New Lost Knowns
New Lost Knowns is a hallucinatory solo statement by Twig Harper (Nautical Almanac), fusing noise, tape collage, and electronic psychedelia in the tradition of Wolf Eyes and Aaron Dilloway.
Orchestral Works
Orchestra Works brings together three groundbreaking compositions by Alvin Lucier, each redefining the orchestral tradition through radical explorations of sound, space, and perception. Performed by the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra under conductors Christian Arming, Petr Kotik, and Zsolt Nagy, with cellist Charles Curtis, this album showcases Lucier’s singular ability to transform familiar instruments into vehicles for profound auditory discovery.
Lucier’s Diamonds uses split orchestras to “dr…
The black symphony
2013 release ** "The new solo work by inventive French soundartist is the true symphony, divided into several parts titled like 'Adagio', 'Allegro', 'Menuet', etc. but without any hints to traditional instruments or classical orchestration - just the pure white noise structures. A mediactivist, artist-researcher, composer / musician, poet and tongues destroyer, experimental film maker and anarchitect, founder and member of Apo33, Julien Ottavi is involved in research and creative work, combining…
Scrumptious sabotage
A recording of live performances which brought together two essential figures of the contemporary scene: an oustanding Norwegian composer and vocal artist Maja S.K. Ratkje and a celebrated improviser and composer, former DNA drummer, Ikue Mori. The common sound territory, created together by Mori and Ratkje, balances between quietly growing tension and powerful outbursts of unrestrained, relentless noise. Within this harmony, Ratkje takes adventurous excursions towards the borders and unknown fa…
Alpes
Alpes is a visionary collaboration between French ensemble GOL and the legendary Ghedalia Tazartes, merging ritualistic chants, electronics, and improvisation in the spirit of Nurse With Wound and Brigitte Fontaine.
Temperament as Waveform
Temperament as Waveform is a transatlantic exchange in process and poetics. Between 2010 and 2012, UK-based sound artist Lee Patterson and Austin’s Vanessa Rossetto traded recordings, objects, and digital files by post - each response reshaping and folding the other's sonic worlds. The album merges four wide-ranging improvisational/concrète works, each combining manipulated field recordings with amplified objects, cassette fragments, instrumental events, and filtered signal noise.
Opener “Every…
Safiyya
Like a true psychedelic experience, one that if you've ever had, you'll know what we mean, it presents you with a fixed length window that opens into another possible perspective of our lumbering existence. Imagine 500 milligrams administered via an eye dropper filled with mercury and you're on your way. Born of a correspondence between two fellows entrenched in parallel explorations of the unknowable and imagined, there's a mystery to the source of the sounds contained in these grooves; a myste…
The Seven Storey Mountain
a groundbreaking musical project by Nate Wooley, unites legends like Paul Lytton (Evan Parker’s longtime collaborator) and David Grubbs (Gastr Del Sol, Bastro) in an ecstatic sonic journey. Inspired by Thomas Merton’s spiritual exploration, the piece transcends religion, channeling the raw energy of free jazz and modern noise. Premiered at NYC’s Festival of New Trumpet Music, it blends improvisation, ambient textures, and bold experimentation—a testament to Wooley’s visionary artistry.
IMPREC300
IMPREC300 is a vinyl only collection of exclusive live tracks from a handful of Important bands including Master Musicians of Bukkake, Grails, Mugstar, Cave, NHK yx, Bardo Pond, Chord & Bass Communion.
