Tip! Dec. 2015: I received an invitation from Old Heaven to participate with FaUSt to the 3rd edition of “Tomorrow Festival” at B10 Live, Shenzhen, China! A few months later, May 2016, we were on our way to the most exciting concert experience. A loooong flight-haul and then, such a warm welcome, such a perfect organization… the most charming, dedicated, competent crew around us… the largest cement mixer I ever used on stage, and an audience so vibrant, so focused. I was and still am in memory, …
2025 stock Divine Madness is a captivating archival release from the visionary Russian composer and pianist Sergey Kuryokhin, presented by Old Heaven Books. This collection spans four tapes, offering a rare glimpse into Kuryokhin’s experimental genius, where avant-garde jazz, improvisation, and electronic experimentation collide. Known for his fearless creativity and theatrical performances, Kuryokhin’s work here embodies the raw, unbridled energy of his artistry—sometimes chaotic, always mesmer…
*2025 stock* These are live recordings of Nikhil Banerjee at KPFA Radio in Berkeley, California, on the 9th of July, 1967. It is for the first time they are made into vinyl record and published in China. The original recordings were on two reel-to-reel tapes. In 1988, American record label Raga Records released the recordings on both CD and cassette. Until a few years ago, it was by chance that producer Tu Fei got hold of these reel-to-reel tapes and decided to release this vinyl version, hoping…
Sixty Strings is an album of two epic duets by Eric Carbonara (22-string upright Chaturangui guitar) and Jesse Sparhawk (38-string lever harp). While Carbonara has studied Chaturangui extensively with Pandit Debashish Bhattacharya in Kolkata, and Sparhawk was classically trained by major figures of the harp world in his formative years, the music here is their own—not a mashup of quasi-orientalism and conservatory bloodlessness. Both side-long tracks lay out a spacious framework, with the two pl…
Years later, revisiting this performance through the album still leaves me gasping in awe—she reads minds, she hypnotises, a celestial sprite blessed by the heavens. Her solid grounding in classical and folk music, extraordinary technique and control, boundless stage presence, and our own beautiful yet bittersweet memories all converge to create this timeless recording.
Time rewinds to a May evening in 2014, as the inaugural Tomorrow Music Festival unfolded. Czech musician Iva Bittová stood alon…
Tip!
David Murray - Saxophone Kahil El'Zabar - Percussion / Kalimba / Voice
Recorded at the 10th OCT-LOFT International Jazz Festival, B10 Live, Shenzhen October 27th, 2023
Huge Tip! Deluxe CD edition, in tri-fold gatefold sleeve with outer case. This is a live recording of the Peter Brötzmann Trio (Peter Brötzmann, Sabu Toyozumi, and Jason Adasiewicz) from their performance at the 5th OCT-LOFT Jazz Festival at B10 Live, Shenzhen, in 2015. After the performance, the B10 Live team conducted a warm and friendly interview with the three musicians. The transcribed conversation has been edited and included in the liner notes of this vinyl album.Liu Ying Studio delivered…
Tip! The Sahaja Veena is a stunning stringed instrument with a unique and beautiful design reminiscent of the Vichitra Veena and Chitra Veena. With a wider range than the traditional Indian veena and a deep, warm sound, the instrument can produce compelling melodies and delicate ornamentation, often evoking deep emotions, and is therefore also known as the “Sagar” (‘Sagar’ meaning “sea” in Hindi). “(Sagar means ”ocean" in Hindi).
Noor Zehra Kazim is the world's only Sagar Vina player. Her father…
Mamer first became known as a dombra virtuoso and a modern master of Kazakh folk music. Over the years, he has evolved into a prolific and versatile artist, working across the boundaries of both tranditional and contemporary music. Mamer leads seven band projects: IZ, Bande, Mekrop, TAT, Mask, 51-Rayon, and Kunakar. He has released over 30 records, presenting a diversity of distinct styles including folk, ambient, industrial, noise, improvisation, and drone music.
