Author: Yarlung Records

GRAMMY® Award winning Yarlung Records brings fresh musicians to the classical music world using minimalist audiophile recording techniques to deliver sound as close to living performance as possible. Rather than using recording studios, engineer Bob Attiyeh produces these albums in concert halls famous for their acoustics
Genesis Quartet by Yarlung Records

Yarlung introduces the Genesis Quartet

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Dear NativeDSD aficionados, Working with friends in the music business is part of why music is so enjoyable. This is certainly the case collaborating with the team at NativeDSD, and it is the case preparing music with Gary Koh, president of Genesis Advanced Technologies, who generously sponsored this new quartet of albums. Lucky audiophiles have heard and have then yearned someday to own the legendary G1 Genesis Loudspeakers. Fortunately, the company also designs more “family friendly” speakers and amplifiers, several of which Gary and I will use today for our first presentation of the DSD Genesis Quartet at Acoustic Image in Los Angeles. This quartet includes some of my favorite music in the Yarlung catalog, the transcendent percussion concerto by Toru Takemitsu, the stylish debut recording by American violinist Nigel Armstrong, Swiss cellist Frederic Rosselet playing Bach and Ligeti, and Petteri Iivonen, from Finland, treating us to his interpretations of Brahms and Ysaye. Continue Reading →

Jim Svejda Review of The Colburn Orchestra Mahler Symphoney

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hdTracks | iTunes | Native DSD | SoundCloud  | Yarlung Records Mahler Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor.  Gerard Schwarz, cond., The Colburn Orchestra.  YARLUNG 41014 (64:00). By any standard, this is a superlative Mahler Fifth; given that it’s a live performance by a student orchestra, it’s frankly jaw-dropping. Though less well known than Eastman, Juilliard, Curtis or the New England Conservatory, the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles is one of America’s top-flight musical institutions– as may be gathered from the fact that it currently fields an orchestra every bit the equal of any of its venerable eastern rivals.  But then again, with the American Youth Symphony, the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, the USC Thornton Symphony and the UCLA Philharmonia – several of which are more than capable of mopping the floor with the highly touted Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra – Los Angeles has a fair claim to being Continue Reading →

Myles Astor review in PFO of Smoke & Mirrors Percussion Ensemble

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HDtracks | iTunes  | Native DSD Volume 1 | Native DSD Volume 2 | SoundCloud | Yarlung Records Myles Astor, New York, writing for PFO, December 11th, 2013 Reel-to-reel Recording of the Year: Smoke & Mirrors Percussion Ensemble, Yarlung Records. Steve Reich: Nagoya Marimbas; Lou Harrison: Canticle No.3; Maurice Ravel: Sonatine. Producer and engineer: Bob Attiyeh. 15-ips/2-track, CCIR, Yarlung Records. In contrast to past years, there was absolutely no shortage of candidates in this category including The Tape Project’s Lee Morgan Sidewinder, International Phonograph’s Ravi Shankar in Luxembourg, 1980 and Opus 3’s One, Vol. 2 Sampler tape. When push came to shove, however, Yarlung Records newly recorded and released Smoke & Mirrors walked away with this year’s top prize! This single, roughly 31 minute reel, features a potpourri of percussion music from a trio of 20th century composers ranging from the likes of Steve Reich to Lou Harrison to Maurice Ravel. Each track is a musical and sonic spectacular with Continue Reading →

Yarlung News from NativeDSD

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Yarlung Records presents the PS Audio Quartet Your support has kept us busy and happy at Yarlung Records. Your Quad, Double and Single DSD download orders have placed our albums consistently in the top ten across the NativeDSD website. Sometimes number 5, sometimes 6, and often even number 1 or 2! And the superb recordings from other labels on the site have inspired us to keep helping the NativeDSD family grow. Elliot Midwood and Steve Hoffman are two of the titans who enabled Yarlung Records to succeed. Steve, known as one of the finest mastering engineers in the world, kindly took us under his wing to master our first release and he has generously worked with us ever since. Elliot Midwood helps us continue to refine our recording techniques, designs microphone preamplification and monitoring equipment for us, and serves as executive producer for a number of our most successful analog releases as well Continue Reading →

