Keiji Haino and Steve Noble’s ‘Cafe OTO’ arrives on CD via Cold Spring
Cold Spring issues Keiji Haino & Steve Noble’s “Cafe OTO” on CD on 17 July 2026, the first physical edition of their 2012 Cafe OTO improvisation.
Cold Spring releases “Cafe OTO”, a live album by Keiji Haino and Steve Noble, on CD on 17 July 2026. The record documents a duo performance the two improvisers gave at Cafe OTO in London on 28 February 2012, and it is the first time that recording appears on a physical format. The concert previously circulated only as a digital release.
Keiji Haino and Steve Noble’s ‘Cafe OTO’: a 2012 set across four movements
For the CD, Cold Spring splits the roughly hour-long performance into four untitled parts, running from about twelve to eighteen minutes each. Haino plays electric guitar and feedback and, at one point, sets the guitar down for a wooden flute; Noble answers on a full percussion set-up. John Chantler recorded and mixed the show, and Martin Bowes of Attrition mastered it for Cold Spring, with sleeve design by Abby Helasdottir. The release comes as a CD in a matt digipak.
The album is Side-Line’s first coverage of the pairing, and it lands close to another Cold Spring reissue of Japanese experimental music, Sun Ra | Merzbow ‘Strange City’. The label has drawn on the same well before, as with its vinyl reissue documented in Cold Spring reissues cult Japanese noise release by Maso Yamazaki on vinyl.
About Keiji Haino and Steve Noble
Keiji Haino, born in Chiba, Japan, in 1952, is an experimental musician who works across electric guitar, feedback, percussion, wind instruments and voice. He first turned to performance through theatre before forming the group Fushitsusha in 1978, and has since appeared on more than 200 recordings under his own name and with projects including Nazoranai and Sanhedrin. His playing moves between extreme volume and near-silence, often within a single piece.
Steve Noble is a London-based drummer and percussionist active in free improvisation since the early 1980s, when he worked with Rip Rig + Panic and the Bow Gamelan Ensemble. He has recorded and performed with Derek Bailey, Peter Brötzmann and Stephen O’Malley, and leads the groups N.E.W. and Decoy. His work centres on the acoustic drum kit and extended percussion.
Cold Spring, the UK label releasing “Cafe OTO”, has issued industrial, power electronics, dark ambient, noise and experimental music since 1988. Recorded at the Dalston venue Cafe OTO, which opened in 2008 as a home for improvised and experimental music, the album brings a long-unavailable Haino and Noble meeting to CD for the first time.
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