June 14th Newsletter

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Torn Light Records
1855 N Milwaukee
Chicago, IL 60647
312.955.0614
Open Everyday
10AM-7PM

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  • PainKiller – The Great God Pan
    PainKiller – The Great God Pan
    $19.00 | , Add to cart

    The reunion of PainKiller, the world’s most extreme sax-bass-drums trio, was one of the great musical events of 2024. For the third installment of their new trilogy of albums, Zorn, […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise, Jazz / Fusion / Free Jazz
  • John Zorn – Through The Looking Glass
    John Zorn – Through The Looking Glass
    $19.00 | , Add to cart

    Medeski, Marsella, Hollenberg, and Grohowski are Chaos Magick—a powerful electric quartet formed to perform Zorn’s twisted and challenging compositions. Founded in 2021 as a spinoff of the heavy [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise, Jazz / Fusion / Free Jazz
  • Maria Chavez & Sandy Ewen – All The Duos
    Maria Chavez & Sandy Ewen – All The Duos
    $18.00 | , Add to cart

    Orb Tapes presents “All The Duos,” a brand new collection of collaborative pieces featuring Maria Chavez and Sandy Ewen. A colossal effort, this double CD release contains over 90 minutes […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Arelseum / Recovery Center – Split
    Arelseum / Recovery Center – Split
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    ARELSEUM: all sound by Ryan Lipynsky and Colin Marston RECOVERY CENTER: Synthesizers and feedback by Pow Martinez and Chester Masangya Vocals on “Qlippoth” and “KA RA YA SA TA [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Kevin Sims – Yarrow Canon
    Kevin Sims – Yarrow Canon
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    “People misrecite the best portion of what they memorize, memorize the best portion of what they write, and write the best portion of what they hear. So if you acquire […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Life Giver – Enviroments
    Life Giver – Enviroments
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    C-22 Cassette Tape from ORB Tapes

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Pet Peeves – Slapstick In The Birdroom
    Pet Peeves – Slapstick In The Birdroom
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    Pet Peeves: drums + screams: J. Cavaliere guitar: A. Maerbach bass: O. Brinner saxophone: Labrat Additional musicians: vocals (track 6): L. Sherman percussion (track 8): H. Rowan lap steel + […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Instant Messenger – Sologuitar 1
    Instant Messenger – Sologuitar 1
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    “This is a set of solo guitar pieces recorded over the course of a few weeks that are sometimes percussive, sometimes droney, sometimes noisy and sometimes nothing. I have recently […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Orphan Parapet – Time Lapse Of Wet Fire
    Orphan Parapet – Time Lapse Of Wet Fire
    $10.00 | , Add to cart

    Nick Podgurski and Colin Marston: synthesizers, acoustic and electronic percussion, production Recorded and mixed at Menegroth, the Thousand Caves, NYC 2022 – 2024 finished at the Milman [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Emil Beaulieau – Memories
    Emil Beaulieau – Memories
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    For the first time ever on cassette, Orb Tapes presents “Memories” by Emil Beaulieau, America’s Greatest Living Noise Artist. Originally released on CD on the RRRecords [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Soft As Snow – Organ Candy
    Soft As Snow – Organ Candy
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    Soft as Snow is a Norwegian avant-pop duo based in Berlin. Their music effortlessly straddles the structure and determinism of club and “pop” music and the abstract expressionism of experimental [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Clang Quartet / Crank Sturgeon – Split
    Clang Quartet / Crank Sturgeon – Split
    $11.00 | , Add to cart

    Clang Quartet “Hate Wrapped In Prayer (We Say…)” Recorded at Corner Shed Studios by Scotty Irving 2024 Mixed and mastered at Earthtones Recording by Scotty Irving and Benjy Johnson [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Bastard Noise & Diagram: A – Collaboration Split
    Bastard Noise & Diagram: A – Collaboration Split
    $16.00 | , Add to cart

    A true collaborative record. Here both artists contribute to source material created by the other. Originally releasd as. alimited cassette in 1998, this album has been lovingly restored and [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Diagram A ‎– Human Tissue Press/Vinyl Removal
    Diagram A ‎– Human Tissue Press/Vinyl Removal
    $15.00 | , Add to cart

    Construction and Performance by Diagram:A/Dan Greenwood Originally released on vinyl LP in an edition of 300 on clear vinyl with covers screened by VG Kids. Released on Bill Nace’s OPEN [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Arthur Russell – Open Vocal Phrases Where Songs Come In And Out (Live 12/20/85)
    Arthur Russell – Open Vocal Phrases Where Songs Come In And Out (Live 12/20/85)
    $46.00 | , Add to cart

    “Some of it sounds so pure and clear and I am picturing him huddled around all that gear, simply magical. In my memory he didn’t play ‘for’ the audience but […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Roland Barthes – Mythologies
    Roland Barthes – Mythologies
    $7.00 | , , Add to cart

