jesse poe.is recording

Hey, here is a recent interview with an Italian fashion mag called label, It is the bed issue, so it is sort of “in bed with Tanakh” dreams, bedrooms, waking, etc. the English is abit jumbled, because it was done in English then translated into Italian, put into story form and then re-translated to English, the Italian reads great but if you are an English reader you might prefer the original, so I have included it below, plus a link to a great blog on music art and good drinking! Which did an interview yesterday, for those of you interested here is the link: www.iworkatinitech.blogspot.com

Also, we just finished mastering Saunders Hollow the newest Tanakh record, I..ll be sending a link to some tracks from it in the next few days…as soon as I get the master in the mail.

ALSO, darius jones our fantastic sax player and friend has finished producing and playing on a new record which is really hot! You can hear the whole thing on line for free, it isn..t mastered yet and it is still looking for a home! Check it out here: http://www.mythofmitch.com/album/

Happy Holloween!
jesse

Original Label interview in English:

1) You actually live in FIrenze and the record has been put together there in the studio. Is the mixture of arts, history and tradition of the city influenced at some level the grace and touch of classicism of your songs?

I am currently working with a group of musicians from Tuscany, Cosimo Santi (electric guitar), Fabio Mannelli (bass), Viola Mattioli (cello), Jacopo Salvatori (piano) and Nick Liceti (drums) from the US, L.A. in fact, and we are hoping to go into studio late fall. As for Ardent Fevers I wrote it mainly in Firenze, in Santa Spirito where I still live, and recorded the demos here but returned to the US to record the final record, the whole record was recorded and mixed in ten days. I didn..t intend to mirror the beauty or classicalness of Firenze, but I feel that its presence can be felt in the songs of Ardent Fevers, like the city itself, Ardent Fevers is a mix of cultures and experience, full of sun-bleached pastels and damp alleys that haven..t seen the sun since palaces crowed their way into every corner, full of detergent stores, flower shops, enotecas, magazine stands, high-end fashion, cheap knock offs, street musicians, gypsy beggars, and double-parked suburbs. I recently learned that Damien Rice apparently wrote ..O.. here in Firenze and that he lived in the suburbs when he did, which makes sense when you listen to his beautiful lyrics which have always struck me as written for a love who was a second language speaker. And although I truly adore that record and wish he would make another soon, I can feel the difference of location from the periphery and the city center, there is a delicate sadness to ..O.. that is lovely and bleak, where as Ardent Fevers in contrast chases some of the same emotions and ideas but spins its wheels on cobbled streets which maintain the passage of years and a million cultures between its stones, their crevices albeit at times beer drenched and caked in guano, and cluttered with cut-outs of Mickey and Minnie dancing next to cheap Chinese remote control cars that bump and beep infinitely. One is not better than the other, but it is interesting how the geographical difference of a ten minute bus jump can make on a record, ..O.. comes from a world more like ours in America concrete streets, convenience stores and stop-lights, but as seen through a frosted window of a stranger, the misted doors of perception, frustration and longing. I wonder what Damien..s thoughts are on this simple twist of location…

2) I found your songs perfect for sound tracking early wakes or very late hours of the day, when most people are in bed. “Deeper” and “Like I used to” seem to have that touch of intimacy. Is something deliberate or comes natural?

That is funny because at concerts most people tell me they listen to my record in bed or in the bath. Natural or deliberate..I guess sort of both, my first objective in writing music, stories, poems, arranging my room, or whatever is to do it beautifully, to make something that is beautiful, which of course is always in the eyes of the beholder, so in essence my own idea of beauty, but I hope that if I show what I think is beautiful that maybe there are others out there who will find it the same, there is so many things that are beautiful everyday that go largely unnoticed, a grandfather..s proud approving nod as his grandson explains the workings of his toys, the person who holds a door for another, a seat surrendered to another on a train or bus, a refection of light on a building. For me the clock never touches a time more beautiful than the early morning and the late evening, so I strive for that sort of feeling in what I do. Plus, I work during the late morning and early evening so I only have the early mornings and nights to practice and write songs, so in part this mood is forced on me by time constraints, I find it hard to contrast my surroundings, for example when I am in a bleak place I find attraction and inclination towards the more monochromaticness of life and when the sun is setting over the Arno it is another story entirely. For me writing music is like listening to music, each type of music, each artist, each record and song has a place and a time. It is hard to find something more fitting for a Sunday morning than Nick Drake..s records or Miles Davis.. Seven Steps to Heaven, however sticking with Miles as a motif, Sketches of Spain is better at 5pm that same Sunday and On the Corner your just gonna have to wait till the following Saturday night, a last glass and smoke before bed. So in the same way, when and where you write and practice sort of informs what you produce, perhaps if I wrote in the afternoon, the music would be brighter and more rambunctious, who knows, maybe someday I..ll have a contract with Sony and be able to test these theories, but for now got to make ends meet, right?

3) Your music sounds somehow oneiric and evaporated and you have the impression of being suspended in air (it happened to me with “Deeper”). Label dedicates every single issue to a specific topic. This turn it..s the BED. What are your feelings about this piece of furniture and everything related to it?

Bed, well that is a totem that is hard to wrap myself around. I have a very strange and sometimes unhealthy relationship with THE BED. It is one of the most wonderful places in the world, where not only do you recharge and express your love in a very concrete way but also a spring board of fantasy, where all of your fears and aspirations, all of your past experiences and just the simple mundane day to day shit that transpires comes wrapped all together in a fog of delight, delicatecy, and dementia. Where else do you walk freely from your kitchen to your high school gym to your grandmother..s living room to the office of the doctor you saw that day as if it were one seamless edifice? It is warm in the winter, a womb you never want to leave, and a sanctuary at the end of the day for each aching muscle, it is truly yours and no one else..s.. and there is no place better. Yet nothing tortures me more than my bed. So many nights it will just never open it..s arms to me, but it tosses me back and forth like an angry and inconsistent sea. It..s pretty keen that you keyed in on the onericness of my songs, because a lot of them are written in the bardo between bedtime and morning..s light. For example, 5am the second track was written at 5 am, thus the title, and it maintains the hushed humility in which it was written, I couldn..t play or sing anything loud at that predawn time and so the song came as does the blue hue of morning and the first birds.

I have always had an unhealthy relationship with THE BED. In fact, my whole family is quite the same, my father will stay up for two days straight, even now at this stage in his life, working on this or that, listening to music, smoking weed, making what not for his cabin in the mountains, and if you want to have a good meaningful relationship with my mother, you will have to wait till the witching hours to get started, and then when they and others in my family do sleep, they do it with a violence. My sister spends more time asleep than awake. One time my father slept two weeks straight until one of his friends broke down his door for fear that he was dead. Be it nurture or nature, I am quite the same cotton count. One of the most treasured results of a love when it is kind enough to stay with me is a more consistent sleep schedule, like eating, it is much better to do with someone you care deeply for.

The act of falling asleep has become a martial art for me, I have to focus and concentrate and clear my mind (which is always the hardest part). For a while I mastered the art with a trick and it worked for six months or so..I imagined a simple country home with a backyard that lead into a woods and there in that yard were the linens hanging on the line almost dry from their washing. And in my mind I zoomed in like a cameraman on those billowing sheets gently flapping in the summer breeze until their white filled my peripheral vision and I saw nothing but the rippling of loose weaved cotton. This blank yet beautiful image lead me to the other side many nights, then after some time those beautiful white sheets which carried me to dream land took a part time job as the screens for backyard films where my mind projected a more cinematic rendition of all the refuse that was rushing around in its recesses.

I think you can tell a lot about a person based on their bed and their bedroom in general, and I am always so curious to make my way into those rooms (some more than others) to know something from how the bed and its container, the bedroom looks; is it made, is it messy, is it clean, dirty, dark, light, monochromatic, or filled with designs, low to the ground or high, in the corner or in the middle of the room, books on the night stand or just wads of paper and dirty socks at the foot, it..s relation to the door and window(s), small, big, filled with pillows or Spartan. My mother..s bed is always filled with clothes and books, where as my father..s is always in the living room with blocks under the foot of it to tilt it in an decline, and it has been so in every house he has ever inhabited, I..m sure there is a psychological study in the waiting just based on that alone.

One of the most beautiful things in the world is the things you say as you are falling asleep, in that bardo between waking and sleeping. I wish I could write music that sounded as pure and conscious free as those utterances.

4) You have a side project called POULOS, which is more folk oriented. Are your folk roots influencing some how your TANAKH side?

