★Important Records
Split LP
Limited edition split album from two of Earth’s avant-garde super powers: Asmus Tietchens and Kouhei Matsunaga. Last summer Important released some highly praised records with Kouhei Matsunaga including a collaborative CD with Sean Booth (Autechre) and Mika Vainio (Pan Sonic), a split LP with Mika Vainio and a full length CD of his own solo work. The breath and quality of Kouhei's work was apparent across these three releases and his compositions for this split LP serve to create connections b…
Imprec 300
After 10 years Important Records is extremely proud to present IMPREC300, 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, and Bass Communion. Important Records 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 they set out to run a label tha…
Transamorem - Transmortem
restocked: Transamorem - Transmortem was premiered on March 9, 1974 at The Kitchen in NYC, where the music programmer at the time was Rhys Chatham - this was right before his guitar phase. During this period, 'Transamorem - Transmortem' was presented along with other compositions by Eliane Radigue in a linear mode of listening, although the piece had originally been conceived, during its composition, as a sound installation. Of course, both modes of listening are possible, and each works marvelo…
The headlans
CD version housed in a Digipak following the immediate sell out of the LP version. Released to coincide with Ellen Fullman's new full length for Important titled "Through Glass anes." Full length collaboration between Ellen Fullman, Theresa Wong, and Barn Owl produced by The Norman Conquest. Barn Owl's extended drones and Theresa and The Norman Conquest's strings are the perfect accompaniment to Fullman's Long Stringed Instrument; a product of her own invention. This is an album of deep mater…
Attention Patterns
few copies available, now out of print. Attention Patterns is a 2 LP + 48 page booklet set featuring new and archival compositions by Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue,Yoshi Wada and Sun Circle, as well as interviews with the composers, scores and related texts. This release brings together composers with shared affinities for long, slowly unfolding durations and unconventional, harmonic approaches to tuning. Each has contributed a full LP side to the compilation. Oliveros’ “Horse Sings from Clou…
KRMN
Working with the same source material, sound artists Maurizio Bianchi & Francisco Lopez create individual works produced from the impartial de-oxidation of sonorous carbon-containing modular compounds. "'KRMN-FL' and 'KRMN-MB' were both created with the same original source materials, jointly created by Maurizio Bianchi and Francisco Lopez.""Produced from the partial oxidation of carbon-containing compounds, carbon monoxide is a highly toxic gas and has no odor or color. It is the most common ty…
Jigokuhen
Jigokuhen is the final instalment in Masami Akita's 15 part Bird Series for Important Records. Inspired by Olivier Messaien's Catalogue D'Oiseaux, the Bird Series saw the release of one CD per month for 13 months while a 14th disc was released free via download to series subscribers and on CDr with the purchase of Merzbow's EcoBag. This 14th Bird Series release is being issued on the 2 year anniversary of the start of the Bird Series and in conjuntion with Vampilla's new album on Important …
Through Glass Panes
Ellen Fullman's first proper full length for Important Records follows her collaborative work with Barn Owl (imprec327) and a split LP with Eleh (imprec318). She was also featured on The Harmonic Series: A Collection Of Work In Just Intonation (imprec272).
