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January 9, 2025

Back after a break, the Books discuss their musical influences

By JONAH FURMAN | September 30, 2010

Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong comprise the New England-based, genre-defying duo, The Books. Their music combines elements of collage, folk, ambient and whatever other elements Zammuto and de Jong have been able to fit into their five studio albums.

Coming off of a five-year break, The Books return with The Way Out, and will play in Baltimore on October 6 at Ram’s Head Live!. The News-Letter spoke with Nick and Paul  about their music, in theory and practice, in two separate conversations.

 

The News-Letter (N-L): Tell us a little bit about the new album [The Way Out]. It seems to have a few pronounced differences, like a stronger rhythmic element and more extensively manipulated samples. Does this mark a shift for The Books?

Nick Zammuto (NZ): It’s taken us into unexpected realms, for sure. We’ve kind of moved away from our acoustic instruments, somewhat, and more into electric instruments, I guess.

You know, I bought an electric guitar recently, and I’ve been playing a lot, and that’s a really great sound. And I think, you know, maybe wrongfully we were kind of pinned as this kind of folktronica band, because we used acoustic instruments, but that’s really just what we had laying around.

I think our interests are much broader than that, in the end. It’s been five years between our last record and this one and a lot has happened since then, so I think our interests have naturally drifted. It was really just kind of refreshing to delve into a new kind of texture, and playing around with synthesizers for the first time was fun.

For the live show, as well, we wanted to — you know, if we were going to take a break that long, we had to come back with something kind of hard-hitting, and hopefully not grating, but at least something energetic; so we really wanted to play a show that was kind of more bouncy, and this material allows that to happen pretty well.

 

N-L: So does the new album mark a new direction the Books are taking, or is it more exploratory? Is there a marked shift here?

Paul de Jong (PDJ): I think actually both. I don’t know if it’s a direction that we’re interested in . . . I mean, you can also say that Lost and Safe [2005] came out of the Lemon of Pink [2003] and there are marked differences in those. Every record is kind of . . . a reflection of the time we are living through and the time we’ve lived through, and our interests.

There are some aspects of The Way Out that we deliberately set out before we started on the record, like you identified, the rhythmic element, is something that . . . We really wanted to come out with a pretty up-tempo record. We kind of felt that we didn’t want to have so much of the dreaminess going on as we had on the records before.

It also really has a lot of material that was really good for that, you know, music-derived samples that you mentioned, we never used them before, because we didn’t really have that critical mass. The sample library in the past couple of years grew at such a staggering rate, that there was actually really a choice in which we could do pretty much anything with those musical samples, and it really became an instrument in itself.

I think that the up-tempo decision is something that we made and became one of the guidelines in our record, and still you know you deviate from that, but if you have that as a guideline at least it will be a major element in the record, although we deviate from it and we have, like, anchors in the record, that are more like slow, or lyrical, or kind of song-like anchors. But we really identified right away that up-tempo element was something . . . we really hadn’t explored enough.

 

N-L: Do you see a connection between what The Books are doing with William S. Burroughs or Picasso or even more modern stuff like hip-hop or like DJ Shadow, or do you come at it from a different place? Do you feel the connection with other cut-up or collage artists?

PDJ: Maybe . . . Yeah, but not any stronger than I feel it with artists that I feel attracted to in different media, or who use a non-collage style. I feel more attracted to how as a listener, as a spectator, a work of art, what its emotional impact is on me, and then to find out how the hell did you do that?!

To really look at a work of art and see why does it do what it does to me. Speaking for myself, because it’s really something that is a very individual matter of taste, I suppose — Nick and I have very different taste (it overlaps, of course) but we have very different likes and dislikes . . . I’ve always been very attracted to collage artists like . . . Kurt Schwitters, for instance, or the collages of Max Ernst, and you know the collages of the Dadaists.

I think there is a certain aesthetic quality and fragmented — it relates to the way my mind works . . . it has a chaotic way. It’s a really . . . it’s kind of a slightly organized chaos, collage, and it’s very much how I see my mind. I mean, I’m off pretending that it’s all perfectly organized, but it’s much less so in my sample library, or in the world.

It’s just really interesting to see . . . what an artist’s reflection is in art on the world around them. And collage . . . has a playfulness to it that I can relate to, you know, very, very immediately.

I think that the way I view my work is completely driven by play, by the desire to play, by the desire to kind of feel on a treasure hunt for media that can recombine in some way, but also a treasure hunt within myself. I think that my answer is fragmented.

 

N-L: Who else has inspired you, sample-based or non? Who would you say is doing something that really speaks to you?

NZ: As a composer, my primary interest is in flow. How do you create the seamless flow in music? How do you keep a rhythm from getting stiff? How do you have something that constantly refreshes the loop? And so, my ears are really drawn toward interesting production. You know, not so much sample-based work,

although I think working with samples is a great test of one’s resolve to make impossible things happen, because it’s like, you have these two totally disparate things, and there’s a million ways to connect them; and finding just the right one, that kind of means the most, is kind of a tricky thing — it’s a lot of trial and error.

One really cool thing that happened during the making of The Way Out was that Nigel Godrich’s engineer, Drew Brown, was a fan of our music for a while.

