Liv Singh was raised in Osseo, Minnesota, and his first music teacher was his grandfather who conducted marching bands that played for troops during battles in World War I. Liv started on trumpet at 13 and moved to Phoenix. He got a tape recorder and when he was 15 he recorded a new age album for friends and family featuring a home-built synthesizer, backwards tape loops and nature sounds.
Although he played trumpet in his high school marching band, after hearing The Byrds in the mid-Sixties, Liv also began playing guitar in a rock band. As a sophomore, he started a studio production company to record local bands, tape interviews and put together a one-hour weekly radio show for KDKB, a freeform underground station.
After playing in a King Crimson-styled progressive rock band, Liv attended a graphic arts school for two years to study graphics and printing. He also began meditating in 1972, the same year that he started his own record company after producing an album of folk songs by Bi Bi Bhani. Over the next two decades, the company evolved into the Invincible label, one of the oldest and most successful new age recording companies which has branched out into other types of music.
Liv has been involved as either producer, arranger, recording engineer, songwriter or musician on 130 albums that have sold a total of more than a million units. These albums include the worldbeat Music of the Spheres (two volumes) and the meditational Crimson series (seven volumes) featuring Celtic harpist Kim Robertson and new age vocalist Singh Kaur (with Singh and the jazz ensemble Mosaic on Vol. 7). Liv also has been involved with recordings by sitarist Rahul Sariputra, Robertson and Kaur as solo artists, and acoustic guitarist Mila Gilbert.
"What I learned by meditating is how rhythm and repetition affects the consciousness," explains Liv. "I am continuously studying the relationship between mantra and music. One of my main goals is to take music beyond entertainment and make it an experience on the soul level as well."
"It's interesting to note," says Liv, "that most baroque music was notated by the composers so that it would be interpreted by the orchestra playing it. It's designed for musicians to do with it whatever they want. So we did.
Liv & Let Liv is a collaboration between Liv Singh and Livtar Singh (also a solo artist who has recorded and toured with the Khalsa String Band).
Liv and Livtar, although not related, are part of a spiritual brotherhood that practices Kundalini Yoga, chanting and meditation. They both became Sikhs and, as most do who follow that way of life, they changed their names and took the last name Khalsa. However, there is only a very small group of Sikhs with the name Liv (which means love). Their bond strengthened when they discovered they both play guitar, have similar influences in Sixties rock music, and like to hike in the desert.
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