I have always been a fan of folk music from all over the world, but especially 70..s Britt-folk-rock, like Pentangle and Fairport Convention, if I could write a song as beautiful as Pentangle..s ..So Clear.. from their 1971 record Reflection, I think I would then, surrender my guitar and rest assured I had made something truly beautiful. Dieu Deuil and Villa Claustrophobia, which I released in 2004 and 2002 respectively, are much more folky than Ardent Fevers but I still have a deep love for folk music.

5) You had some Italian musicians and Isobel Campbell involved in Ardent Fevers. Could you give us some details about this experience?

Well, working with Isobel Campbell and Alex Neilson came about the same way as working with David Lowery, Jim White, Mic Turner, Ned Oldham, and so on..it just sort of happened naturally. With Isobel and Alex it was just sort of meant to be, I was in Scotland to visit my friend Ali Roberts who was preparing to record his new record with Will Oldham as the producer and Ali wanted me to help him with the studio stuff, check it out and make sure it was going to be a good place to record and so on. He also had me come to his practices to give production and arrangement ideas before they went into studio. That was when I met Isobel and Alex, right off the bat they were just lovely people and so easy to be around, and when it came time to play they were very open to my suggestions. Especially coming from a person like Isobel who is not only a wonderful person but also a personality, it was refreshing to have the freedom to say, ..how about if you played this melody or attacked the line in this way… And instead of blowing me off for not being a bigger personality than her, she simply tried my suggestions and played them beautifully, with a lack of ego that is hard to find amongst famous musicians. I ended up moving the choice of studios to the studio of some dear friends of mine (and fabulous musicians, Jim and Caroline of Delicate AWOL). We ended up spending a few days in the highlands of Scotland at their villa/yoga studio/recording studio drinking and just having a great time in general, and as I was leaving for the US to record Ardent Fevers, I simply invited them to follow me in a week to join us in the recording and the next week there they were in Virginia sweating away in our practice loft and as any good Scotsman/woman staying up in to the wee hours nipping away at the whiskey we had brought over from the Highlands.

6) I know that you had probably answered 100 times to this, but is the choice of the Hebrew word that stands for “Old Testament” at some level related to certain aspects of your music or is pure coincidence?

(Laughing) yeah, I get asked that a lot, it is a strange name I guess, but then again so is the Beatles when you think about it, I can imagine their folks saying, ..why bugs? And furthermore why that bug?.. However it isn..t a random choice as I am sure is true of the Beatles, or the Turtles, or Madonna, it was very purposefully based on the meaning and the way in which the band was formed. There is an interview with a Radio station in Siena which details this, you can hear it on our myspace website http://

7) This is the 4th record of Tanakh. Do you consider Tanakh as a regular band or more as an open project where contributors can change from time to time?

I consider it a regular band with a revolving door of contributors, depending on the place and time and the sounds I am trying capture.

Teacher, Story Writer and musician. What can we expect form Jesse Poe in the near future?

What..s next…well I just came back from Pulgia where I recorded a solo record, just voice and acoustic guitar, with no effects not even reverb, but it is as full and as lush as my previous records which was accomplished by different distances from microphones, different acoustic spaces, and the layering of sounds from my guitar and voice. Sort of like extended technique in jazz where you explore your instrument for every possible sound it can make even just the sound of it bumping into the microphone. I am hoping to mix that this month and find a label that would like to put it out with a collection of photos that I took there and a travelogue/story of my search for the ever-elusive Tarantella that I tried to find the month that I spent in Pulgia. I am writing it both in English and in Italian and hoping to find a home for it in the next few months. Then this January, the sister record to Ardent Fevers will be coming out on Camera Obscura. It was recorded the week before Ardent Fevers, in the same studio with the same engineer (Bryan Hoffa) and with all the same musicians, including Isobel and a few others. The only difference is that these songs are sung by Michele Poulos who usually sings back up while I sing lead and on these songs I sing back up and she sings lead. As you know, Michele and I had a project together called Poulos and it sort of evolved into Tanakh (laughing) because it was the same thing, the same players the same beauty, but based on her songs, which I would take and twist and reform and rearrange and well in the end it was just plain Tanakh with her singing lead. It is a beautiful record and sounds very much like a feminine Ardent Fevers, it is the perfect mate to Ardent Fevers, a sort of ying to the yang. There are a few songs from that record on myspace if you would like to hear http:// Meanwhile I have been writing new songs that are much more groovy and pop-driven and hope to record those here in Italy with my band this fall.

DEEP WATER ACRES just posted a great 10 member interview with us, which they intitled, “Bringing the Sexy”

Bringing the Sexy and Listening to Space – Tanakh’s Outernational Music by Kevin Moist



Among a whole weekend of high musical points, one of our favorite experiences at last April’s Terrastock 6 in Providence, RI was the festival’s opening set by Tanakh. Their recently-released CD Ardent Fevers had really spun our heads, & it ended up being one of the real recorded highlights of 06. Tony Dale summed up our feelings in his 06-roundup rave, calling it “a sensory overload of songwriting classicism and rock dynamics, tightly controlled pop-songs and explosive guitar freak-outs … Shattering the paradigm of the psychedelic underground, Ardent Fevers is a release that deserved to be heard by millions.”

So we were especially interested to see how they would work this stuff live, and fought our way through various (mostly self-created) potholes to be sure we were in the AS220 club in time for them to take the stage.

And man, they really took it. We quickly realized we were seeing some expanded version of the group, as a line of ten musicians filled the small stage from one end to the other. We later learned this was the literal first meeting of the US and Italian contingents of the group (the latter coalescing since singer/leader Jesse Poe moved to Florence a couple of years back), onstage opening the festival… So we had a your rock-band lineup, plus horn section, cello, lap steel guitar, and two basses (one acoustic, played by a tall lanky Italian guy; the other electric, played by a petite poetess from Virginia). Not to forget of course the designated jaw harpist.

From a public performance point of view, it was a move that took some cojones, especially since most of the detailed arrangements necessary to keep a group of that size non-cacophonous were in fact improvised on the spot. It was also one of those amazing musical moments, 10 people each doing their own thing, and at the same time doing this one larger thing all together… Just flying, like a flock of birds… and not just any old flock of the same bird, but some open-ended association of city birds and country birds and jazz birds and red wine-drinking birds, all doing a big aerial-show dance as much for their own pleasure as ours. As high as we were by the end of their set, they seemed even higher…

So we were especially chuffed (as our Anglo friends say) to already have an appointment to interview the group that weekend. We met up with the infectiously energetic Mr. Poe, who had the excellent idea of getting the whole band involved. Most previous Tanakh articles had focused on Jesse (the best of those definitely Mats Gustafsson’s piece at the Terrascope online), though he always referred to the group as a “collective” operation as much as possible and wanted to see if we could capture some of that in the interview.

So on Sunday afternoon we convened an assembly, and the whole group hunkered down in a crowded noisy basement of AS220 for the interview. Everybody was there, and we’ll introduce them as they show up (though for the record let it be noted that Umberto Trivella [electric guitar] and Jason Andrews [jaw harp] were present but mostly quiet). In spite of the difficulty of rendering here the conversational dynamic, which often flew around like the flow of their live music, they all had some pretty ace things to say, and I think we got a lot of that. They started out laughing about the oddness of meeting one’s bandmates for the first time onstage…
Jesse Poe (singer, guitar, director): Yeah, we got here five minutes before the sound check…
Paul Watson (cornet): These guys all just met one another. I was trying to get people to not shake hands on stage… It makes the promoters nervous…

DW: Was it a little weird?

Oretta Giunti (drums): No (laughs), because I didn’t have time to realize what was happening…
Phil Murphy (lap steel): I think the nice thing about working with a collective is that hopefully you’ll never experience the same thing twice, every night it’s a different situation; and therefore it makes it pretty easy, you go in with no expectations and everybody does the best job they can, and you learn very quickly, it’s a baptism by fire up there…

We spent a while discussing that “collective” aspect of Tanakh. Much of the publicity surrounding the group has understandably focused on Jesse’s role as singer, chief songwriter, and guiding presence. But equally important is the group’s status as a group effort, where each of the members contributes something of their own to the final outcome.

DW: Is the balance between songwriting and improvisation a key to understanding Tanakh?
Jesse: For me it’s essential. I love improv music, and when we started Tanakh it was just Phil and I and all we did was improv. There’s something so beautiful about a song, but then there’s something so free and in the moment and exhilarating about improv, testing yourself and pushing yourself higher and higher. But then it’s a song that kills you, you can sing it and put it on a mix tape… At least for me, I don’t make improv mix tapes… So putting the two together, that is the reason to play music for me, that tension…

Phil: Jesse has the uncanny knack for being able to select co-conspirators, he just knows who is gonna fit together, and that inspires some confidence and the uncertainty is abated.