“Every Mamer is brand new”. On…
This series of reel-to-reel tape recordings, to be jointly released by Old Heaven Books and Liu Ying Studio, aims to offer to our listeners the best quality of sound we can achieve so far. Whilst a small part of these releases come from historical archives, the majority are freshly made by musicians we invite to our studio. We record these studio sessions − some of which free-improvised, others more composition-based − on reel-to-reel tapes. With high-quality studio equipment, we make a small nu…
"The antennas that grow in your ears and hide in my head. In 2019, Dan and Li's live performance at the OCT-LOFT International Jazz Festival of their album "Mutually Chanting Cipher" was a stroke of genius, and the two of them put together a memorable performance with little advance communication.
In November 2021, Dan traveled to Yunnan to meet Li with Tang. In Dali, they experimented with a wide range of compositions, from acoustic to plugged-in instruments, from Chinese to Western, from ethni…
Tip! *In process of stocking. 2022 stock* Peter Evans believes that his music is closely related to the philosophical concept of "Wu Wei (literally means "doing nothing" or "inaction")" from China. He has also been studying how it reflects in different academic and cultural contexts. As a composer and improviser, Peter Evans talks about "Wu Wei" with his superb trumpet playing, and named his first album released in China "Into the Silence". It's worth mentioning that the artwork on the front cov…
2025 stock “Regarding the title of the album what I found by looking further is ‘Inside Out’. To explain in a few words from Hungarian: at the base, there is ‘itt’ = ‘here’, and ‘ott’ = ‘there’. From ‘itt’ derives ‘ide’ = ‘from there to here’, from ‘ott’ follows ‘oda’ = ‘from here to there’, so there is a dynamic in ‘ide’, which there is not in ‘itt’, which is stable. ‘Kint’ is ‘outside’. ‘Idekint' therefore means, that we are outside and we invite to be outside (while ‘Odakint’ would mean that …
Keiji Haino considers this live album as an integral work that cannot be separated. We suggest that you enjoy the whole album without interruption and turn the volume up to the maximum.
2025 stock In 2014, Tatsuya Yoshida participated in the first Tomorrow Music Festival, and his improvisation with Mamoru on the night of the performance was the first time the two musicians collided, and the improvisation, which lasted less than 30 minutes, brought the audience's perception of “improvisation” to a new level. The last two improvisations in Ruins Alone: Tomorrow's Ruins were recorded live at that time.
**2nd pressing, screen printed cover, risoprinted obi edition of 250** “Peace is not the word to play” rapped Large Professor on Main Source’s 1991 debut album. His plea to stop abusing the word “peace” simply for rhetoric flair sounds just as valid in today’s genocidal world as it did in the streets of New York over 30 years ago. For Oiro Pena to name this album Béke, meaning peace in Hungarian – or white people in French Caribbean creole – it seems like they finally have something to say. With…
** Silk-screen printed (blue color) recycled sleeve. 200 copies ** Much-needed repress of this spiritual flute jazz artifact by the mastermind Antti Vauhkonen. Originally released as a limited edition lathe-cut 10'' in a handful of copies. Cover art silkscreened on recycled cardboard-sleeves. Artwork by Arsi Keva. Mastered by Samuli Tanner. The first person to create something one may classify as instrumental music was probably alone. The mind tingles when imagining the prehistoric moment when, …
Mega tip! *80 copies limited edition bundle.* Ideal Secret Circle It's an 11 CD limited-edition set of albums packaged in digi packs designed by Philip Marshall. The series is curated by Joachim Nordwall.1. Sins For Beginners - We Don’T Need No Music (For Pita)2. Susana Santos Silva - The Fabrication Of Time 3. Merzbow - Gareki No Niwa4. Jim O’Rourke - Subtracted5. Spykes - Memoirs Of Pogonophores Vol. 2.6. A. Bolus - Evil Moisture Plays Music In The Style Of Organ Of Corti7. Eternities - Foreve…
Eighth Tower Records unveils Nihil Impvlse’s The Great Filter, the third release by the industrial project on the label. A dark post-industrial exploration of humanity’s collision course with its own tools, the album reframes the titular cosmic theory as a metaphor for our self-engineered existential sieve where accelerationism’s fervent dogma and apocalyptic fatalism fuse into a nihilistic liturgy. Through seven corrosive movements, Nihil Impvlse conjures the dissonance of a species intoxicated…
Joan La Barbara begins Sound Paintings with a scream that pushes you into an unusual world of vocal sound. Her virtuoso singing style, developed over a 20-year period, can be heard on this disc, which combines some of her earlier works with more recent compositions. She takes her extended techniques, which include multiphonics, overtone singing, and glottal clicks, and orchestrates them in layered soundscape compositions using from 8 to 16 tracks of material.