    “[Mythologies] illustrates the beautiful generosity of Barthes’s progressive interest in the meaning (his word is signification) of practically everything around him, not only the [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Sidney D. Kirkpatrick – A Cast Of Killers
    Sidney D. Kirkpatrick – A Cast Of Killers
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    Forty years after the 1921 murder of distinguised silent film director William Desmond Taylor, another famed director, King Vidor, ferreted out Taylor’s murderer. The full story of this [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Sybil Leek – The Complete Art Of Witchcraft (Very Rare)
    Sybil Leek – The Complete Art Of Witchcraft (Very Rare)
    $50.00 | , , Add to cart

    Packed with revealing anecdotes and information, this rich, enticing portrait of witchcraft presents the engrossing, fiery history of the ancient religion kept alive despite centuries of [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Jeanne Betancourt – Women In Focus (Scarce, as-is)
    Jeanne Betancourt – Women In Focus (Scarce, as-is)
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    An early study on women directors across a variety of genres Pflaum Publishing, 1974 Softcover edition. Tear to front wrap at spine. Remainder holepunh in front wrap. Some discoloration to […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Patricia Bosworth – Diane Arbus
    Patricia Bosworth – Diane Arbus
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    “In this book we follow Arbus’ progress as a photographer – coming to see how the work of others influenced her, and how the “New Documents” exhibit at the Museum [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Hitchcock/Truffaut
    Hitchcock/Truffaut
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    In Hitchcock, film critic François Truffaut presents fifty hours of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock about the whole of his vast directorial career, from his silent movies in Great Britain to [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Focus On: Hitchcock (as-is)
    Focus On: Hitchcock (as-is)
    $5.00 | , , Add to cart

    “In this volume LaValley presents the most comprehensive look at Hitchcock to date, examining the man and his films from a three-fold approach; Hitchcock on Hitchcock, the Hitchcock [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Proof Of The Shooting – Demonstrative Evidence
    Proof Of The Shooting – Demonstrative Evidence
    $30.00 | , Add to cart

    Selected Recordings Of Proof Of The Shooting… 1995-1999 Locations: WMUA radio station; University of Massachusetts Fine Art Center; RRRecords; Wesleyan University; Northampton, MA; Leeds, [...]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Diagram A – Diagram A
    Diagram A – Diagram A
    $15.00 | , Add to cart

    This is a cassette by Diagram: A all this material is directly influenced by the Diagram: A/Bastard Noise Collaboration. Over the years I was in touch with Eric Wood we […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Udo On None Duo – Untitled
    Udo On None Duo – Untitled
    $15.00 | , Add to cart

    Udo On None Duo is Bill Nace and Dan Greenwood. This tape is a muddy thunderous blown out improvisation at Soupcon Salon Gallery in New Jersey. Packaged in hand made […]

    GENRE: Experimental / Noise
  • Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany
    Between Mass Death and Individual Loss: The Place of the Dead in Twentieth-Century Germany
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    Recent years have witnessed growing scholarly interest in the history of death. Increasing academic attention toward death as a historical subject in its own right is very much linked to […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress
    Mal’uocchiu: Ambiguity, Evil Eye, and the Language of Distress
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    The evil eye has received considerable attention in the literature of disciplines as diverse as anthropology and medicine. Researchers have attempted to identify and explain this essentially [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
    Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    In Pretend We’re Dead, Annalee Newitz argues that the slimy zombies and gore-soaked murderers who have stormed through American film and literature over the past century embody the violent [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Dark Matter: In Defiance of Catastrophic Modernity: A Fieldguide to Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt
    Dark Matter: In Defiance of Catastrophic Modernity: A Fieldguide to Alexander Kluge and Oskar Negt
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    Collaborators for more than four decades, lawyer, author, filmmaker, and multimedia artist Alexander Kluge and social philosopher Oskar Negt are an exceptional duo in the history of Critical [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the International Communist Avant-Garde
    The Chaplin Machine: Slapstick, Fordism and the International Communist Avant-Garde
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    There was something uncanny about Charlie Chaplin. His fellow actors spoke of him as inhuman—automaton-like. His stiff, comic movements could be viewed as an attempt to parody the newly developed [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility I
    Transportation and Revolt: Pigeons, Mules, Canals, and the Vanishing Geographies of Subversive Mobility I
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    During World War I, German soldiers shot down carrier pigeons for fear the birds were carrying enemy communiqués; in Mexico, the United States, and other countries, mules were used for […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader
    Wicked Theory, Naked Practice: A Fred Ho Reader
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    For more than three decades, Fred Ho has been a radical artist and activist. As a composer and baritone saxophonist, he is famed for creating a new music that fuses […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography Of Art Cinema
    Ulrike Ottinger: The Autobiography Of Art Cinema
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    Since 1974, German filmmaker Ulrike Ottinger has created a substantial body of films that explore a world of difference defined by the tension and transfer between settled and nomadic ways […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War
    A Conspiracy of Images: Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, and the Art of the Cold War
    $18.00 | , , Add to cart

