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You are browsing an archived site for a previous Northern Spark event. To visit the current site click here.

Innova recordings,
A Little Overnight Music
  • Image courtesy The Rambler Blog

A little night muzak featuring some of St. Paul’s own, kinda famous, new-music label, innova. An outdoor PA system will waft delicious experimental, new classical, jazz, and other vibes into the night air.  You might catch Steve Reich, Terry Riley, their tribe of remixers, texture-masters like Harley Gaber and Alexander Berne, and ambient tuba player extraordinaire, Tom Heasley.

Innova Recordings

Innova Recordings is dedicated to “forward-hearing” work that pushes and challenges the boundaries of contemporary music. The label’s releases are less dictated by record-bin constraints or typical notions of marketability than by the integrity of the work, its originality, conceptual richness and technical quality, and the artist’s willingness to support and promote the release.

Innova redefines the typical relationship between artist and label. Artist and label work together, taking advantage of each other’s strengths, to provide both the tools of an established record label and the freedom usually associated with self-publishing.

Innova is geared towards work that is unlikely to find a home in the mainstream record industry. We focus on world class music—regardless of its genre (or lack of one)—that commercial labels overlook. When Innova accepts a project it means that we believe not only in the quality of the work but also in our ability to help it reach new audiences. Innova is not a vanity label that accepts all projects; they need to be a good fit with our resources, and we need to be convinced that we can do a better job of promoting and selling the records than artists could do by themselves or via a different route.

Like our parent organization, the American Composers Forum, innova serves artists and their careers. We are part business, part service.

Releasing an album through Innova means being part of a team effort – artist and label working together, with no secret agendas and no politics. We have a flexible, innovative business model, a different kind of architecture, and offer a supportive environment to artists. Innova is a place to try out new marketing ideas as well as new musical ones.

Curated by Chris Campbell and presented by American Composers Forum