Concrete follows from Robert Ashley's preoccupation in two previous operas with the kind of speech that has not been explored in opera -- in Dust (LCD 1006CD), the speech of the homeless; in Celestial Excursions (LCD 1007CD), the speech of people living together in a home for old people. The three operas are not a "trilogy" in any sense, but they all come from this preoccupation with or fascination with special kinds of speech and special kinds of states of mind. "The characters I'm interested i…
Robert Ashley's street-corner opera: five voices, Joan La Barbara, Thomas Buckner and Jacqueline Humbert among them, recall a man who lost his legs in a war and, when the morphine wore off, his conversation with God. "Blue" Gene Tyranny on synthesizer; 2CD with the 160-page libretto in a slipcase.
2005 release. Following the ground-breaking work, Dust (LCD 1006CD), godfather of experimental opera Robert Ashley returns with Celestial Excursions. Ashley's endeavor explores remarkably uncharted territory -- the kind of language that is common among "old" people who talk all the time or not at all, to anyone passing by or to themselves. The opera premiered at the Hebbel Theater in Berlin, before coming to The Kitchen for its U.S. premiere in April 2003. Celestial Excursions delves into the wi…
2007 release. Now Eleanor's Idea was made possible by grants from The Rockefeller Foundation (1984 and 1993), the National Endowment for the Arts' Opera Musical Theater Program (1985) and InterArts Program (1992). Robert Ashley's Now Eleanor's Idea is a quartet of short operas based on the notion of a sequence of events seen from four, different points of view. At the same time, each opera is an allegory, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), for an individual's self-realization within the co…
*2022 repress now in digipak, with new cover art* Robert Ashley's Perfect Lives has been called "the most influential music/theater/literary work of the 1980s." At its center is the hypnotic voice of Robert Ashley. His continuous song narrates the events of the story and describes a 1980s update of the mythology of small town America. Perfect Lives is populated with myriad characters revolving around two musicians - "R", the singer of myth and legend, and his friend, Buddy, "The World's Greatest…
2025 stock 1998 release. Inner Journey contains works by William Duckworth, Thomas Buckner, Jacques Bekaert, David Wessel, and Somei Satoh - united by their themes of the quest for self-knowledge. Composed of fragments from the works of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry Miller, Gertrude Stein, and Thomas McGrath, William Duckworth's text reveals the multiple perspectives of an unknown couple whose post-modern love story emerges. Thomas Buckner's improvisation, "Inner Journey", is dedicated to the spiri…
1995 release. Two legendary composer/performers, David Rosenboom and Anthony Braxton, join forces on Two Lines to unite composition with improvisation, "new music" with "new jazz". Starting from David Rosenboom's notated score for Two Lines and his musical computer program, these musicians have achieved, to paraphrase Rosenboom, created a composition that is immediately heard. Duets with interactive HMSL software. Includes Rosenboom's Two Lines, plus compositions in collaboration with Braxton: L…
*2022 stock* "Any resemblance between these pointillistic chamber compositions and Schoenberg is purely coincidental. Delicate as to texture, curiously dispassionate as to mood, these mostly notated woodwind, string, and piano chamber works are motivically atonal, but tend to collapse into tonal cadences just to show you they know where they are. Like Ornette Coleman, Mitchell's playing with the tension between center and periphery, but in a milder, more abstract idiom and from the other directi…
** 2021 Stock ** Legendary avant-garde jazz saxophonist Roscoe Mitchell is best known for his role as a founding member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This group is recognized for incorporating, and none-too-subtly ridiculing, the long-bearded tradition of Western art music. Mitchell, nonetheless, has something to say that is within the tradition himself, apart from, but related to his work in the field of jazz. Usually the sort of classical music piece produced by a "jazz cat" is formulated wi…
2003 release. A CD of works for solo piano from "Blue" Gene Tyranny.