Jesse: I read that John Woo dreams about, not his movies, but what actor with which gun, and I lay in bed at night thinking “this guy on this instrument” “that guy on that instrument, that would be so cool…” A lot of it is the dynamics between people. I’ve been playing a lot of solo shows recently, and it does well but I don’t like it. I mean, I enjoy doing it, but having somebody else out there, it raises the bar for you, gives you something else to jump on top of…

On the first two Tanakh CDs, Villa Claustrophobia (2001) and Dieu Dieul (2003), Jesse wrote most of the songs himself, and constructed the arrangements with various collaborators in the studio. They both deservedly got a good bit of favorable attention within the frame of a “new psychedelic folk” thing, though they also included drones and ethnic and experimental influences too. And indeed, the self-titled third Tanakh release ended up as a double-CD of extended free improvisations, with a large group including Pat Best of Pelt among others; Jesse says, “It was kind of orchestrated, I was trying to run around and point at people and different instruments…” But Ardent Fevers (like the previous three released on the Canadian Alien8 label) was largely co-written with guitarist Umberto Trivella, the first time Jesse had written collaboratively in depth, which opened up new avenues, incorporating all the group’s previous directions within an especially focused and forthright set of songs. The new CD Saunders Hollow, just out on Camera Obscura, was actually recorded at the same time as Ardent Fevers with much of the same expanded group. It takes the collaboration idea even further, made up entirely of songs written and sung by electric bassist Michele Poulos, with Jesse in an arranging and production role. More on this one below.

We asked about the sources of Jesse’s songwriting, which seem to draw on American folksinger roots but stretch out into a variety of unexpected territories. Jesse acknowledged that, but stressed the openness and incorporative possibilities.

Jesse: Phil and I picked the name together, the T and K right, and the one part is the prophetic part – which might sound really arrogant, cause we’re not prophets, leave that to Sun Ra – but prophetic in the way that, the way I see the future going is globalization, that everything is becoming one. For me it’s like being able to put sounds from all over the world together and make one thing… Not like fusion, but… the Japanese do it so beautifully – consume everything and put it out as this new thing – Ghost is marvelous at that. I always say it’s like “outernational” music instead of “international” music, just taking everything and trying to make something beautiful out of it…

Darius Jones (saxophone): It has this universal thing happening… I think we come from so many different walks of life, but at some point we all connected, and that’s the place where Tanakh is – this place where everyone comes together, like church… And even if we don’t listen to the same exact things when we wake up in the morning, it doesn’t matter… It’s really just the love of music, of sound.

Phil: Not to sound corny or whatever, but if you look back at American history there’s this “melting pot” they tell us, so it only seems natural that you put together a group of people from all around, with different origins, they’re all gonna come with something to contribute… So our sound, it’s kind of American but it’s also got so much more to it because it’s coming from so many different angles and different backgrounds… The songs are like an incubator for it…

DW: So, how do those songs get processed by the group into the live experience?

Matteo Bennici (upright bass): We had to study from Jesse’s songs and rebuild the core to play live. And for example with the rhythm section we made it as open as possible, so you can see every aspect of the songs, not only the American tradition and sounds but also something else… You don’t know what will happen, so you have to be very open-minded, and what you play can be shaped and molded into anything.

Viola Mattioli (cello): In other groups, they might have cellos or strings, but they’re not always this important thing, and they’re not really given much room, they’re just there for the chorus or to strengthen the song. But I’m happy that in this group I’m given a chance to really be a part of the band rather than just an addition, not just playing a set part but there’s room to experiment and improvise as well.

Oretta: The thing that I like best when I play these songs is that they bring me to listen. You can be very open, you are stimulated while you are playing…

Jesse: Yeah, I listen to the point that sometimes I fuck up what I’m playing (laughs)… Sometimes people just blow me away, I turn around and I’m like “Wow!” I’m so happy with what they just did, that I forget what I’m doing…

Darius: That’s the beauty of sound, it’s everywhere and happening all the time if you just listen, but as a society we don’t really do that. But when you get musicians together, we’re really listening to one another hard, and more from the heart too: “What are you really trying to say?”

Jesse: I have a hard time keeping my eyes open when I play, ’cause it’s just too much to try and take in that other sense. I prefer to have my eyes shut, not in some poser-ish shoegazer way, just because it’s too much to hear what everybody is doing, and it’s all inside your head and corresponding… Think about somebody like Mingus, who’s playing and while he’s playing is telling you what he’s gonna play next, playing his bassline and he’s singing the next notes. And I think everybody, if they’re really playing right, is kind of thinking the same thing – “Oh, what he just did is shit-hot, I’m gonna hit on that”… So you’re hearing twice, and that makes it impossible to see anything… I would go mad if I had to look out there at the same time; if I’m doing that I’m not playing the music I want to be playing – it’s about listening to space… Really though, I like D’s definition of it:

Darius: It’s just hot! (laughing) It’s all about THE SEXY! That’s all we said all the time we were in the studio for this record – “You gotta bring the sexy man!”

Jesse: That was a big motto during making that record, and Michele’s record…

Darius: That was even hotter…

Michele: I must have heard that hundreds of times… (sighing and shaking head tolerantly…)

DW: So then, it’s about bringing the planning of a good song together with something more primal?

Jesse: Yeah. That’s why I liked Avarus so much (referring to their short and wild set at Terrastock), they were doing improv but I thought it was so raw and animalistic, I found it really sexy…

Paul: He was humping my leg the whole time…

Jesse: I felt like they were doing the same thing we were doing, but we were doing it with songs and they were doing it with just straight-up madness!

Darius: You have the craft, and at some point you have to lay that down and go back to the human thing. I think that’s what’s happening with this record (Ardent Fevers) – we’ve got great tunes, we’ve got great song structures, but then we just pissed all over it, shat all over it, spit on it, fucked on it, slept on it… Everybody I’ve played this record for, they just can’t get enough of it, and I think the same thing is gonna happen with Michele’s record, that was some special special mojo going on…

Jesse: Sometimes I feel a bit hindered by the manqué we’ve created. Sometimes it’s really shitty, because I like all kinds of music, I like hip-hop, I like Ethiopian music… So with Michele’s record it was awesome because it was a Tanakh record but it wasn’t, so we could do whatever we wanted. It’s all over the place because there was none of that boundary.

Michele’s record is of course the brand new Saunders Hollow, where she steps to the front of the group for the first time. Michele has a long music-making history in her family – mother sang with a girl group called The Bobby Pins, aunt with another called the Pussy Cats – and she had been playing and writing music for years when she met Jesse and joined Tanakh back in 2002, playing bass on their first two CDs.

Michele: So when we came together to make Ardent Fevers, I’d already been working on some songs and we thought, since Jesse was going to be here in the states with Isobel and Alex (that’s Isobel Campbell and Alex Nielson, who guest on both AF and SH), we should go ahead and record the songs I’d been working on. So I mailed Jesse a CD of the material, he thought the songs were pretty good, and we decided that he would take the role of producer, as well as musician, and basically put his spin on them, or shape them, which he did. The way the sound came together was pretty typically Tanakhian – which is to say, I think we may have practiced them a few times, but the recorded version of what you hear is all pretty much live. We, of course, go over some tracks later, like the vocal tracks, but the actual sound is very much a live sound – it’s very much improvisational, like the other Tanakh albums.

If Ardent Fevers represents Tanakh at its most focused, Saunders Hollow finds the group in a playful and expansive mood, dressing up Michele’s songs in a bunch of different outfits ranging from moody folk to jazz to dark drones, from the soundtrackian title instrumental to the harpsichord-led girl-group pop of “Longer Than Sorrow”, and even a couple of numbers like the sultry “Kept” that make one feel dirty in the best possible way. Jesse details the strenuous coaching required to keep the sexy at effective levels during the recording sessions:

Jesse: (laughing) One time Michele got so fucking pissed at us… She was singing, and it just didn’t quite have the sexy, and we kept saying, “You gotta bring it harder than that!” She was wearing this cool girly hipster sweater, and I was like, “No, no, take that shit off and wear my shirt…” It’s like with Dr. John – the first thing he says is, “They call me Dr. John,” and after that you just believe him. She switched shirts and afterwards she was the shit, she was just like a different person, it was amazing…

Michele: It’s true. There was something about changing the outer that changed the inner too, it was a simultaneous transition…

Michele is also a published poet, currently working toward an MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University (displaced there from New Orleans University when Hurricane Katrina hit), and that literary background had an influence on Saunders Hollow as well.

