Two guys walk into a room, in a basement, with no lights. There are pieces of electronic equipment that have little red and green lights, but the lights are, for the most part, covered over with black electrical tape. Initially, then, this room is pitch black. The two guys trip over things, knock things down, break things, until they find some instruments and start playing them. All of this is recorded.

All of this is recorded because there is a third guy, in a different room, with a little light so he can see the console and the tape machine. He twiddles things as the other two do whatever they do to get music out of themselves and the stuff in the black room. As time wears on they begin to get a hint of light, ambient light is still leaking from somewhere, and their eyes are adjusting. Later, when the lights are turned on full, they will again be blind for a while. This happens during the recording, and the change in mood can be heard in the music.

There are more than three guys in Halaka, so I don't know what the other guys do. Perhaps the two guys in the black room are always different guys. 

Five guys walk onto a stage. It is dark, as a stage is dark. There are people in an audience, waiting to see something. Some spectacle. Halaka is not a spectacle, though. Halaka records what they hear and hear what they see and is not a spectacle. I have no basis for anything I'm saying except that I know it's true. You've noticed, I'm sure, that they release a lot of misinformation, and no good, real information about who they are or how they work. This is how they work, I'm telling you. I've got it on good authority. I'm not sure what authority. There are a lot of good sites about this stuff, if you look.
 
 
 

Haggada is anything that is not halaka. Everything is halaka or haggada. Halaka pushes themselves into the spaces that are supposed to be haggada, so that it becomes more and more difficult to tell what is halaka and what is haggada, what is not halaka. This way a definition is slowly displayed without being spoken, the idea that nothing is unique, nothing is truly separate from anything else. Everything is either green or not green, but it's very hard to tell what's green.

Haggada is also a band. I can't find ANYTHING that I'm sure is by Haggada, and I can't find ANYTHING that says it's by Haggada that doesn't sound like it's by Halaka. So Haggada could just be Halaka with a different name. This sounds like something Halaka would do. I'm pretty sure. But they don't seem very intent on putting any of that stuff out there. Haggada seems even less concerned about actually having anyone hear anything than halaka is. 

People record what they hear and what they see, and they send it to each other and call it "Halaka." They record something on a four-track in their basement and they send it to some halaka fans and they say, "This is halaka. I found it in the underground. I found it in a junk store. I found it in a friend's garage. It is a halaka album and I haven't heard it before. Copy it and send it to your friends." And people copy it and send it to their friends, and they say, "this is halaka. It sounds so different than the other halaka stuff because it's a different singer, they had a guy with a cold that time, they were recording in Mexico, they were sick, they were in the hospital, they had their kids play most of the instruments."

Ever notice how different some of this halaka stuff can be from some of the other stuff? I encourage you to do this. Record some stuff. Send it along, send it to someone. Put it in a junk store. Call it halaka. If you've already got some halaka stuff, or stuff that says it's halaka, make copies, on tape or CD or whatever, and send it out to someone. This is how.

This is how halaka works:

They leak their stuff to their fans to pass around to other fans and to record stores and used places and radio stations. They never finish anything, they release the same album in a bunch of different forms. Whenever they feel like changing something they change it. There are copies out there of the other version, someone has this. Someone has that. This is an art in flux, this is a crap-pile in flux, this is flux in flux. Drift. The sounds and music drift. The styles drift. There is not a head in the band, not a fundamental law, nothing to anchor the output. This is why it's very hard to tell what is Halaka and what is Haggada.

A guy steps off a bus in a small, midwest town. He's got a beat-up suitcase in his hand and a beat-up hat on his head. The kind of hat people really don't wear anymore. He looks around him, sits the suitcase down at his feet. He has arrived. He knows exactly where he is and why he's there, and not only that, he's RIGHT about what he knows.

Nothing works like this:

Three years ago the man was handed an instruction booklet. How to Live Your Life! is what it said on the cover. Twenty pages in all, easy to read, easy to follow. This led the man to this small, midwestern town, told him what to pack in that small suitcase, and to wear this weird hat that is a kind that no one really wears anymore.

Nothing works like this because no one is really in a book or a movie.

This Man Does Not learn that he must create a tremendous body of music that very few people will want to understand, fewer will try to understand, and fewer still will understand. He doesn't recruit four others who have been given identical tasks and develop a way to work with them toward their common goal.

If you put halaka in water it doesn't sink or float. If you put haggada in water it does. Do not try this.