    In October 1962, a set of blurred surveillance photographs brought the world to the brink of nuclear apocalypse during the Cuban missile crisis. The pictures themselves demonstrated little, and [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Vicente Huidobro – Manifest/Manifestos
    Vicente Huidobro – Manifest/Manifestos
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    The first publication in English of the great Chilean poet Vicente Huidobro’s manifestos, published originally in 1925. Book is in “Like New” condition. Some light superficial wear and/or [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Murat Nemet-Nejat – Peripheral Space of Photography
    Murat Nemet-Nejat – Peripheral Space of Photography
    $8.00 | , , Add to cart

    This profound essay explores what separates photography from other artistic media. Murat Nemet-Nejat argues that photographic seeing is not a plastic experience, but a meditative one built around [...]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico
    You Are Beautiful and You Are Alone: The Biography of Nico
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    YOU ARE BEAUTIFUL AND YOU ARE ALONE is a new biography of Nico, the mysterious singer best known for her work with the Velvet Underground and her solo album Chelsea […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Volume 2: Black Sacred Music from Sit-Ins to Resurrection City
    Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Volume 2: Black Sacred Music from Sit-Ins to Resurrection City
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    Volume 1 of Nothing but Love in God’s Water traced the music of protest spirituals from the Civil War to the American labor movement of the 1930s and 1940s, and […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Volume 1: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement
    Nothing but Love in God’s Water: Volume 1: Black Sacred Music from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Movement
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    The first of two volumes chronicling the history and role of music in the African American experience, Nothing but Love in God’s Water explores how songs and singers helped African […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956
    The Folk Singers and the Bureau: The FBI, the Folk Artists and the Suppression of the Communist Party, USA-1939-1956
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    Some of the most prominent folk singers of the twentieth century, including Woody Guthrie, ‘Sis Cunningham, Pete Seeger, Lee Hays, Burl Ives, etc., were also political activists with [...]

    GENRE: Folk / Country, Non-Fiction
  • A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado
    A Different Light: The Photography of Sebastião Salgado
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    A Different Light is the first in-depth study of the work of Sebastião Salgado, widely considered the greatest documentary photographer of our time. For more than three decades, Salgado has […]

    GENRE: Art/Photography, Non-Fiction
  • Vwadek P. Marciniak – Towards a History of Consciousness: Space, Time, and Death
    Vwadek P. Marciniak – Towards a History of Consciousness: Space, Time, and Death
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    Towards a History of Consciousness: Space, Time, and Death offers a cogent and compelling discussion of the neglected topic of the history of consciousness. An analysis of our postmodern ontology [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Maurice Blanchot – Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942
    Maurice Blanchot – Desperate Clarity: Chronicles of Intellectual Life, 1942
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    These articles gradually outline a practical project that both looks back to the radical artistic doctrines of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and anticipates the most original [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Howard Mandel – Future Jazz
    Howard Mandel – Future Jazz
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    Jazz has always been an experimental art form, pushing the boundaries of the mainstream, searching for the new. As Howard Mandel reveals in Future Jazz, jazz today is still reaching […]

    GENRE: Jazz / Fusion / Free Jazz, Non-Fiction
  • Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files
    Writers Under Surveillance: The FBI Files
    $15.00 | , , Add to cart

    Writers are dangerous. They have ideas. The proclivity of writers for ideas drove the FBI to investigate many of them—to watch them, follow them, start files on them. Writers under […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Lesley Wheeler – Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present
    Lesley Wheeler – Voicing American Poetry: Sound and Performance from the 1920s to the Present
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    The most interesting tensions and ambitions of twentieth-century American poetry intersect in one resonant word: voice. The term “poetic voice” emphasizes poetry’s reliance on [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline
    Remainders of the American Century: Post-Apocalyptic Novels in the Age of US Decline
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    This book explores the post-apocalyptic novel in American literature from the 1940s to the present as reflections of a growing anxiety about the decline of US hegemony. Post-apocalyptic novels [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Wim Wenders – The Pixels of Paul Cezanne: And Reflections on Other Artists
    Wim Wenders – The Pixels of Paul Cezanne: And Reflections on Other Artists
    $10.00 | , , Add to cart

    The Pixels of Paul Cezanne is a collection of essays by Wim Wenders which he presents his observations and reflections on the fellow artists who have influenced, shaped and inspired […]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Lust For Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker
    Lust For Life: On the Writings of Kathy Acker
    $9.00 | , , Add to cart

    Kathy Acker was one of the most original, subversive and influential writers of the late 20th century. Known variously, and notoriously, as a consummate postmodernist, feminist, post-punk and [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction
  • Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy
    Lost Transmissions: The Secret History of Science Fiction and Fantasy
    $12.00 | , , Add to cart

    Science fiction and fantasy reign over popular culture now, associated in our mind with blockbuster movies and massive conventions. But there’s much more to the story than the headline-making [...]

    GENRE: Non-Fiction