1. Amish Rec.
Hall Of Fame (US,1996)***'
This earlier release of Hall of Fame is pretty different from their latest effort. This sounds like temple hall experimental music consisting of acoustic noise, drones and borderline inspirations. It reminds me of Gurdjiev’s words : “people want to fill their emptiness with noise”. When we might be able to feel how little we are we create more openness to the real things around us, and to open ideas from inside that clarify all the other noise around us. But nothing is too simple, and there are no vast rules. This music for instance is like a mixture of an inner sound and rhythm, with the effect of noises from all around us, in this way creating with its own noise its own existence. This is a real different approach, by means of this kind of acoustic noise-psychedelica. Only on “Fatter leaner” and the tenth track, we hear Samsara singing, with guitars slightly slipping in tune in a different direction, as another kind of disturbing-drug-to-the-mind psychedelica. It’s all on the edge of senility and a trance-caused inventiveness that the improvisation continues, with no-drones droning, with acoustic almost-noises, with hypnotic effects, always on the edge of “noise” as a true sound and presented as coming from an inner voice from within. Actually.. very good.
2. Amish Rec.Hall Of Fame (US,1998)*°
This release has in the first few tracks a partly acoustic organic aspect, with improvisations around some sounds, or driven by some two-tile-space rhythms. I’m not sure where the focus is this time. It’s a bit a weird and stoned inspiration. Then there are a few tracks with electric guitars, and other ideas around it, which give these few tracks an underground celler live sphere, more experimental, just on the border of the interesting ‘United Diaries’ related experimental mood, but still too gentle to risk the real step towards them, in that deeper, darker celler chamber. Never the les the spirals in this music go up and down, and the rhythms have its own variety within a kind of pre-existence sphere of a not-belonging-anywhere-yet, in a stage of almost becoming something, just before the stage of a focused creation or birth of a first really bright idea. Then it gets this human focus with a Samara Lubelski song, called “Blond Haired Girl”. Then it returns to the twilight on “All Fall down”, with some weird sounds, rhythms on gongs, and with a non-worldly violin improvisation. It is as if any focus on a real world becomes filtered with a strangeness of a ghostly vision, blurring the senses, and the sense of getting a real grip on things. The last track’s improvisation murmurs out these visions, until the last few seconds with environmental sounds and still leaves us with some notion of where in the world we still are present.
Hall Of Fame here consists of Dan Brown and Samara Lubelski along with sound & video artist Theo Angel.