Rachel Denny at Hesperia Hall – folk songs from the heart

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In many ways, our modern folk ballads echo the long tradition of the medieval pastourelle. In this genre, the narrator, often a knight, stops in the woods. After all, woods are always erotic dream space where anything can happen. There the knight meets a shepherdess, often named Marion, who is longing for Robin, her absent shepherd lover. The tension between love, infidelity, rape, voyeurism, and the plays between high and low class and language have been rehearsed many times since the genre was first preserved in the twelfth century. Another classic feature of the pastourelle and its descendant ballads is the dorelot, or refrain. These refrains can mimic birdsong, quote other ballads, and can range between nonsense syllables to intelligible text. The word dorelot is just one variant of all the “tura luras,” “lully lullays,” “dilly dillies,” “diddle diddles,” “fa la las,” “tra la las,” and “Polly Wolly doodles” heard Continue Reading →

exaSound salutes Yarlung Records on its 10th Anniversary

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Yarlung Records.com    |  exaSound.com  |   YarlungRecords.NativeDSD.com exaSound sponsored Yarlung’s first quartet of albums in high resolution DSD, and exaSound salutes Yarlung Records on its 10th Anniversary Review by Robert H. Levi Review by Dr. David Robinson The Collaboration Some audiophiles believe that Quad DSD is the finest medium to deliver great music on the planet.  Recording music to Quad DSD is one thing, but playing it back is another much more difficult process.  The circuitry and design aesthetic required to take the super high resolution DSD files and deliver them as living and breathing music takes enormous skill and care.  For this most important and delicate step we are especially grateful to George Klissarov.  It is his musical aesthetic and from-the-ground-up engineering that enabled him to create the exaSound e22, which must be one of the finest Quad DSD and high resolution PCM digital to analog converters on the planet.  Continue Reading →

Executive Producers – Yarlung Records

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Sponsorship, philanthropy and guidance from underwriters have always been critical to the success of music and the performing arts.  The choragoi, wealthy citizens of Athens, helped produce and pay for classical performances in the 5th and 4th centuries BC.   Before them, the pharaohs sponsored the arts in ancient Egypt.  Lorenzo de Medici and his Renaissance family were not the first patrons of the arts in western culture, and as long as the arts flourish, it will be visionary people who finance them and make them possible. Countess Yoko Nagae Ceschina, “Fairy Godmother to the New York Philharmonic,” died last month.  I appreciated this loving tribute in the New York Times. It is our executive producers who sponsor and make music possible at Yarlung Records.  They are our fairy godmothers and fairy godfathers, our modern Medicis, who work with us and support our musicians every year. Please join our executive producers Continue Reading →

Sophisticated Lady

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HDtracks | iTunes  | Native DSD Volume 1 | Native DSD Volume 2 | SoundCloud | Yarlung Records | Review | Sonics: 5 out of 5! Sophisticated Lady Jazz Quartet. Yarlung. This band of young jazz musicians follows in the classy-cool tradition of Shorty Rogers & His Giants, a tasteful swinging late 50s-early 60s outfit led by a principal creator of the West Coast sound. Recorded in Cammilleri Hall in LA, this debut album sounds astoundingly good. Recorded live, it gives one the feeling of having a ringside seat at an intimate jazz club. It opens with a politely swinging rendition of Jerome Kern’s “I’m Old Fashioned” that’s underscored by drummer Andrew James Boyle’s deft brushwork at the intro. Every nuance of JJ Kirkpatrick’s bristling trumpet solo here can be readily felt while Boyle’s switch to sticks on the ride cymbal is like sparklers being set off in the dark. Boyle’s gentle ballad “Gone” is a lyrical highlight while the Ellington-Strayhorn song “Isfahan” Continue Reading →

The Absolute Sound – Yarlung Records Makes A Splash

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Yarlung Records Makes A Splash By Jeff Wilson   |  Aug 13th, 2014 Categories: Jazz, Classical One of the pleasures of experiencing a second golden age of audio is witnessing all the ways record labels keep evolving. Take, for example, Yarlung Records, a California- based company that, when it was launched in 2005, was just one more small label in the increasingly sink-or-swim music industry. Almost ten years later Yarlung remains, in the words of owner Bob Attiyeh (uh-TEA-yuh), “too small to fail,” yet its list of accomplishments points to the success a label can achieve when it combines carefully-chosen performances with superb-sounding recordings. Case in point: In 2010 Yarlung won a Grammy for Antonio Lysy at The Broad: Music from Argentina, a recording that also earned a spot on the list of top forty best-sounding recordings TAS compiled in Issue 234. A big part of Yarlung’s success comes from its Continue Reading →

Mahler Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor – Gerard Schwarz

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CD | Amazon | iTunes | HDtracks | NativeDSD | SoundCloud | Mahler Symphony No. 5 in C-sharp minor. Gerard Schwarz, cond., The Colburn Orchestra.  YARLUNG 41014 (64:00) By any standard, this is a superlative Mahler Fifth; given that it’s a live performance by a student orchestra, it’s frankly jaw-dropping. Though less well known than Eastman, Juilliard, Curtis or the New England Conservatory, the Colburn School in downtown Los Angeles is one of America’s top-flight musical institutions– as may be gathered from the fact that it currently fields an orchestra every bit the equal of any of its venerable eastern rivals.  But then again, with the American Youth Symphony, the Young Musicians Foundation Debut Orchestra, the USC Thornton Symphony and the UCLA Philharmonia – several of which are more than capable of mopping the floor with the highly touted Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra – Los Angeles has a fair claim to Continue Reading →