By Rudy Trouvé

In 1991, if my memory doesn't deceive me, like it often does, we (Rudy Trouvé, Jacki Billet & Dirk Belmans) rented a house in Antwerp in the red light district.
The place turned out to be an old brothel. Strange hooks in the ceiling, a huge bath and blacklight in every room sort of gave it away.

We named the place Heavenhotel (it's a filmish tradition up in the country to give your house a name).
Following the factory concept of Andy Warhol we wanted to use the place to create art, paint, mess with video and rehearse. We also decided to use the name for exhibitions and for a record label - bands like Kiss My Jazz, Gore Slut and Lionell Horrowitz were founded here.

After a hectic but interesting year we gave up on the place, because friends of friends of friends started to hang out there up to the point where we hardly knew the people who stayed there.
So we moved and gave up on the idea of having a common location. We kept the name though. In 1992, I (Rudy) joined deus and after developing an intense hate for long tours (long for me is anything longer than 14 days) I left in 1995.

In 1996 we released the first album inder the Heavenhotel banner, Kiss My Jazz in Doc's place Friday evening, in coöperation with The Knitting Factory.
Since then we've made up to 3 releases each year of our own projects.
We cover a wide range of musical tastes - from traditional alternative guitar rock, avant-garde jazz, art-wank pop and singer-songwriter stuff.

Our structure is chaotic and vague. We manage & book ourselves. Which basically means if the phone rings and we are asked to play and we are available, we play. If we feel the urge to make a record we make one.
There's like 20 people in our outfit and if decisions must be made some of us get together, stare into each others eyes, mumble, and make the decisions. Money to make albums comes from album sales.

Our bands are, or were: Kiss My Jazz, Golf, Gore Slut, Dead Man ray, Mitsibooshy Jacson, Daan, Autistic Youth, Sue Daniels, Tip Toe Topic, Almanac, Ow, Franco Saint de Bakker, The Love Substitutes, Cynthia Appleby & Friends, Lionell Horrowitz, The Rudy Trouvé Sextet, I Hate Camera, Central.

Future releases: End 2009 I hope to release the Rudy Trouvé Septet part 2 as promised, but since we don't have a distribitor at the moment this keeps getting delayed... I also would like to compile all HH footage and make a DocuDVD (but I have this plan every year for the last 5 years, so maybe next year?). Other releases are vague and depend on the urge of the moment.

More info on the net:

On Heaven Hotel:
Facebook group
Heaven Hotel MySpace