lonesome andi haller

+++++ only authorized biography of lonesome andi haller: +++++

discography, filmography

The beginnings - After a few alarming displays of exagerated brightness, 3-month old Andi Haller, only to his very best and to spare him the sad fate of an overly intelligent kid, was put into an isolation tank by his caring parents.

Luckily technical knowledge was crude on these issues in rural Tirol of 1962, and so little Andi, deprived from daylight, at least had a rich soundscape of hissing, gargling, pumping and humming, which would mould his hearing sensibilities forever.
Back in the outside world, he decided: "From now on, I'll call myself Lonesome Andi Haller, and SOUND is what I will do !!"

Soon his first band started blowing up tube radios, which they had chained up for maximum loudness, but they never made it out of grandma's basement.
At his 12th birthday he got it clear: It is a long and stony way to the top.

Free jazz became the voice of revolution, as he roared his tenor sax against the establishment in support of the first occupied house in Innsbruck.

Of course, the dark Nazi times were long over by then and so he could spend the 7 months of re-education in relative comfort in a traditional marching band, where he learned to polish lots of shining brass instruments.

Bands, bands, bands -

A long list of groups began and LAH got to know the world beyond the wall of mountains that surrounded his hometown. Many stages and tourbuses he shared with a cheeky kid he met when the drummer of a thrown-together big band for his first filmscore didn't turn up, and HP, this hardly contained charge of energy took that loser's place.

With NYLON, where all the tunes had plastic names, they opened the ears of the world to the sound of polyethylene.

With FUNK TAXI they faked the funk, but their noses wouldn't grow.
Packs of wolves howled under the moon, as they crossed the serbian gorges on the way to Istanbul, when their name was KÖB, Lismo the drummer and powertrio the direction.

In London LAH joined THE MURPHY WORKING STIFFS and played and lived in Brixton and Camberwell squats where empty beercans rained on them in eery violett colors.

In Berlin he did the Bassman for STAN RED FOX, with BÖHM OHNE KÖB they played 'Spill the Blood' on double bass and acoustic guitar and the handouts of LOUD adored the lampposts of Alphabet city on their fearless trip from the rural Schwertberg to New York City.
He stayed cool on the drums with MAZ PANIAC and in HP ZINKER he replaced the unreplaceable Puemp on electric bass for many weeks of touring up and down the hip stages all over Europe
In Belgrade they couldn't play because there was war in the air. In Bologna they were sent away because they had booked another band. They had to fight to get paid in Braunschweig and Istanbul. In Oslo the crowd was small but refreshingly cool. They ate cheese every day, there was a stash for the dope, they slept in the bus, on the floor and in fivestar hotels. And all that time there was another unit, teaming up, honing their skills, getting ready and diggin the hitch:

LAHB - the birth of the clones - 1985 is the year that changes everything for LAH. Confused and depressed by the general lack of spirit in the morbid streets of Vienna, he buys a 4-track casette machine and starts experimenting with ether waves. In the famous setup involving pyramids and the dried testicles of an abyssinian saint, which here can't be made public due to internet safety regulations, it finally happens. For a tiny span of a second the fragile order of matter and energy is disturbed, and when LAH finally wakes up to his smelly room again, he finds it populated with three sheepishly grinning, shockingly familiar individuals, three clones of himself.

Here's what he told a reporter in one of his extremely rare interviews:

Q: How did you get the idea to toy around with ether waves in the first place?
LAH: It was in one of those dark Vienna jazz clubs, where all the tables are dominated by candles stuck into bottles whose thick crusts of wax symbolize the utterly wasteful dripping of time, where once bright and cheerful colors mix into an ugly gray in a hopeless downward motion of disgusting little streams of sad droplets...
Q: I, see. So how...
LAH: The live band consisted of a tenor sax and a piano and their feeble rendition of memorized be-bop clichés made me want to puke in the stale beer in front of me.
I was only grateful when a rather big guy approached me, although, by the way he stoically downed mug after mug of the reddish paint thinner they sold as red wine, you could clearly tell he was not human. "Have you ever thought about doing something with ether waves?" he opened the conversation...