Michele: I’m writing a lot of poetry lately – it’s incredibly stimulating and complements songwriting in profound ways. When you listen to poets read their work, their words, like Robert Creeley or Bukowski, you’re listening to music, the beats, the way they accent particular syllables or phrases – they use their voice as an instrument, and it has the same effect as if you were listening to a song or a particular musical phrase. When I write poetry, I have to read it aloud, many times. Poetry has to sound good; it must sit in the ear like a good chorus. However, when I write a song, I don’t begin with words – I begin with music, or even before that, I begin with an elusive or inarticulate emotion, for lack of a better phrase. It seems when I sit to write a song, I’m grappling with some incredibly vague notion or feeling, one that needs expression somehow that words alone cannot convey. I think that’s where my songs evolve from – an inarticulate emotion or desire. I think words are very important in songwriting, don’t get me wrong! But for me, they are probably the last part of the entire process.

DW: So what can you say about Saunders Hollow?

Michele: Saunders Hollow is a place in Connecticut near where I grew up, in Old Lyme. The song “Saunders Hollow” was actually written a long time ago, when I was living in New York going to film school. I could give you the really long story of why I wrote a song called Saunders Hollow, but it’s incredibly sad and tragic and I don’t really want to go into it – suffice it to say that I lost two really good friends there. So initially I wrote a song for them, their memory, but it’s also a magical place filled with mystery and wonder. Okay, I recognize that I’m now sounding like a brochure promoting a vacation to Hawaii or something, so I better stop while I’m ahead.
Since the recording of both discs and the Terrastock gig, the collective has continued to develop, with most of the working European lineup having switched out, and only the sweetly muscular cello of Viola Mattioli continuing from Terrastock. The current roster also includes: Jacopo Salvatori (piano),Cosimo Santi (electric guitar), Nick Liceti (drums), and Fabio Mannelli (electric bass). “And of course,” Jesse adds, “for our new record you can count on finding Mr. Jones on sexy sax as always, Phil, Watson and Michele and other of the usual suspects popping up here and there.” According to Jesse, the latest Tanakh material has been taking a much heavier rock slant than in the past.

Jesse: We are hoping to record a new record this spring, but that is based on finding some money to do so and the right producer. I have always produced our records and I really want to work with someone this time… P.J. Harvey is my first pick, I think she could really bring out the intensity of what I am hearing in my head and wanting to communicate, and above all I know that she would not only preserve the integrity of what I have done in the past but she would raise the bar for me and challenge me to do more, give more, expect more, and leave no emotion inside but to spill all of it good and bad right onto the 2 inch tape, and that is what I think a producer should be/do…

The group is also planning a few European shows, and Jesse has some solo gigs lined up as well. In addition to the new album, recordings by Tanakh can also be heard on a pair of upcoming compilations, including a “France”-themed disc on the Ruralfaune microlabel, and the long-rumored Carnivale-themed comp promised from Camera Obscura. We’d encourage you to check them out.

(initial interview conducted April 2006 at Terrastock by KM and NR; additional information added later from Jesse and Michele via email)

Mats Gustafsson talks to Jesse Poe exclusively for Terrascope
Every time I listen to the music of Tanakh I find myself painting mental images of favourite places already visited but more importantly also imaginary vistas of the most stunning nature. At times I see myself riding quiet country roads through the Appalachians but I am just as likely to be seen under a streetlight in a fog-clad, deserted town square at night. Music that has this visual effect on me is the kind that unquestionably hits the deepest and when it comes to sonic mastermind Jesse Poe it’s no secret that I fell under his spell already when Alien8 released his debut album Villa Claustrophobia in 2002. The way the sounds move back and forth from the abstract and droning to the compositional and folky makes me feel like I’m in the semi-detached state of awareness where your body falls asleep but your mind remains awake.
 
2003’s Dieu Deuil was a more structured and traditional listen in a ‘70s-era folk psychedelia kind of way so when Tanakh returned for their third album on the Canadian Alien8 imprint I was pretty sure to get another dose of their slightly more structured repertoire, but I couldn’t have been more wrong. Tanakh once again proved capable of illustrating new locations, this time of the more haunting variety through all sorts of creaking noises and slow-changing clusters of hazy drone abstraction.
 
No matter chosen artistic direction Tanakh always seems to come out in one piece, and the results continue to fascinate to this day. As the band prepares to release the follow-up to their third album, and celebrates the fact that they’re going to play at the upcoming Terrastock fest in Providence, I got in touch with Poe via email for the extensive discussion that follows.

Tell us a bit about your personal background. Where did you grow up? Could you tell us a bit about your family?

Well, I was born in Louisville, KY, where my dad was running this independent record chain, Karma Records, after a year or so we moved back to Indiana where my parent’s families where living. I left Indiana as soon as I was legally able to and moved to Blacksburg, Virginia at 17. There wasn’t much rhyme or reason for picking VA, other than I was tired of flat middle-America and I wanted to be where there were mountains and geography that was a bit more diverse than the hours of cornfields in every direction, I had grown up around. Unfortunately there wasn’t a Secretly Canadian, Jagjaguwar, Blue Sanct, Family Vineyard, scene in Indiana until long after I had left home.

As far as my family, they are a strange bag. I guess everyone has a strange uncle or a crazy aunt, or a famous brother, but my family seems to be full of all the above and more; writers, musicians, songwriters, painters, preachers, full-time drivers for country musicians, inventors, etc. and then the ones who aren’t seem to be just plain crazy in your typical garden varietal sort of way. I had this uncle who made an actual flying helicopter from used parts and pieces from catalogues and junkyards, and then this other uncle who made as much money fixing shoes as most doctors did in our town, and yet every year he would steal aluminum siding from building sites to fix the rust spots on his Gremlin by repanelling it with the pilfered aluminum siding. I guess really idiosyncratic is more appropriate than crazy, but there is a handful of bona fide crazies as well, most of them I didn’t know just, heard about. I love my family, they are all just really unique, I remember the first time I met my cousin Danny the space cowboy, who lived(s) in southern Texas in a small Silverstream with lawn furniture bolted to the roof, that was parked in the front yard of my great-aunt Billie’s house, his mother, who writes historical fiction, under the name Will Alan Jameson. Anyway Danny was a cool interesting guy to my adolescent eyes, he made his money doing album covers for psychedelic bands, which I thought was pretty cool, but then (this was the 80s) he was having trouble finding bands that still wanted psyche-art. The thing I remember the most about him, though, was that the inside of his Silverstream was floor to ceiling audio-tapes all hand labelled and I was in awe, I grew up in a house with a lot of records, but I think it was that this took up his entire living space. He began to show me around his collection; Danny had amassed a gigantic collection of full-length records recorded to tape from the radio in accurate album order. He was a primitive downloader, calling up radio stations requesting a particular song, cueing his tape and then waiting for it to come on so he could capture it. I am still amazed when I think about it, but at the same time it just seems like most of the folks in my family.

What are your earliest musical memories, Jesse?

(Laughing) In-utero. My parents although much more normal than my extended family were crazy about music, they were the kind of expecting parents who would but headphones on my mom’s bulging stomach. My father was running Karma Records which was the best independent record store(s) in the Midwest for a really long time, and then my mom worked down the street at Coconuts, a corporate record store chain. We never really watched TV, except two or three programs, which we would watch and then turn off and play music. My dad used to put on concerts in conjunction with his store, booking bands like, Cheap Trick, Black Sabbath and so on. The first concert I attended (on this side of the womb) was Roy Buchanan, I was six months old, and then shortly after that Robin Trower, and so on. I can’t remember a time in my life when music wasn’t an essential, integral part of it. I remember thinking Sgt. Pepper, Yellow Submarine, Goodbye Yellow Brick Road and all the Savoy Brown records where kids records cause they had cartoony covers, it wasn’t until last summer when I did a kids camp in Chianti that I sat down and learned real kids songs like “I’m a little teapot” and the like. In fact that is where “girland” a b-side from our new record came from, I had borrowed a stack of kids records to learn songs for this camp, and one of the records leant to me was “Free to Be You and Me”, which must have been great, if you were a kid at the time or a hippie-going-straight-kind-of-parent, but I kept getting “girland” stuck in my head and it just sounded so strange when I was singing it that I got together with Darius Jones, who plays sax in Tanakh, and proposed rearranging it for our new record. It was the first time I really let up on the reigns in Tanakh and let someone else do the greater part of the work, really he did almost everything, and I think he did a fantastic job! He really caught the strangeness of it that I was feeling and took it a step further. I remember being 5 years old and having a collectors pride due to my 8track collection, which I listened to obsessively, Kiss-destroyer, Simon and Garfunkel-Bookends, David Bowie-Changes One, Jim Croce and some others I don’t recall right now. Between my mom’s record collection and my dad’s our house was just a library of records, which was really fortunate for me and at the same time kind of unfortunate, because it wasn’t until I left home for college that I started buying my own records. So in high school while everyone else was listening to the Violent Femmes and Metallica, I was listening to Miles Davis, Gram Parsons, Tim Buckley, Quicksilver Messenger Service and whatever else my dad would pull out. I mean I listened to other stuff too, like for example I would go to the library and check out records of civil war songs, old-timey records and different international records but I never bought records of my own till I left home.

