Tanakh (band)

Tanakh is the name of a musical collective from Richmond, Virginia as well as a reference to the music produced by the group. The collective was formed in 2000 by its primary songwriter, producer and recording engineer Jesse Poe.

Poe and Phil Murphy were then working as apprentices under John Morand at Sound of Music Studios to improve their recording skills. The two musicians would take turn recording each other after hours at the studio, using whatever instruments happened to be left around. This included many international instruments that Joan Osborne had recently left in studio. They would layer track upon track taking turns recording while the other played, and vice versa; some recordings from this time appeared on the bonus CD with the band's 2002 debut album Villa Claustrophobia. They also composed and recorded the score for Andrew Carnwath's silent film Greater Than Half which won the The Audience Choice Award at Bare Bones International and the Rosebud Film Festival in Washington, D.C.

The duo began to perform live using analogue loops created live on stage with old tape machines and half broken equipment they salvaged from the Sound of Music equipment graveyards and thrift stores. Frustrated with limitations of analogue looping, they enlisted the help of Jeff 'Sanford' Krones, who lived with Poe at the Pyramid Institute, an abandoned Shriners Temple atop the collapsed Church Hill Tunnel, and Pat Best of Pelt. This quartet formed the core of the original Tanakh collective, playing live shows and recording improvisations at the Pyramid Institute and Sound of Music Studios along with many guests who joined performances as they were available.

Inspired in part by John Zorn's Tzadik label, Poe and Murphy's original idea was to provide a name that they could perform under and that anyone who they liked to play could perform or record under, with their dream being that there might be two or three Tanakh shows at the same time in different geographic locations. The band's self-titled 2004 EP on Alien8 Recordings came from a Pyramid Institute performance recorded by Bryan Hoffa who would later start a band Broken Hips with Murphy on guitar, and various instruments. This instrumental double disc was later mixed and mastered by King Crimson engineer Ronan Chris Murphy.

...
Wikipedia