since they were cut onto acetate discs in the 1930s.
Running for 74 minutes, wit…
Futurpiano
Futurpiano showcases three influential avant-garde composers associated with the Futurist movement, by way of piano music composed between 1913 and 1933.
Arthur-Vincent Lourie was the first Russian Futurist musician, and a signatory of the original St Petersburg Manifesto in 1914. The five Syntheses written that same year offer a form of dodecaphony, while Formes en l'air from 1915 is a Cubo-Futurist conception using an innovative form of notation, dedicated to Pablo Picasso.
Born in the Ukraine…
Le Groupe des Six: Selected Works 1915-1945
This 160 minute anthology features selected piano and orchestral works by Les Six composed between 1915 and 1945, including collaborations with Jean Cocteau, Guillaume Apollinaire, Max Jacob, Marcelle Meyer and Denise Duval. Highlights include a digitally remastered cast recording of the Surrealistic opera Les Mamelles de Tirésias, co-created by Francis Poulenc and Apollinaire, and new recordings of Dada-related works performed by Peter Beijersbergen van Henegouwen.
All selections were re…
Par Hasard: Chance Composition 1913-1951
Par Hasard is a unique collection of avant-garde music by Marcel Duchamp, Francis Picabia, Georges Ribemont-Dessaignes and John Cage, all composed during the first half of the 20th century using chance techniques and operations.All selections are performed on piano. Iconic French conceptual artist Marcel Duchamp conceived both of his Musical errata in 1913. One consists of notes drawn at random from a hat; for the second, balls are dropped through a funnel into wagons drawn by a toy train. "Exec…
Don't know, just walk
May 2014 release.“I used to think that music was my escape from reality, now I think it’s an escape into reality.” – Mike Weis, 2014. Mike Weis is probably best known for sitting behind a plethora of drums and gongs in long- running Chicago three-piece Zelienople, but his music is just as potent unaccompanied. Weis might be an obsessive collaborator (his work with Scott Tuma, Mind Over Mirrors and Kwaidan is also essential), but on his own, he is able to allow his unique percussive skills to bu…