Important was started in 2001 in a small house on the beach along the New Hampshire seacoast. The first two releases, from Daniel Johnston and Merzbow, stated the breadth of intentions and we set out to run a label that would function much like a good record shop with a wide range of interesting r…
Grape Skin
Grape Skin is the focused outcome of a trio session between Michel Doneda, Jonas Kocher, and Christoph Schiller in a Zurich space, 2011. Doneda’s soprano sax curves and stirs in threadlike whispers, multiphonics, and percussive pops; Kocher’s accordion sustains microtonal clusters, gentle drones, or sudden detours; Schiller turns his spinet into a source of prepared sonorities, glancing harmonics, and tactile staccato. The approach is neither meditative minimalism nor crowded abstraction - it's …
Herzschlag Erde / Verdunkelt die Sinne
** Edition limited to 350 copies including a large booklet with sinister photos, surreal drawings and lyrics in German and English. ** Right on time for its 30th anniversary, “Herzschlag Erde”, cassette debut album of Die Welttraumforscher, is being re-released in a collaborative effort between the labels Planam and A Tree In A Field. The new, limited vinyl edition includes a large-format, 20-page booklet as well as the previously unreleased follow-up album, “Verdunkelt die Sinne”. Die Welttraum…
Echos Pastoraux
Beautiful new album by Andrew Chalk and Timo Van Luyk (with Daisuke Suzuki on percussions and Ian Middleton on "accidental sounds"). Andrew Chalk is one of the most appreciate musician in this category floating between drone and ambient music, and his meeting with Timo Van Luijk has created an amazing disc, able to emphasize the slow, limited gestures, movements elegiac elegance, but still so heavily controlled. Each faint seems to have a gesture meaning. Here you can hear a flute (connected to …
Galactic Tornado
2008 release ** "The conception, the idea, realisation and sound sources of this CD are all based on original sound material (loops and sounds) from Rapoon's “Tribal Sci Fi” CD-ROM (courtesy of Sony/Sonic Foundry). Not the entire original Rapoon's tracks have been re-mixed or re-composed, but the general “sound” (or the sound aesthetic of Rapoon's music) instead. All the artists have provided their own original compositions, that less or more based on the audio-sources from Rapoon. The album “G…
Mouthless
Pick-up is a new duo of Frans de Waard (Beequeen) on laptop and Martin Luiten (Girlfriends, Uw Hypotheek Advies) on guitar. Limited edition of 300. Hand made cover artwork. This is the 9th release in our Arts & Crafts series which pairs music with handmade artwork by the artists responsible for the recordings.
Mirrors
There is not a lot to say when a young talented percussionist meet one of the master of improvised music, also percussionist ; we can just sit and listen what happens. this is what exactly did the guys at cosabeat studio during "mirrors" recording session. the result is incredible. you can really feel the musicians concentration and then understand the importance of every sound they created. this is a focused, brilliant, top class "sound dialogue" between two of the most dedicated artist i …
The cat from Cat Hill
Named after the slow loris—an animal beloved by Patrick Farmer and Sarah Hughes for its shy, gradual movements—this London trio creates music that moves at a similarly unhurried pace. Farmer (natural objects, e-bow snare, tapes), Hughes (chorded zither, piano, e-bow), and Daniel Jones (turntable, e-bow, piezo discs, electronics) recorded these three pieces at Middlesex University in 2009, producing what Richard Pinnell in The Watchful Ear describes as "a calm but invigorating massage of the eard…
Vivmmi
LP only. Limited Edition of 130 copies. These 37 minutes mark a turning point in Uhlig,s work. "Genmaicha: At the opal seashore (the last full length Aalfang Mit Pferdekopf-album on Mystery Sea, October 2005) was a already a vague hint of what comes now: Uhlig on the peak of low volume.
"VIVMMI is divided into five segments accompanied by a host of verdant birds and the melancholic and peaceful humming chords of an old droning piano (and without much doubt: completely out-of-tune). As if someone…
0509
2009 release ** Limited edition of 100 hand-numbered copies. "RCF's '0509' cd is the first release by the Misengarde label, an awesome improvised album between the so-called onkyo and noise tout-court, Asmus Tietchens and Keith Rowe; RCF (Ciro Fioratti) wander lonely through his mc505 frequencies in order to make them talk freely, finding a hidden life and reacting against the machine wild language. The disc had been recorded in May 2009 playing the mc505, a mixer and a small multi fx rack; no e…
Lunula
Barcelona's Octante—Ruth Barberán (trumpet, speaker, microphones), Alfredo Costa Monteiro (accordion, objects), Ferran Fages (oscillators, pick-ups), and Margarida Garcia (electric bass)—create what one reviewer calls "a crackling and crunching kind of sound" that's "utterly condensed." The quartet has essentially become "one common music machine" where distinguishing individual instruments becomes nearly impossible. The two extended improvisations (each around 29 minutes) recorded in Barcelona …
Shots At Infinity 1
This is the companion release to the Tom Carter LP titled Shots At Infinity 2 being released on Important simultaneously. Shots At Infinity 1 (the CD) is comprised of recordings from various basements in the northeastern USA from late 2007. Steering away from the more delicate string environments and modal folk improvisations of previous CDs, the disk features maximum loop delay drone overload stretched over long, densely harmonic tracks, retaining the melodic content and flow of earlier release…