In 1981 Ellen Fullman began developing the Long String Instrument, an installation of dozens of wires fifty feet or more in length, tuned in Just Intonation and ‘bowed’ with rosin coated fingers. Fullman has developed a unique notation system…
Totem 3
Not to be confused with the Master Musicians of Jajouka, MMOB are mischievous ethnographic music fakes from Seattle whose name actually derives from a Japanese pornographic pursuit. Stick with them, though, because against the odds, these miscreants' trilogy‑ending album is a seriously heady decoction of eastern mysticism hitched up to heavy droning jams. Despite the band's forbidding air, tracks such as "In the Twilight of Kali Yuga" reverberate with good cheer and "6000 Years of Darkne…
In V. Tro
A highly intriguing set of live recordings and "extreme aural mixes" capturing, for the first time, the disciplines of Larsen and Z'ev in collaboration. 'In V. Tro' was conceived as the soundtrack to a series of micro-cinematic images created between 1935 and 1985 at Bologna's Instituto di Anatomia Umana Normale (Basic Human Anatomy Institute) and assembled by professors Dario Cantino and Antonio Barasa. The images pay tribute to the maestro of anatomical discipline Giuseppe Levi, and there's a …
Cool Cruel Mouth
"Cool Cruel Mouth" is Larsen's 9th full length studio album and marks 15 years of activity with a fine collection of textural, cinematic, haunting, nocturnal songs. Written and recorded in 2010. "Cool Cruel Mouth" finds the band as a 5 piece with the full time addition of lyricist Little Annie "Anxiety" Bandez as the official voice of Larsen. Also featured on "Cool Cruel Mouth" is inimitable Baby Dee playing piano on one of the two featured instrumentals as well as on her own composition "Unhear…
Alchemic Heart
"Alchemic Heart is a special project presented by Vampillia who have colored these two colossal compositions with beautiful contributions by members of the Boredoms, Jarboe (ex-Swans), Inswarm and Japanese Noise-God Merzbow. Layered strings, piano, bass, noise and voices are weaved mysteriously and expand as two magnificently parallel aesthetic worlds. Comprised of two pieces, 'Sea'/'Land,' a primitive landscape is created via listening and destroyed when the pieces are complete. Vampilli…
Turntable History
Arnold Dreyblatt (b.1953) is an American composer who has studied with La Monte Young, Pauline Oliveros and Alvin Lucier. He is a member of the German Academy Of Art. He has released work on labels such as Table Of The Elements, Canteloupe, Tzadik, Hat Art and Dexter's Cigar.Turntable History is a recording of a 40 minute multi-channel sound composition which was concieved as part of an audio-visual installation installed in the circular vaulted brick space of a historical water container in Ber…
Progression
Featuring members of Pelican & X-Bax. For the new album three single-chord compositions were charted out, one freeform and tone driven, one long-form piece with charts dictating the players' intensity of performance, and one grid-like chart where each players' note continually shifts, though the combination of voices continue to maintain the chord. Six chords were chosen and arranged in a progression that encompasses two separate performances of each of the three compositions. Though the…
Split LP
Numbered edition of 500. Jackets letterpress printed at 43rd Parallel Letterpress. Split release between Ellen Fullman & Eleh. 'By examining the waveform produced by the Long String Instrument through a spectrum analyzer, I have observed that every overtone of the fundamental being played is represented nearly equally through the entire range of hearing. Just intonation, a tuning system based on pure ratios, lends itself to a consideration of not only precise tuning of fundamental frequencies, b…
13 Japanese Birds In A Bag
Shortly after ordering this 14 CD set; I read a newspaper article about the plight of the Eurasian cuckoo whose habitat is being gradually destroyed both in Britain and abroad. It is this type of threat to birdlife that inspired Japanese ‘noise music’ meister and long-time animal activist Masami Akita’s (aka Merzbow) 2009 album series, “13 Japanese Birds”. Now the entire set, plus a new CDR and piece of screen print art-work have been reissued as “13 Birds In A Bag”, with a navy blue eco-f…
Live
Magnificent reissue of this tape obscurity from 1980, Cluster's eighth album (the first of three live LPs) originally released on the YHR label (which was curated by Pump's David Elliott), also including archival material never before issued on CD. With so much stuff from this era coming to the surface recently it's sometimes easy to get blasé about it all, but this is one you really ought to give your fullest attention to. As the title says, this was recorded live in Vienna in 1980 at th…
Mirage
With Mirage on Important Records, Smegma again does the impossible. 38 years after reinventing the musical wheel, they have recorded a stunning masterpiece. With four of the original members working together again for the first time in many years, together with many new collaborators , they have kept alive their unique brand of old school primitive, Avant/Garage music. Running the gamut from the Musique Concrete inspired subtilely bombastic mood of the Title track.to World of my Own's frenzied n…
Live Conference
Recorded live last September in New York, this LP documents what might turn out to be Om's Don't Look Back concert, should they ever get the invite (actually, last May the band's Al Cisneros played one of those shows as part of his other band, Sleep). The stoner-doom classic Conference Of The Birds gets a full playthrough here, with Cisneros (on bass and vocals) partnered by drummer Emil Amos. Fans of the original will be pleased to find the recording fidelity and the…
The Visible Sign Of The Invisible Order
RESTOCKED Deluxe double LP set pressed at RTI with heavy duty tip on jackets from Stoughton. B side includes two bonus tracks not found on the original CD. Featuring contributions from Alan Bishop and Charles Gocher of the Sun City Girls. Graphic design by Stephen O'Malley. At last the long awaited reissue of a west coast outsider death cult classic! From the forests of the Northwest an uncharted document of shamanistic psychedelia. Recorded mostly during rituals deep in Cascadia and filtered th…