Folk /
For Octavio Paz
Ben Chasny's last ultra-indie label release before moving onto greener pastures with Drag City is finally available once more on vinyl thanks to Hermit Hut. Originally released in 2003 on the fabulous Time Lag label, we are now safe to bask in it's psych-folk sunlight again and let me assure you it's worth it. Ditching the voice almost altogether (save for a few wails), For Octavio Paz sees Chasny focussing on his primary skill - the guitar. This is a collection of some of his best solo guitar w…
Philos
Park Jiha’s debut album Communion - released internationally by tak:til last year - drew well deserved attention to the young Korean instrumentalist / composer’s vivid soundworld. The widely acclaimed album graced 2018 critics lists at The WIRE, Pop Matters and The Guardian. Her new album Philos - which she calls an evocation of her “love for time, space and sound” - is every bit as inventive, elegant and transcendent as her debut. While Park Jiha’s music is often contextualized by its kinship w…
You Are Tired
**300 copies** You Are Tired features amazing finger-pick style utilising both a calm and destructive mood, the tracks title producing imagery whilst you are listening and to a degree the sounds send you back to a time. similarly to other such guitar luminaries within the same genre such as John Fahey, Sandy Bull, Robbie Basho to name a few. Rob is an extension of their ideas, using his guitar to express meaning and emotion and he does it very elegantly on the opening track. Nightmare Study is a…
Blue Guitar
Mike Cooper's Blue Guitar is a collection that first appeared on Cooper's Hipshot CDr label in 2010 in a limited edition. It is presented here on Idea Records, for the first time on vinyl. Upon its initial release Cooper wrote: "For the past couple of years I have been collating a body of text culled (mostly) from Thomas Pynchon's novels Gravity's Rainbow and V and making cut-up collage pieces in the spirit of William Burroughs, Kurt Schwitters, Tom Phillips and others. Those two particular nove…
Formación del Espíritu Nacional
2013 release. With his sight set on legendary figures of guitar experimentation (John Fahey, Jim O’Rourke, Loren Connors), Negro builds a statement of his own that is wider than it may seem at first hearing: ambient, mutant blues, field recordings, finger picking, rusty folk, post-punk, lo-fi poetry…
Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill
2025 stock The third full-length release for Portland, Oregon-based Liz Harris. Harris might have achieved a significant fan base thanks to the whispering, near-ambient vocal crusades of her debut album Way Their Crept and its follow-up Wide, but those with a careful ear would have heard slightly more trapped beneath her fuzzy chain of effects. Dragging A Dead Deer Up A Hill marks a departure of sorts for Liz, which sees her turn down the fuzz boxes which caged (and to some degree defined) her s…
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…
Love Is The Plan, The Plan Is Death
Important is proud to welcome back James Blackshaw for his first full length on Important since his breakthrough album O True Believers was released in 2006. James has since forged a remarkable career achieving critical praise for his dexterity, his deep, connected songwriting and his beautiful arrangement.
Written at a time of great emotional disquiet, the hauntingly beautiful and bittersweet ninth full-length studio album, Love Is the Plan, the Plan Is Death, from British guitarist-composer Ja…
Nihil Obstat
Gorgeous new full length from Dutch lutenist Jozef Van Wissem. Wissem's long form, graceful melodic lute layers, preceded by suspenseful deep bass movements, create a transcendental and pastoral. Wissem's is a world where hypnotic minimalist figures are repeated to slow the act of listening. Nihil Obstat (Nothing Hinders) is performed on Wissem's custom black lute built by Michael Schreiner. LP pressed in an edition of 800.
"New classical lute music that sound as if it always existed, as if it h…
Live 1976
Well further gifts abound, as this 1976 concert on Galactic Zoo Disk/Drag City will attest. Clearly, the explorations of Sandy Bull were not lost on the far-out audiences of the Bay Area, and though the heady days of the '60s have gone, the Berkeley heads are still in full force, hanging on Sandy's every note with a clearly expressed delight as they wait for headliner Leo Kottke to take the stage. Even though there were no further albums after 1972's Demolition Derby (a candidate for unhi…
Red Favorite
Red Favorite, a cycle of compositions for guitars, electronics and voices created by Jeremy Pisani was first released as a limited edition CD on Spirit of Orr and is now offered, as it was originally conceived to appear, on an LP. He moved closer and looked through the peephole. And he saw: the world stretched out before him, a quiet and gentle space with a broad expanse of grass that practically glistened in its greenness. A sparkling brook ran through the meadow in the middle distance, and now…