Luis Alvarado didn't have big plans when he started Buh Records, originally starting out by producing CDrs with photocopied cover artwork to be able to release music made by friends. "It was very much of the time," he says today. "The CDr culture gave me freedom to experiment and to publish at low cost." His hunch that Buh could evolve beyond all that has proven to be correct: almost twenty years later, the Lima-based label has become his full-time job and is internationally known. The attitude, however, Alvarado is quick to point out, has remained the same over the past two decades: "I think Buh is still scary," he says in reference to the tongue-in-cheek name he chose in 2004. "It's more than just a record label, it's my way of life, and I think that all those who run record labels that go against the grain will always generate some kind of tension."

And going against the grain it does. Since the beginning, Buh has provided a platform for adventurous music from all over the world that is often hard to categorise. In its vast back catalogue, Chinese noisenik Li Jianhong rubs shoulders with the Czech electronica band Gurun Gurun, the radical Berlin-based vocal improv Audrey Chen, Italian industrial pioneer Maurizio Bianchi or Franconian esotericist Baldruin. If there is a common thread, it is that Alvarado would like to find the individual records in a vinyl store, as he says. After 13 years of operating Buh, he started producing vinyl in 2017. This was not an easy task for a company located outside the power centres of an allegedly global music industry that is primarily located in North America and Western Europe. "I knew that this was the ideal format, but it required a strong investment and logistics as well as trustworthy people in Europe," Alvarado says in regard to his label's first vinyl release, the "Superfricción" LP by Liquidarlo Celuloide.