Thirty-five of the 36 songs in this "audio storyboard" are individually
built around an atmospheric primary chord, counter-rhythms, and a body
of notes which creates a potential melody that unfolds bit by bit. The Driver's Son
is scored for a narrator, a chorus of five people creating fifteen
voices, an electronically modified orchestra of folk and concert
instruments and parts for a lighting designer and a live video ani…
1994 release. A realization of "Blue" Gene Tyranny's How to Discover Music In the Sounds of Your Daily Life, a procedural score for recording and composing with environmental sounds. Eclectic, flowing music alternately gesturing toward impressionism and minimalism. Personnel: "Blue" Gene Tyranny - acoustic and electronic keyboards, field and studio recording, electronic transforms; Timothy Buckley - accordion in "The CBCD Intro"; the Arch Ensemble for Experimental Music, featuring Robert Hughes …
In this fascinating exploration of acoustical phenomena, Alvin Lucier slips from the domain of language to that of music in the course of 40 minutes and 32 repetitions of a simple paragraph of text.In I am sitting in a room, several sentences of recorded speech are simultaneously played back into a room and re-recorded there many times. As the repetitive process continues, those sounds common to the original spoken statement and those implied by the structural dimensions of the room are reinforc…
Crash was Robert Ashley's last opera. It premiered at the Whitney Biennial weeks after his death in 2014, and presented again in 2015 at Roulette, where this recording was made. Featuring the original cast: Gelsey Bell, Amirtha Kidambi, Brian McCorkle, Paul Pinto, Dave Ruder, and Aliza Simons. Music Director: Tom Hamilton. "What I have appreciated most about previous reconceptions of Ashley's operas was the extent to which newcomers found fresh possibilities. Already in Crash, broadened horizons…
An opera commissioned by Bayerisher Rundfunk Munich's Hörspiel und Medienkunst department about an internationally renowned swindler, who almost took down the European and American banking system. Featuring the voices of Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jackie Humbert, and Joan La Barbara. Recorded and mixed by Tom Hamilton. Robert Ashley on the piece: "Your Money My Life Goodbye is one of forty-nine vocal-ensemble pieces of various lengths (from ten minutes to ninety minutes or more) …
A gorgeous recording of works for trombone and piano, transformed by Lucier's electronics and oscillators. Wind Shadows (1994), Music for Piano with One or More Snare Drums (1990), and Panorama (1993)--were written for the Swiss musicians Roland Dahinden and Hildegard Kleeb, who play them on this CD. Also included: Music for Piano with Amplified Sonorous Vessels (1990), which was originally written for Margaret Leng Tan."Wind Shadows" (1994)Two pure wave oscillators are tuned a tenth of a cycle …
Originally released on Lovely Music in 1985. Robert Ashley makes use of the story of Atalanta
- a royal princess, discarded by her family, who was raised by the
animals to become the fastest-running human, and who was later reclaimed
by her father to marry her off for dynastic purposes - to present the
character aspects of the "successful suitor". These three aspects of
character are presented in the opera as anecdotes about three
extraordinary men of our times: Max Ernst (surrealist paint…
2010 release. Three of the satellite songs from Robert Ashley's opera Atalanta (Acts of God) - each inspired or revolving around one of the main characters of the opera, Max, Willard and Bud. Atalanta (Acts of God) was written in the 1980s, begun while Ashley was still in production for the television opera, Perfect Lives.
The many hours of material were performed throughout the world in many
different configurations, but this is the first time these songs have
been available on CD. Personnel…