He told us that Nigel was gonna be out of town, so we should come and use the studio, so we’re like, ‘Are you kidding me? Of course!’ So we booked a show in London just to pay our way over there, and got to spend like four days just in Nigel’s studio, with Drew.

I mean, Drew’s an amazing engineer — if he saw the wheels turning in our head, he was already setting up the microphones. Nigel’s got an amazing collection of vintage instruments and I’m not really at liberty to give much detail about it.

But it was really interesting to see how he works, and of course I know all of his productions, especially the stuff he’s done with Beck and with Radiohead.

I love deeply layered sounds, and I love transparency in a mix. I love when there’s a lot going on, but it doesn’t become a wall of sound, you can still pick up all of the detail in it. What I’m interested in is a kind of layered approach.

 

N-L: How does nostalgia play into it? What are you looking for in samples?

NZ: It’s kind of absurd. I mean, Paul likes to boast about the size of his sample library, but that’s the thing — I’m the guy who has to go through the 35,000 samples and decide what’s actually worth using. It’s a big job even figuring out where to begin.

I make these kind of temporary folders called “MUST BE USED” folders, where I take stuff that I’ve been working on, like little sketches and melodies, and you know, harmonies and rhythms and things like that, and if I find something really cool in the studio I just kind of squirrel it away in this MUST BE USED folder.

I throw the samples in there too. I start to find these — you know, on The Way Out, the new record, there’s some amazing standouts from Paul’s collection.

 

N-L: Like “Cold Freezing Night”?

NZ: Like “Cold Freezing Night,” exactly. I remember the first time I heard those kids, I’m like — it’s just so freaky, it’s almost like too much, but we had to use it.

I stole this 808 kick off of one of my favorite records and started playing my new electric guitar a lot and dug into an old improvisation that my brother and I had done with two basses.

That’s where I got the bassline from, and then kind of was fiddling around with Paul’s sample library, in the instrumental section . . . the harmonica sample, and synth sounds from the library—and kind of had them all in one folder, and I knew they could relate somehow. It was a matter of really figuring out how to bring all the sounds to life.

I wrote a blog entry about the making of the rhythm of that track, which is sort of a funny electroacoustic device that I invented. I pretty much exclusively do the blog [thebooksmusic.tumblr.com] — I like writing about the music. It’s more from kind of a producer’s standpoint. You know, given this unbelievable chaotic mess of stuff, how do you make sense out of it in a musical way?

 

N-L: What do you feel about nostalgia in your music?

PDJ: A lot of samples have — because of the media that they come from — have a real timestamp to them, and it might be an acoustic timestamp because it, you know, you can hear that it’s like ‘50s radio, or it’s like a ‘60s kind of recording, or it obviously comes from an audio cassette, because it has this hiss on it, or you hear the clicks and the crackle of an LP.

Also that is something that evokes something different with any listener. It might be the way language is being treated. If you listen to recordings from the ‘30s or ‘50s or ‘80s you hear that language develops in interesting ways, and so that’s like a timestamp there as well.

There is definitely this, like, nostalgia, but to us it really is essential to bring that into the contemporary arena, to recontextualize that, and sever it from its source, so it still has this emotional impact of its source to people, but at the same time its message is something that is severed from the time reference of the source.

There’s a dichotomy in every sample that we’re looking for. So we’re not looking to make people yearn for better days, on the contrary – to yearn for better days of past, that’s not our intention at all.

 

N-L: Lyrically, The Books seem to have a weird way of dealing with high abstract philosophy, like one of the tracks on The Way Out.

NZ: Yeah, “Beautiful People,” that’s all about my favorite irrational number, kind of a lame concept for a track [laughs].

 

N-L: So what’s interesting about the lyrical content is the way these generalities and abstractions are juxtaposed with the most banal, mundane, specific snatches of found sound from answering machines, field recordings, etc.

NZ: Yeah, a few things. There’s this feeling . . . when you’re working in a sort of a collage style like we work in, there’s this feeling of reconciling opposites that kind of comes up fairly often.

You end up, when you’re looking for sample material, you don’t want to spend your time listening to anything you agree with that much, because it’s just not that interesting, you just end up preaching to the choir in a way.

You really have to kind of delve into realms that you’re unfamiliar with, in order to find a new way of looking at things, and so you end up, when you’re sampling stuff, like when I’m going through Paul’s library, and just getting inundated by information from all sides, I feel like I have to reconcile that noise in some way. and music becomes the activity that allows me to  process it and kind of make sense of it and give it back to the world so I can sort of let go of it again.

Yeah, this feeling of making sense of things, and I think that process of making sense of things, you end up coming up with theories, and you know, overarching paradigms as it were.

You see patterns, and I think I’m really — I love patterns, and I think it’s a really natural human instinct to recognize them and then to store them, and you know, there’s like a direct connection between, you know, dopamine-levels and pattern-recognition, absolutely to the core of your brain.

That’s really what it’s about, it’s about sort of taking this what may seem like a mundane moment, and having it filter through everything that you know, and get spit out the other side, in a way that you can live with it, you know, you’ve kind of dealt with it and you can move on [laughs].

That’s what making music kind of feels like to me, a way of moving on.

 

Culture Show was an excellent throwback to last year’s strong season, and provided fans and freshmen with an auspicious glimpse of the good stuff to come.


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