Welcome to Brian Imig news and homepage.

STEVE SMITHAUG 01, 2025

For the Record is a weekly column that rounds up details about new and pending recordings of interest to the new-music community – contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined – on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, digital-only formats… you name it.

This list of release dates is culled from press releases, Amazon, Bandcamp, and other internet stores and sources, social-media posts,  and online resources such as Discogs. Dates cited typically correspond to initial U.S. release, and are subject to change. (Links to Amazon, used when all else fails, do not imply endorsement.)

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It’s Bandcamp Friday, when the popular music-retail platform waives its usual cut and puts more money into the pockets of artists and labels from midnight to midnight PST. (I suspect most of you will have known this already because of an inundation of emails.) Consume with gusto!

That said, you don’t have to spend a dime – and in fact, you basically can’t – to pick up the new album that’s enchanted me most this week. I learned about Brian Imig from composer, critic, and academic Kyle Gann, who attests to having learned a great deal from Imig when the two worked together decades ago at a record store in Illinois.

Imig, a composer, improviser, and singer-songwriter, cites such disparate artists and acts in his bio as Jade Warrior, Hamid Drake, Douglas Ewart, Ralph Towner, and Daevid Allen, and if that’s a neighborhood you’re able to mentally map, you’re certainly to take delight in this album of idiosyncratic, charming instrumental pieces colored with dulcimer and Mellotron. Call it New Age if you must, but don’t deny yourself the pleasure of Imig’s joyous music making.

In 1979-80 I worked at Laurie's Records in Desplaines, Illinois. One of my fellow salespeople was a guy named Brian Imig. He was the store hippie, I was the store pompous grad student, but I quickly sensed that he knew things I needed to learn. (Among other things, he was one of three Laurie's employees who exposed me to the history of jazz, which I hadn't imbibed in Dallas or Oberlin. No college course could have done so much for me.) Brian and I lost touch for a few decades, but he shot up as a suggested friend on FB one day and I immediately reconnected. I've been listening to his music occasionally, and his new album The Gate is blowing me away. I've listened to it three times already, and it's on one edge of a pop/minimalist divide that I've been warily trying to approach from the other side every now and then. Very inspiring.