Apart from the specific persons and events mentioned above, how would you say that having a “strange” family has had an impact on you as a musician?

Well I guess having a strange or unconventional family has given me the mind set that I could do or be whatever I wanted to, not in a stupid grandiose way like hmm…I think I’ll be president, but that you just do the things you want to do or else you don’t. I remember this feeling be fostered the most by my father, which was a godsend since my step-father often told me I couldn’t do anything, anyway I remember I wanted to be an artist, and my step-father saying you couldn’t make any money being an artist unless you were really good so forget about it, so my natural father paid me a dollar for every picture I drew. I remember one day driving in the car with my natural father, Kent, and listening to the radio, which is what we did all the time, I bet you mileage-wise I could have circled the globe twice listening to old radio stations with my dad at the wheel, I’d sing along and he’d quiz me on all the songs that came on, till this day, it is the one thing I miss the most about living in America, not having a car, and endless country roads with a blaring stereo. Anyway we were riding around and “Misty Mountain Hop” (Led Zeppelin IV) came on and at the time I worshipped them, still sort of do I guess, so I was so psyched to hear them on the AM and I told my dad, you know this song is so great but they really ruin it with that droney mantra verse stuff (now a very favorite style of mine funny how you grow to love what you first hate), my dad so matter of factly said, well change it, rerecord it, the way you think it should sound. And now I do it, I hear a sound and I change it to please my ears, wouldn’t it be great if there was some kid riding around listening to one of my records, saying this is great but that part sucks, I am going to grow up and do it right. That would be fantastic!

Have you always been interested in the more abstract side of the sound spectrum?

No not really, unless you consider Tribute to Jack Johnson or African Brass Sessions abstract for a teenager in the late 80s early 90’s, but it just seemed normal to me. It wasn’t until my second year of college that I met this writer, Vic Moose, who became a mentor/father/friend to me, that I even heard music concrete or abstract musics. Vic introduced me (and still does) to all kinds of music that I had never been exposed to before, from Gavin Bryars to Bang on a Can to John Cage. He also turned me onto lots of other stuff, like Lauri Anderson and so on. My parents had really given me a treasure trove of rock, country, blues and jazz, but my friendship with Vic really started to fill in the other holes. My parents split up when I was a kid and my mother remarried to a Mexican man so I heard a lot of Spanish music and particularly conjutos music when we visited his family’s house which was about one weekend a month, I think this paved the way for my interest in international music, but it wasn’t until college that I started to get really interested in it. I was dating this Indian girl, Radhika, in college and saw all kinds of classical Indian concerts and then a few years later started studying Indian classical music myself, focusing on vocals and sitar, and tabla too, but I sucked at tabla, but you have to learn the taals to be able to understand the other stuff. At the same time I met Vic I was working at a bakery/coffee shop/vegetarian restaurant with Jack Rose, I quit the bakery and got a job at the corner record shop. I guess through connection with Pelt and the shows that they played in town, this record shop, The Record Exchange, was a haven of Terrascope fans and it was through that shop, that I began to find out about a whole new world of music. We could open any record we wanted to just as long as we could sell it afterwards and we did, we listened to every record we could, and would sell things like the harmony of the spheres box sets to girls who were looking for Dave Mathews. It was fantastic! I became even more obsessed with music than ever before, and now I had found a music that was equal in quality to that which I had listened to as a kid, but it was my own, I think that it was really the most important part of my musical development, it wasn’t until then that I wanted to make my own music. Sure I had played guitar as a kid learning Led Zeppelin riffs and stuff, and most people in my family could play something or other, in fact my great aunts and uncles had a weekly live radio program where they played bluegrass and country music, but once I started reading the Terrascope and listening to all the records they recommended I wanted to make my own music, and somehow Terrascope made me feel like I actually could do just that.

I guess this musical revelation of sorts probably was even more powerful for someone like yourself who was brought up in a family crazy about music, right?

Yeah, I thought that I had heard everything by the time I was sixteen, I mean I was reading Lester Bangs the other day talking about Coltrane’s African Brass Sessions and I was right there with him, I remember making a tape of that record when I was twelve. So yeah, having heard so much great music growing up, there was a hunger for something new, and well current mainstream music wasn’t doing it for me, so to finally find music that I hadn’t heard that was good was amazing for me! I went from feeling like I had heard it all to feeling like I didn’t know a thing, and that is a wonderful feeling, which I am still feeling, I have heard so many records in my life and memorized the liner notes, and been quizzed by my dad about who played what and then what band did they go on to be in later, etc. and now I just stand in awe of how little I know. And today with the accessibility of quality home recording and the CD-R culture, the world of recorded music is just what it should be, a vast unconquerable sea that forever calls you to explore it, an exotic jungle filled with creatures that you could never imagine and indigenous peoples to teach you things that you never knew. I mean I remember a few years ago, crashing/playing at Godspeed’s Hotel 2 Tango, and hearing Slap Happy Humphrey for the first time and just being absolutely floored and in tears for hearing someone else express themselves musically in the same way that I see the world, so beautiful and endearing and so absolutely fucked and then not being able to tell which is which. It is wonderful to know/believe that with every new record recorded or re-released that this experience may present itself again, and hopefully again and again.

If I am correctly informed Tanakh started as an improv duo comprised by yourself and Phil Murphy.

You are right. Playing with Phil was/is one of the greatest joys of my life. He’s fantastic!

Tell us a bit about the start and what lead to the recording of your phenomenal debut album Villa Claustrophobia?

Wow that is a tall order, I could do a whole piece just on that, but ok the short version is this: Phil who is in my opinion the best musician in the world and one of the coolest sweetest guys I have ever met, he is just a gem! So we were friends, really close, we did everything together, we worked together in a coffee shop, and we interned together at a recording studio (Sound of Music) and we played music together, and listened to records together non-stop. Anyway we were learning to engineer under John Morand one of the best engineers ever, with a brain the size of Minnesota. So we were allowed to work after hours at the studio trying out what we had learned that day, so a couple times a week we would grab a bunch of instruments stick them in the room and he would play something and I would record him so that I could practice recording, and then we would switch and I would play something while he practiced recording me, and visa-versa. Joan Osborn had just recorded at S.o.M. and had left all these ethnic instruments there since she had recently done a study with the late great Nasrat Ali Khan and had a major label budget; she had all this cool stuff. We didn’t know how to play any of them but we would just have a go till we got sounds we liked and then go from there. Our rule was to make music on things we couldn’t play and then add our own instruments later, guitar and banjo and stuff like that. We did this for a couple of weeks and were ending up with these really cool songs/sound pieces. After we had amassed a few recordings we realized that not only had we created a sort of continuing esthetic but that it was pretty cool and we were excited about it. I remember we were eating falafel one night at like 2 am on the floor of the control room, listening to the stuff we had done the last few weeks, and we were talking about the Tanakh, we were crazy about anything that wasn’t familiar to us, and we both just sort of realized that the songs were really good and we should do something about it. That night we decided to start playing live and that maybe we should include some other people to accomplish the same sort of sound that we were stacking up on our own in the studio. That night we decided to call the project Tanakh, because it seemed so mysterious and foreign and cool to us at the time, plus we just really liked the way it sounded and how it looked on paper, so angular. We played one show, just Phil and I, thinking Phil could loop some tabla while I created a guitar sound wash and then he could join in on something else and we would build live just like in the studio, the only problem was that we didn’t have the right sort of gear to do this, and our first show consisted of Phil wresting with this old loop machine and never getting it to work and me doing a thirty minute guitar wash/repetitive mantra-like solo, god I was so nervous and excited and thought we had just absolutely bombed, but it was a hit, everybody dug it and I remember having a tape of the show and thinking this is really awesome, but it could be a hell of a lot better, if there was some more folks.

