Herzbeat Hotel is an ongoing project for investigation on religious music led by Damien Yates and Anton van Ringe. These two former theology and ethnology students have developed an unhealthy obsession with the notion of music as a spiritual, holy activity, and conduct researches on all sorts of psychic and spiritual connections involving such disparate elements as Indian classical music, Elvis Presley and silent movie star Gloria Swanson.
Yates and Van Ringe divide their work into two streams, one of them directed towards more inwards, watchful sound activity ("The Elvis Motown Mantras"), the other focusing on the attainment of mental progress through noise-induced ecstasy ("The Snakebite Sermons"). Every performance or recording by Herzbeat Hotel falls into either one of the two categories.
The network of connections, channels, and "luminous coincidences" (cf. Carl Jung) that Damien Yates and Anton van Ringe uncover in their work is a neverending spider's web encompassing all sorts of psychological and spiritual energy sources who exist in inadvertent symbiosis, be it Shaker trance poetry, drone music, Zen buddhism, quantum physics or the holy quality to be found in Motown. The list is endless, and since "physics" and "psychic" are very nearly anagrams of each other, there is always a lot of work to do.
