Em:t Records
| Industry | Music |
|---|---|
| Genre | Ambient, Dub Ambient, Techno Ambient |
| Founded | 1994 |
| Headquarters | Nottingham, UK |
| Products | Music |
| Owner | t:me Recordings |
| Parent | t:me Recordings |
| Website | Official Homepage |
Em:t Records (Emit Records) was a British record label, based in Nottingham, which specialized in ambient electronic music. They were active from 1994 to 1998, and after a period of bankruptcy, re-established themselves in 2003 under new ownership and management. In summer 2006, the label officially ceased operations again, although by this time it had not been active for some time.
em:t was born as a division of the t:me Recordings label in 1994. t:me released mostly vinyl records falling under the broad category of house music, and sought to create a new sublabel for more forward-thinking ambient material. Over the next four years, they released a series of eighteen albums and compilations, packaged as a collector's series. Though em:t never enjoyed widespread commercial success, their releases were highly regarded and influential in ambient circles, and the label attracted a cult following - encouraged, no doubt, by the collectible nature of the releases.
em:t releases had strict rules governing their design aesthetic. Individual album titles were always the sequential four-digit catalogue number of the disc; the album's cover was always a full-colour picture of a wild animal; all albums were released on CD only; all CDs were packaged in digipacks; all CDs themselves bore the same Chinese character in black on the non-playing face of the disc.
The label garnered praise from music journalists at the time. Coda magazine wrote that "The Em:t series will surely go down in history for being as important in the 90s as the albums of Brian Eno were in the 70s", and specialist music magazine The Wire noted that the em:t catalogue represented "The vanguard of post-dance technological music". Em:t produced promo postcards for the label on which these quotes, and others, were duly displayed. A Q&A in DJ Magazine in 1995 also stated the label's unofficial credo: "Never presume your audience is any less clever than you are".
The most highly praised albums of the series came from British composers Paul Frankland recording as Woob, and Mat Jarvis recording as Gas.
In addition to the original run of CDs in the UK, some of em:t's music was licensed to Instinct Records in the USA, a label that had a contemporaneous interest in modern ambient music. em:t 0094 and Woob's 1194 were released individually. The compilations em:t 2295 and em:t 3394 were packaged together as a double-disc set called em:t 2000. In addition, various other tracks were compiled onto the anthologies em:t beat exploration and em:t explorer.
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