So after that we decided to enlist our friends who we thought could pull off live, what we were doing in the studio, i.e. mixing any exotic sound/instrument we could muster with all others and trying to create a kind of OUTER-national music, a music that was from a jungle/desert/glacier that had never been explored, named, or exploited. Those friends were my roommate at the time Jeff Krones, who was a mad-scientist of a guitar player and sound manipulator, and Pat Best who was a good friend and neighbor of Phil and mine’s. Pat, besides being one of the nicest guys, is just a great musician on anything you put in front of him. So we started to play out, four guitar players playing everything we could get our hands on, and even building stuff to play on, too. Sometimes others would join in, and we played a lot of shows in art galleries and pubs and opened for a lot of cool acts like Palace, Mic Turner, and bunches of others. Our idea was to have a name, Tanakh, that would represent a quality and mystery of sound and that anyone who wanted to be a part of that sound could play, and they could play anything they wanted. Our dream was to have other people do Tanakh without us even being there, that one night there might be two Tanakh shows in the same night in the same time. But it never really happened, however what did happen is that we had this really cool improv band for about two years or so around 98-2000 or so. We recorded everything either to four-track, DAT or at the studio [god I wish I had a DAT player, a cheap studio and a month to listen to all those recordings, mix and release them, it would be a great five disc box-set; if I ever win the lottery!] and even one big blow out recording session at Jeff and mine’s place to eight-track analogue, with Bryan Hoffa at the board, who was also interning at Sound of Music at the same time as us (this record just came out on Alien8recordings as a DBL CD and Bryan just recorded our two newest records Ardent Fevers due out in Feb. on Alien8recordings and Poulos which is yet to find a home). Those recordings were heard and then mixed for free by R. Chris Murphy (King Crimson, etc.) and we realized that maybe we should really go for it and record full on at Sound of Music. We were so excited and we decided to split it cost wise between the four of us. I booked the time and put down my fourth and we started to play a lot more to get ready. Between that time and the booked dates, everything fell apart, Jeff unexpectedly found himself to be an expecting father, which was great for him but sucked for us because he packed up his truck and moved to New Orleans to be a father, within a week’s time Pat got excepted into MIT and his girlfriend got a cool job in NYC and he was gone. So that left just Phil and me, which should have been just like old times, but we had the rest of the studio debt over our heads now and Phil had just graduated and was looking at a whole new world of debt and responsibility. Unfortunately, Phil and I got into it and we broke off our friendship, it was the worst two years of my life, I missed my friend so much and felt like there was no one in the world I could connect to like Phil, it was all my fault. Luckily after a few years we were friends again, but I regret those missed years, so much, losing a real friend is like losing yourself. So I was stuck in a situation where I had put in my fourth of the money, had studio dates booked, and had to choose, lose that money and give up, or dive in head first, except the rest of the studio costs on my own and do a record by myself. I had a month till the date, and no money but I said, fuck it I am gonna do it, I don’t know where I’ll get the money or what I’ll play since it was an improv group, but I am not going to quit. A friend of mine, Eric, told me about some medical studies going on at the time and it was enough money to pay the rest of the record off so I signed up, they burnt me repeatedly on both arms while supposedly testing some new pain medicine (I feel sorry for the folks they give that pain medicine to, because it didn’t work), asking me crazy brain-fuck questions like was I glad to be there, did I regret anything in my life, did I want to hurt people, etc. It was pretty grueling and then they stuck these finger-sized tubes up my nose and down my throat and shut me in the wing of this hospital with these other poor sods who were in the same shape, they were each in their own rooms and I in mine and all we could do was walk up and down the halls or stare out the windows for two weeks, it was such a horrible place. I should have been practicing getting ready for the studio, but I had to come up with the money first. I just sat in the twelfth floor of that old southern hospital and looked out the window which conveniently and torturingly looked right out across the cement valley onto the adjacent Church hill where I could see my warehouse and the roof of my girlfriend at the time. Megan had pretty much had it with me by then, so it wasn’t the happiest view. I just sat there and thought. And when I finally got out, I came home and wrote, in my own non-schooled-musician kind of way, the blueprint for Villa Claustrophobia. It was like I opened the door to my flat, sat down lit the first cigarette in a couple weeks, exhaled and could just hear the whole thing in my head. There were misty murky parts where I knew there would be only improv but that was intentional, I knew how to make the infrastructure and what I dreamed it would sound like and what sort of instruments and sounds and then I went into the studio and just started trying to get it all out. I was really lucky to have some very talented friends who were free at the time to translate the things I was singing to them into their own instruments, because I can’t play cello or violin or things like that without a lot of time to just sit and work at getting the sounds I want out of them. So sort of in the way Phil and I started, I went at it again, recording everything first on the acoustic guitar and then just building on top of that, and when there was something that I thought would be good for another to do I would call them up and have them come in. A lot of those people were folks who had joined in Tanakh in the past, so it was sort of a homecoming, except it was missing Phil, Jeff, and Pat, and unfortunately it was all my vision instead of the organic combination we had had before.

Before I recorded, I was walking around the stacks of the university library playing one of my favorite games, I would just drift around the stacks maybe following a pretty girl or a homeless person who snuck in to get warm, and then following some weird-o sniffing piano benches in the practice rooms, and then just making zigzags, spinning around and grabbing the first book that my eye landed on. Sometimes it was boring or in another language, but sometimes I found cool stuff, anyway I did this and I pulled out this book by these Russian Architects who as much as I could tell only did fantasy compositions, anyway this one really excited me, it was a cylindrical apartment building, where each flat was entered from the outside of the cylinder and the interior had no windows except for the opposite wall which was a floor to ceiling window and was at a slant. This Shotgun flat was pretty cool by itself, but it gets better, this floor to ceiling window wasn’t a slanted window but actually a conical two way mirror with the point towards the ground and the mouth opening to the heavens. So as you looked out of your flat all you saw was the reflection of your neighbor’s mirrors reflecting back the infinity of you’re your mirror reflecting his and his reflecting, well you get the picture. And the name they gave it was Villa Claustrophobia, immediately I connected to it and my recent hospital experience. That was exactly how I felt trapped in that claustrophobic ward full of guys who were killing themselves to get a fist-ring that spelt their baby-mamma’s name or enough cash to buy a stack of drugs that they could turn for a profit. That was exactly how I felt as I looked out my window with tubes down my throat, looking at the city below me and my house and everything I knew and only seeing myself staring back in the reflection of the window, and all the stuff that was swimming around in me during that time.

The story behind the creation of Villa Claustrophobia is just amazing. In what way do you think this sudden and unfortunate change of plans effected the final results?

Well for the better and for the worse. For example, Gently Johnny and The Devils’ Interval were the only songs on Villa Claustrophobia that had a connective history with Tanakh’s first incarnations, I think both are successful but it is hard for me to listen to them sometimes because of my memory of how they were. Pat Best used to play this blisteringly psychedelic 12-string guitar solo on Gently Johnny that was reminiscent of Zeppelin’s “The song Remains the Same”, and every time I hear the recording of “Gently Johnny” on V.C. I can hear how it aches for his guitar. The Devil’s Interval was based on an interval that the church banned for like 400 years because they thought it belonged to the Devil which is hard for me to imagine and also exciting to think that some sounds are so strong they compromise faith, or that perhaps all sounds could be assigned to a person, or god. It is like buying a star; that one there on the right, the bright little star below the Milky Way, that is my star. So the whole song is built on that interval and I intended it to be as worshipful as possible, to reclaim it in a way or in a way to but the Devil back into God, and return them to their proper Eastern Balance. So anyway that song originally was a song for four acoustic guitars, me, Pat, Phil and Jeff. Each one of us treating the instrument in a different way, not counter point so much as counter playing, it sounded great. However, with only me at the wheel it came out as only my vision, I could never reproduce the beauty of the improv that previously existed between the four of us, by myself, so I had to approach it from a different angle, my angle. So in the case of both songs, they came out much more lush and orchestrated than had we done them as a quartet as originally planned. So whether the songs suffered from my own myopia or they succeed because of it, I guess I will never know. But one thing I can say is that there is a loneliness in the music that exists that would not have been there if I had done it as originally planned. I loved and admired those guys, and still do and not making the record with them left a void in me that is ineffable. I intentionally and unintentionally left a space for them on the record, for example on “Gently Johnny” there is a space for Pat’s solo, and although I could have done it or gotten a better guitar player than me to play a solo in that space, I just couldn’t, it is Pat’s space and always will be, and now when we play “Gently Johnny” live I play a guitar solo there, not Pat’s solo, that I could never do even if I was that adept on the guitar, no, infact it is a very destroyed electric guitar solo that is not so much about the song as it is about how much I miss Pat and wish he was still in my life to the same extent he was back then. And in my stupid mind I imagine Pat sitting around on his day off listening to the song and picking up his own guitar and playing in the space I left for him, his space.

