“It sounded like a good idea at the time for reasons we weren’t quite sure about,” offers Paul De Jong, in explanation for the name of his duo with Nick Zammuto, The Books. They make an unlikely pair: Zammuto, who grew up near Boston, Massachusetts, trained and worked as a chemist before deciding to dedicate all his energy to music. On the other hand, De Jong, who was born in the Netherlands and moved to New York aged 28, is more than a decade older than his partner. By any reckoning he was a precociously talented child, picking up the cello aged five and beginning his experiments with electronic music aged 13. “I would make radio plays,” he says, “cut audio cassettes up with razorblades, putting them together with nail polish, make my own sound effects and string up tape loops around my room.”
In typically self-deprecating fashion, the group attribute the textural richness, crisp microscopic detail and spatial depth of their new recording to the acquisition of a new microphone. Lost And Safe, The Books’ wondrous third album, resolutely delivers on the promise of their earlier two releases. Their debut Thought For Food (Tomlab 2002) defined their stylistic parameters with its oblique, spacious acoustic songs, voices lurking in the mix, tracks lightly peppered with the surreal soundbites that are woven throughout The Lemon Of Pink (Tomlab 2003). Nick Zammuto describes working up that early material while living in a small hillside town in North Carolina, which, considered in the light of The Books’ current residence in North Adams, in the Berkshire mountains of Massachusetts, points to the project’s “rural soul”. Indeed, this ambience permeates their records in very practical ways. “It’s very silent where we do most of our recordings,” Zammuto says. “We don’t really need to have insulated sound booths because the place is so quiet. It’s extremely rare that we have to stop when a truck goes by.”
With the new album, The Books have adopted the instrumental palette of traditional Americana, with mandolins, banjos, acoustic guitars, and De Jong electronically pitching his cello upwards to resemble a bluegrass fiddle. But this is far from folk music pastiche: “[Folk] is one of those terms that has been defined and then destroyed and then redefined so many times that it’s really difficult to know what people are talking about,” says De Jong. But it’s the incredible intimacy of their records which most strongly foregrounds this parallel with folk, especially that (strangely for a duo) of the archetype of the solo singer-songwriter. The Books’ songs would be confessions in the manner of old blues songs, if they didn’t so assiduously avoid pinning themselves to meanings. “It’s halfway between us and the listener,” says Zammuto. “We feel that people have to listen to our record to complete it because they’ll have their own set of strange associations. The record doesn’t give away much, it’s open to interpretations,” their “innerspective” sound working to transform one’s ears into headphones.
At the heart of The Books’ startling creative method is the use of found soundbites, which they both collect and add to a vast, shared database. De Jong is the more avid contributor, coming from a family apparently obsessed with collecting. Zammuto recounts an amusing anecdote: “His grandmother once sent his grandfather out to buy a coat and he came home with a clock.” Paul himself confesses to once having watched over 750 films in one year: “I had to replace my couch at the end! I had a minidisc player next to the video. Whenever something struck my fancy I recorded it, snippets of dialogue, snippets of soundtrack. I can’t particularly explain why I made these choices. It usually has to do with something which moves me in one or another way. It’s usually not a cerebral thing, its something which makes me happy or something which makes me sigh.” Nick describes the samples, in an intriguingly chemical manner, as being “atomic”, these self-contained abstract samples of B movie dialogue, voices from unmarked cassettes discovered at fleamarkets, snatches of television and historical recordings sourced from libraries are “whole in themselves but they’re openended. They can connect to other things in a number of ways.”
The pair claim that as they’re working on a piece, a sample will often announce itself out of the blue, from the subconscious, and “fit itself in”. It’s as though they become controlled by the quasi-occult power of the disembodied voices themselves: a housewife’s monologue, a Methodist teacher drilling his class, a radio reporter attending one of Salvador Dali’s happenings and countless countless other mysteriously gnomic remarks issuing deep from the belly of Hollywood. In tandem with the original samples, Zammuto’s voice eerily doubles the original spoken words. “In the artwork of this release we included a verbatim transcription of all of the spoken and sung words on the record,” he sys, “so the words become like lyrics, and that’s where that impulse came from. We wanted to make the samples into one voice.” Ego-lessness also informs Zammuto’s unostentatious singing style. “It’s just not fancy. It’s not about me, as much as the sound of my voice,” he argues, although ironically his charming, wistful vocals are unerringly distinct. While recording Lost And Safe, they also discovered a helpful aleatory method by choosing samples on the basis of their length, an approach that meant samples fitted arcs within the music, but also which ended up producing “the craziest associations”. The Books’ love of words seems guaranteed to continue to drive their creativity: “The most rich thing we have in our lives as humans is a love of communication. Words have a visual component, they have a linguistic syntax, they have a sound, there’s a physical aspect to them, they have to do with breath and with your body, there are so many different languages and so many different ways to say a single word.”
