The Books: The joy of cooking

Just to give you a little context, I caught up with Nick Zammuto by phone while the band was on their way from Knoxville to Atlanta, and we just got through chitchatting about North Adams, Mass., which is a town over from where I grew up and how the Purple Pub just burned down in Williamstown. Exactly: it's not interesting to anybody except Zammuto, me and the residents of Williamstown.



And here's that full-length article:

“Well, we sell these oven mitts,” says The Books’ Nick Zammuto, “and so there were these two guys fighting over this oven mitt right in front of our van and it was about to come to blows and I wasn’t just going to sit there and let them punch each other.”

You wouldn’t think that fans of The Books’ thoughtful, intelligent music would roll so hard over a cooking accessory, but then again you probably haven’t seen those oven mitts. Like The Books’ music, they’re lovingly handmade, a collision between found object and a deft artistic touch that recontextualizes the familiar. Zammuto (vocals/guitar/bass) and Paul de Jong (cello/bass) are, primarily, collage artists, combing through source material and building a musical bird’s nest out of snippets of dialogue, the sound of a bouncing basketball, a language instruction tape, interviews, old newsreels and their own original instrumental compositions. Like any collagists worth their salt, they’ve found that preparation is far more important than any kind of methodical process.

“People use the word ‘random’ all the time when describing our sample library,” says Zammuto, who’s on the road between Knoxville, Tenn., and Atlanta, Ga., when I reach him, “and I think of it as totally the opposite of random. I mean, it’s really carefully selected material. And it’s selected for its quality—not with any particular use in mind, but just because it stands well on its own and it makes for something that’s compelling every time you see it or every time you hear it. So it’s sort of like cooking: if you have good ingredients, it’s hard to go wrong with the composition. So that’s always been the approach: We just try to make really compelling bodies of material. And then from there, things start to coalesce in subconscious ways. We just listen through the sample libraries on a regular basis and kind of get them in our working memories and things crystallize from there.”

The result, on record, is music that’s simultaneously bracing in its originality and comforting in its familiarity, composed as it is out of the rhythms of spoken language. Even the parts that Zammuto sings in his modest tenor voice (“The fact that it’s my voice is completely arbitrary. If I could find somebody else to sing, that’d be great,” he laughs) are often drawn from texts that they simply didn’t have a recording of. These, then, are samples not as decoration or ornamentation in music, but as a structural element, as the very lifeblood of the work, and the line between incorporating found sound into a song like “None but Shining Hours” from 2005’s Lost and Safe, or composing music to go with a piece like “Venice,” where a reporter interviews an artist who seems to be Salvador Dali as he creates a painting live.

“More and more, it’s an integrated process,” Zammuto says. “What sparks the composition—it could be anything. We don’t have much of a preconception of how it’s going to work; there’s just a feeling of integrity that we’re looking for within the process. We don’t want to ruin anything with what we do, so you can’t force a sample into place. You can’t force an idea; you kind of have to wait for it to find its right place. So there’s a lot of patience and a lot of trial and error involved.”

When the pieces come together, as they do powerfully on the recording of “Be Good to Them Always” on Lost and Safe, the result is a kind of ever-expanding dialogue between the music and the texts, creating a new text in the process. As the music settles after an agitated intro, Zammuto sings in a soft monotone, “You know, I simply cannot understand people / Oh how sadly we mortals are deceived by our own imagination / This is not real; this is for us aleatoric television / A mixed consulate of soft instruments.” As the verse continues to unspool, Zammuto’s voice is joined by samples of people speaking the lines he is singing, and they match up to his sung rhythm, eventually taking center stage. For those with a passing familiarity with work like composer Steve Reich’s “Different Trains,” in which Reich took short spoken samples from interviews and then crafted melodic lines that would match their inherent spoken melodies, this is the intellectual seeds of experimental music bearing powerfully affective and effective fruit. The juxtaposition of disparate elements creates new meaning and a new space for the recombination of ideas.

But what’s particularly stunning is that The Books’ audio recordings are only half the story. A live performance by The Books integrates video samples as well, fashioned into artistic pieces in much the same way as the audio. “That was really our vision from the beginning,” says Zammuto, “to have this kind of performance where attention was moving around a lot between sound and the image and guitar here and cello there and a voice there. To keep it from becoming this egoistic rock star thing. We wanted to diffuse attention in a way that you would meet people halfway. Whatever they had within themselves, they can engage with it in their own way. So the image became really important right away for us, and we wanted to go after this synesthetic approach, where there was really a one-to-one relationship between what was going on in the music and what was happening with the image.”

When the recordings are combined with the imagery, which ranges from stock footage to a video recording of another musician playing a part that Zammuto and de Jong play along with, to moving type compositions, the effect can be nearly overwhelming from a synaptic perspective, but in the best way possible. The only word I can really come up with for it is joyous—the sheer joy of the human act of creation.

“People are really focused during the shows,” Zammuto says. “They’re really trying to take it in and they smile a lot, too, which just makes me happy. That’s definitely one of our goals: to make people laugh. Not in a comedic way—in a ha ha way—but like that Zen approach of using language to destroy itself. To find something profound within the absurd. And yeah, the joyous quality of it comes very naturally from our own engagement with it. It is really a joy to be able to find this stuff and then put it into a context where it can really shine.” ||

The Books perform twice on Fri., Apr. 27 at the Walker Art Center in the McGuire Theater. 8 p.m. and 10:30 p.m. $13 members/$16 general. 1750 Hennepin Ave., Mpls. 612-375-7600. For more info on The Books, visit their official site at thebooksmusic.com.