You mention that you knew how to make the infrastructure and what you dreamed the record would sound like. Do you think that the final results come close to the sound you had in mind?

Yes and no. It really gets to the core of the sound that I had in my mind, but like all of our records we have done them in just a few days working round the clock, because of lack of money, so there is so many little things I would have loved to add, and little bumps and scabs I would have liked to lick, cover over and smooth out, but there just wasn’t enough money to afford the time to do so.

When reviewing the album I think I said something along these lines: “This is music for riding quiet country roads through the Appalachians that are dusted with brilliantly colored fallen leaves in all shades of red, yellow and orange.” Would you consider the landscape to be a major influence on what you do? Is there such a thing as a main theme that influences your music?

(laughing) Well I just wish I wrote beautiful things like that! I have always thought that both you and George Parsons (Dream Magazine) have that Elliot kind of gift of just showing a picture and it explains everything, me I always have to touch the feelings somehow, its such a cool way of writing that you guys have. Reading your reviews is like hearing the records by seeing them instead of being told about them.

Anyway, yeah. Landscape really effects me. The Midwest makes me feel free and yet really depressed, the south wets my mind with mystery and irony, New York pumps me up with so much energy and scares the shit out of me like it would swallow me whole if I tried to live there, etc. For example our new record, Ardent Fevers, is much poppier and light and groovey which in part is due to my friendship with Umberto Trivella and partly due to the beautiful boyant brightness of Florence, but yet both the record and Florence are still dark and mysterious, it is a city with a long history of torture and it’s medieval streets wind through darkness as much as through light.

However, I don’t think that I try to capture landscape in my music or that is a theme per se just something that effects me, and of course that affects my writing some too. I think space effects me more than landscape, I have almost always lived in strange places, where the ceilings were 30 feet high or so low you’d hit your head on them after a beer or two. I could just never be happy in a modern suburban kind-of-house. Well maybe I could be happy but not very creative, I need my space, and I need it to be particular. As far as a “theme”, I don’t know, if you had asked me that years ago I would have said that I wanted everything to sound like the first day of November, but I think even that theme has faded away somewhat. I guess my main thing is that I just want to make beautiful things, I want them to be real and honest, but I want them to be a beauty that I have in my head that is sometimes unobtainable except in a certain angle or certain light. A certain look of a person on the street, or the knowing nod of a friend, the hand of some who loves you resting on your shoulder when you fail. These sort of beautiful things that don’t ever get put on post cards, that is the sort of thing that wells in me when I sit down with a guitar.

I have to admit that I was somewhat surprised when you first told me that the amazing Alien8 imprint was going to put out the record. How did you first get in touch with those guys?

I don’t know exactly. The way I understand it is that, I sent them a copy of V.C. and they got it around the same time I had just met Godspeed, and somehow the record came up in conversation and both parties liked it and the next thing I knew they called me. I was surprised too, but very happy and still am, I think they do great stuff and Gary and Sean are really cool guys to work with and just know, I wish Montreal wasn’t so cold, because I would love to live there if not just to hang out with them, then for all the fantastic record stores, one thing Florence is severely lacking unfortunately.

You’ve always had an interesting and capable cast of collaborators along the way. Could you tell us about some of the folks you’ve worked with on your records and how you got together?

Well most recently for our new record we teamed up with Isobel Campbell and Alex Neilson, who I had just met through Alisdar Roberts. They came over from Glasgow to play with us and they were just fantastic all around stellar musicians and just great people to be with. I wish they lived here it would be great to be playing with them, and just having them as neighbors. Fantastic people, really! For the self-titled record which was released 3rd but actually recorded first, there was Pat Best who had been playing in Tanakh for a while. I met Pat while living in Blacksburg and he was also good friends with Jeff and Phil and Pat was/is interested in middle eastern music and other stuff that we all were, so that just made sense. Also on that record was Tom Brickman from Rattle Mouth and Hotel X, he was a good friend of Jeff’s and I think both Jeff and Phil played in Hotel X at one time or another, and Pat too, now that I think about it. Via Noun from Drunk and Manishevits and his own solo work of recent. Via was a friend of all of ours and we had tried to get a band going with him and I and Phil and Jeff and some other guys, like Alan Weatherhead from Sparklehorse and other bands, we were trying to do an all acoustic sleepy country band of diverse covers everything from Prince to the Pretenders, but all in a sleepy beautiful country way, that was in 1998 or there abouts, but it never quite flew, we were all too busy with other bands and well Phil and I were kind of side-tracked anyway birthing Tanakh. On Dieu Deuil, we were supposed to have Marc Ribot play on it, who I had met that year in Italy, but I really felt like it was better to just do it as a band since we had started playing as a band, you know I didn’t want to practice as a band and then record in a much different way, so on that record it was just us and then, Jim White and his bassist-multi-instrumentalist and just all around great guy Bishop, guested on it. I had just flown down to Florida to produce a song for Jim and had a great time working with him and Bishop, so it just seemed right to have them join in, and I really like what they added, they were very reserved and humble in their additions, but when they “spoke up” it was really heart-felt and beautiful. On Villa Claustrophobia, god where do I begin? It just happened that I was booking shows in Richmond, and recording bands, and doing reviews, and playing shows with other bands, and you know you click with some folks and others no. So those folk I had met around then, were nice enough to join in and help out, and I was/am very grateful to each and everyone of them and even the folk who were slotted to be on the record but couldn’t for one reason or another, mainly because I was limited time wise due to money.

If you ask me I’d say that Dieu Deuil speaks in a more intimate tone than its predecessor. It seems like you decided to turn inward rather than illustrating the landscape around you. Do you agree? What would you say is the unifying link between the debut album and Dieu Deuil? Any obvious differences that you would like to point out?

I would say that you are probably right in saying that, it is hard for me to say objectively. I know that one major difference is that the songs on Dieu Deuil were songs that I wrote and played with a band before recording them at the studio, so to me they feel more intimate, because there is a more human connection for me. I love to play music alone, but usually never leave my house to play alone because to me the reason to play out is play with others, and this conversation/expression of music with others is the thing I love the most about music (probably much to the dislike of the others in Tanakh, cause every show we play I am always inviting someone to join us on stage and just have a go at it with us, to me that’s what it’s all about). So actually being able to play the songs with others before recording them made them a bit more intimate for me, more fleshy. I think the major differences between the records from a more pragmatic stance is that the budget for Dieu Deuil was a lot less than Villa Claustrophobia coupled with the fact there were no problems encountered in recording the V.C. like there were with recording D.D. We had a hard drive failure with D.D. and in short almost had to re-record the whole record a second time which severely cut our already short time and rushed us to finish it. I was left with only three hours to record the vocals which was criminal! My dream is to some day re-record that record properly.

The third album is something totally different. This double disc consists of epic tracks that sound like the slowly changing wind bringing in small particles of electro dust on top of a base of hazy drone abstraction and creaking noises that at any given second could breathe to life. It’s a quiet aural collision that shimmers, drones, swells and vibrates in a way that brings to mind equal parts Montreal experimentalism in general and the mighty Double Leopards. How did this album come about?