So, there he was. The etherwave setup in shambles, and his lonesome self all of a sudden quadruplified. Contemplating the clones he quickly understood: there's only one thing they would be able to do, only one use they could be put to, only one task they could be charged with. He would form a band. The band of the bands, the band that would never break up, the LONESOME ANDI HALLER BAND !!!!!!

Years of discipline, training, and more discipline follow until finally the useless little bastards could sing a basic background choir, drum a simple sincopabillybooty beat or thrash some decent powerchords on an electric guitar. Ceaselessly putting sound on sound, ruthlessly abusing about any object that promised to produce some sonic flavour, he makes them suffer, he makes them grow, he makes them REAL.
Soundtracks, Songs and Albums are recorded, but all this is too much for their weak bodies. The strain of showbiz, the endless touring, the interwievs, the unwashed groupies, all this finally gets them and they collaps.
Just as LAH is about to destroy it all, preparing to repeat the old experiment in reverse in a desperate attempt to make them disappear and return to his original lonesomeness, a new technology emerges and saves them from this terrible fate: Computers.
LAH is alone on the stage again, but at least the ungrateful creatures can fulfill their duties as playback. LAHB not dead !!!

Little dots on lines - and other serious stuff. Ever curious but decidedly anti-academic, studies always were a DIY thing to LAH. So, when a bunch of highly trained masters of bassoon, violin, viola and the like asked him to contribute to their repertoir, he had to learn their idiom and started to scribble little dots on lines.
Again an exerpt of the year 2000 lighthouse interview:

LAH: "This was just great. You suss it out, you put it down, you hand it over and, within minutes they make it sound almost as you thought it should. This was nectar and rocket fuel to my inner dictator self and all went just marvelous until I tried to make them bang their instrument cases on each others head in an indian raga pattern while they peed into the tuba for a delicate glissando along to the sharp quintuplets of the harpist biting off her strings in a quartertone scale... Hmmm... What a shame ! This could have been a real masterpiece..."

Still, a few recordings of the scores remain scattered over a few albums, here is the cover of one of them.
More difficult to find are recordings by TRASHPEGEL, another band with written scores and classical instruments, as there is no oficially released album. When a baffled HP ZINKER fan happened to see LAH perform with them he gasped: "What !!! for THIS you left HP ZINKER ???!!!"

The last Rockband - In the late 90s, between the spinning windmills of DJ culture and the big sellout of 'independent rock' on the tv screens, a strange couple made their way through the deserted plains of the underground rock network, SPLINTERS.

Leftovers from the expired HP ZINKER, they had teamed up to show them all, what a cool rhytm section can do without samples and sequenzing. Good try, wrong moment, lads, still, there's an ep out on xterkyu, check it out in the shop.

Moving the Image - soundtracks
The first film LAH wrote music for was never finished.

But the music, a song, could be used for his soundtrack to the sci-fi movie HALBE WELT about 10 years later and from then on he has learned to walk the red carpets with notorious elegance.
For animation films, documentaries and feature films, mostly supported by his infamous clones, he creates score after score and bubbly wine becomes an obsession.
But the love for the screen doesn't stop here. With the vaudeville group DIE FRÜHLINGSROLLE, they toured through the cinemas with a mix of shortfilms and live music, he acted and played in the expanded-cinema show DAS ATTENTAT, and first on super8, later on digital video, gets into the costly habit of NoBudget filmmaking from writing to acting, from editing to postproduction, from casting to props and sparkling alcohol disappears from his life.

When under the chestnuttrees on the gritting gravel of a vienna beer garden the newly immigrated theater group TOXIC DREAMS invites him to join, how could he say no? So soon he becomes musical member of an ever growing family, where the dances are loud, the songs are remembered, the images are colorful and the humor bouncy.

Musicals and Free Will - To provide a milder climate to the clones and livelier surroundings to himself, the LAH lot moves south, to the coast, to the palm trees, to Barcelona.
Few did they know about the harbour town and big was the surprise to meet an old London mate down there: BING SELFISH. Find out what happened then - in the news section