Well that is a good question, it’s funny because chronologically it is the first full “record”, we did stacks of songs before it, but it was the first finished project, yet we released it third, which I think was probably a good idea on the part of Alien8. Jeff Krones and I used to live together in this old Shriner’s temple, and Jeff is a fabulous musician inventor and person all around and now he is a fabulous Daddy as well! Anyway, he used to weld at our house and make different things and we would dream up instruments and make them, etc. Anyway one day we found the shambles of an upright piano that fell out of the back of a truck as it rounded a corner near our house. We took all the parts and made different instruments out of each bit of detritus. One of which is the main instrument that you hear in the self-titled double disc. It was a piano sound board bolted directly into the floor of our second story loft and then we ran bulk piano wire across the floor to the other end of the temple, so the lengths of string were each different from 50ft to 10ft long. There was a natural sound/resonance because the wood of the floor and the walls etc. sang when the strings were bowed, but we compounded this by putting pick-ups on the ground and sticking guitars under the strings so that the guitar pick-ups would amplify the bulk strings we had strung along the floor, for a day or two we just played and played on it like kids, using drills and bows and forks and just trying everything we could get our hands on. It was amazing as a musician because usually as a musician you are always outside and over an instrument which can be a position of oppression sometimes, in this case you were IN the instrument, and that was an incredible thing, especially at night when you got up to pee, because your footsteps would cause the floor to vibrate and then in turn the strings and then in turn the building itself. Fantastic! Like being the dancer and the musician at the same time, somaglyphically sculpting the music from the air around you as you danced. Anyway, my head is like a non-resting scuzi drive, when it comes to music and I started memorizing the possible sounds this instrument could produce and what instruments would sound good with these sounds and even more importantly which musicians with which instruments would go well with the possible sounds in this instrument, like crazy John Woo and his obsession with mentally putting certain guns in the hands or each actor before even conceiving the plot of the film. So once I had figured out who and what instruments, we got Bryan Hoffa (who also just did our two newest records Ardent Fevers and Poulos) to come over and engineer it with an 8 track reel to reel. We threw mics all over the place cause it was impossible to determine and therefore isolate where the sounds were coming from because they were coming from everywhere at the same time, you were in the music. Everyone arrived and I had devised a plan for improv based on a story I heard. It is impossible to write an improv cause it is not an improv anymore if you do, but sometimes improv can be fruitless, especially in front of microphones if everyone is not of like mind or at least thinking in the same direction. The shorter disc was influenced by a Bill Viola installation that I saw in San Francisco, and the idea for that was just to be inside of the music to have all of the sounds raining down on you and simultaneously being inside each drop of that same drenching rain, but the longer one was based on the story of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s brother Paul, who was a pianist, who during the war lost his arm, according to the story I heard he continued to compose pieces for the piano and to play them himself. Ok, now if it was like the drummer from Def Leopard, Rick Allen, it would be a story of triumph, and therefore very near to my heart, but no this was different and it captured my imagination. He wrote as if for two hands but the notes that the missing limb would have played were omitted, but the intervals were not, so there was this phantom limb that was playing phantom notes, notes that you could hear in your mind because the notes from the present existing hand lingered and pined for those missing notes and in the desperation of their want you could hear the tone and quality of these missing notes. It was their absence that made them so much more present, like the face of a lover whose love has gone to sea or war or to the other side, you can see that missing person better in the lack than if there was a picture of them before your eyes, because when you see or listen, it is so often superficial or understood, but when you imagine it, it is sometimes so much more complete and beyond possible reality. Like the image of a story in your head as you read the book and then the actual movie pales in comparison. Sometimes the movie is even better, but more often than not “the book is better” because the movie in your head knows no budget or boundaries. So I explained this to everyone, and then explained that I thought it was impossible for us to play like this, sure we could try, like putting on a blindfold for the day, but in the end you are not blind, you know you can remove the blindfold, and most importantly you never really have the feeling of missing your capacity for sight. So I asked everyone to imagine not that they were missing an arm, because this wouldn’t really work, but to imagine that they had had a third arm which was now missing and to play as if the interval for that third arm was still there. And the result of this is what is on the longer disc. We were very lucky with the recording because it was live straight to tape and there were no over dubs, a second wave of luck was that Phil, Bryan and I were all learning how to engineer at Sound of Music and so were able to use their board to mix this improv for free on New Year’s Eve because there were no bands in the studio, and then perhaps the greatest stroke of luck was that the before mixing these discs I had the great opportunity of meeting Ronan Chris Murphy and we really hit it off, finally I told him about the double disc and that we were mixing it the following day if he wanted to stop by and hear what we were up to. He said he would but only for a few minutes. He arrived, and after five minutes of listening to us mixing it he jumped on the board pushed us out of the way and mixed the whole thing and then took it to Seattle to mix it at Mater Works with Barry Corliss. These guys have done records for everyone from King Crimson to NIN to you name it, really pro and really nice guys, not just because Chris mixed it for free and they did the mastering at the cost of the mastering disc, but because they believed in us and wanted to help us.

It’s a surprisingly avant-garde inspired listen that presents new aspects with every listen and has an emotional depth that many albums along these lines are lacking. Where do you think these organic qualities come from?

I think they come from the fact that we all played together in many different groups and formations of Tanakh before recording it, the fact that we all had the same emotional idea, that I was just talking about, and I think a large part of it came from the fact that we all practiced/jammed/hung out in this space for years in many different groupings and formations and now here we were in this very familiar comfortable place and now this place was the instrument we were improvising to, it was as if we were playing back our experiences of the past there with a collective voice. Like appeasing the building that hosted us. In fact, stupid romantic superstitious tit that I am I use to turn on the Double Disc every time I would leave the warehouse as if it soothed the ghosts there, which were many!

Tell us about the upcoming album?

Wow! I am really excited about this! In fact we recorded two records at the same time Poulos and Ardent Fevers. We are still yet to find a home for Poulos which is really poppy and light, but Ardent Fevers will be out by the end of February. There were some hang ups along the way with when to release it, mainly my fault, so it is coming out a long time after it was actually recorded, but I think it still sounds contemporary and fresh. Full of beautiful melodies, and orchestrated parts, with loads of destroyed-psych-rock guitar workouts. It is much lighter and happier and yet at the same time darker in its darkness, like somebody fooled around with the brightness/contrast button on your T.V. or computer, and it is MUCH groovier than any of the past Tanakh recordings which mainly is a result of writing the songs with Umberto, who is now the principle lead guitar in Tanakh. Clarke Hedgepath still plays on every song and is still both Umberto and I’s hero, but Umberto and I live together and therefore end up developing the songs together. It has been so great working with Umberto, he often comes up with hooks and I write the chords structure underneath and sometimes I have this pretty progression that I’ll show him and he just springs this great hook to accompany it. As a result, I have started thinking more in a groove oriented way myself and have been writing in that direction, which has been a great experience for me, it is so nice to grow and not just keep doing what you’re good at but to learn to be better at other things, different facets of the things you love to do. This record was recorded by Bryan Hoffa who recorded our double disc so it was like coming home. Bryan is a fantastic and ever improving engineer and so easy to work with. Over the last few years he has done some really impressive work, from Labradford to Neil Hagerty to Camper Van Beethoven to Brother JT, but man he is just so easy to work with, so encouraging and attentive and most importantly PRESENT. He is always THERE when he is there, you know? What a great quality in a person let alone someone you are trusting to capture the sounds locked in your mind and heart, especially when you aren’t quite sure where you put the key to that lock when you came home from the bar last night. Also really exciting for us was to have Isobel Campbell and Alex Neilson playing with us and their influence and additions really brought out the best in all of us, let alone great laughs and bringing me back to the dark side of smoking cigarettes again (thanks Alex!…laughing).

I know you’ll be playing Terrastock 6 in Providence, RI in April. I suspect that you’re pretty excited about that, right?

Oh god yes! It is a dream come true! Mainly just to play for Phil and everyone who through their writing and passion for music has enriched my life so so so much. It is not the show that is so exciting, it is the chance to give that feeling back.

There are some tours coming up next year. Where are you going?

Oooh, touchy subject. We are dieing to go on tour and chomping at the bit to do so, in fact we would be ready to go tomorrow if someone called. But that is the problem, we need to find someone who wants to book us and get us on the road. Sleeping on floors and such is no problem, it is just finding some who can guarantee that we can play a show every night, if we could find somebody crazy enough to put us on the road night after night we could play till Keith Richards dies, in short, forever. We do have a tour in Finland like a week or two after Terrastock but nothing else concrete as of yet. We live in Italy now so we are in a nice place to play anywhere in Europe, and we will be back in the States probably permanently next summer so we hope that we can play on both sides of the pond a whole lot this year.

Dreams for the future?

To tour as much as possible, starting tomorrow. To record this ancient Russian folk song I heard with a male and female call and response, I would love to record it with Chan Marshall her voice would be perfect for it. To have PJ Harvey produce our next record. To actually have enough time and money to record a record the way I hear it in my head, instead of in a handful of days. To write something as magnificent as the stuff Ghost writes. To learn to play the piano for real instead of just fumbling around by ear. To learn to write songs for my voice. To write Soul songs. To finally finish this solo record I have been threatening to make. To have a week alone with a DAT and a reel to reel and a good mixing board to compile and mix all the improv and jams that we have done over the years with all the different members of Tanakh and our friends and heroes etc. that would be a five CD box set of blessed out psych-folk, if I could ever get the chance to do it. And Pints with you and all my friends in April at T6!

I’ll drink to that, too! Eternal thanks to both Jesse for his time, and his undying support for all things Terrascopic down the years, and to Mats for finally making my dream of doing Tanakh justice in print a reality. Phil.