By all rights, neither member of The Books should be indie rock sensations. Neither is particularly good-looking, both are (relatively) old and they’ve only performed live once. Paul de Jong is a 39-year-old Dutch cellist and his collaborator, Nick Zammuto, is a sound artist almost as interested in how sound behaves as in creating actual songs. Yet somehow, over the course of the last three years, The Books have become one of the most critically lauded groups in modern music.
What sets the band apart is its work with sound collages that, while not especially technologically advanced, have really not been done before. The two musicians collect snippets of sound ranging from pieces they play on guitar, cello and banjo to found music, and mix them together to create songs. On 2002’s Thought for Food and the following year’s The Lemon of Pink, the main vocal component of the music came from samples as well. With Lost and Safe, released earlier this year, the band takes the concept one step further, adding Zammuto’s lyrics, largely drawn from found texts, to the sampled vocals.
Voice Leisure tracked down de Jong and Zammuto in North Adams, MA, where they are rehearsing in anticipation of their first tour. We talked with them about sampling, illegal downloading and where they plan to take their music in the future.
Voice Leisure: Paul, your background is in classical cello, right?
Paul de Jong: Yes, I originate in classical music. I started playing cello when I was five. I am from a pretty musical family. I kind of grew up with it. My dad was always really into contemporary music, so very early on I was taken to concerts of contemporary music and I saw all kinds of intriguing alternative techniques being played out on stage that caught my ear.
Voice: I read that you were working on a program sponsored by the Dutch government to come up with compositions based on neighborhoods. How’s that coming along?
PDJ: It’s coming along alright. I’ve made five pieces but about a year ago the whole city council of Rotterdam, the city for which I am composing, has politically changed colors quite radically. Now, instead of subsidizing 1,500 artists in the city, they are going to zero-in on three artists, and I don’t know if I’m one of those three. I was supposed to make eight pieces and I’ve done five. So far they’ve been really well-received. It’s a great thing to do.
Voice: Nick, perhaps you could introduce yourself as well and talk a bit about the influences on your music.
Nick Zammuto: Well, I grew up in suburban Boston. It was classic rock 24 hours a day. Supergroups of the ‘70s playing at all hours. That’s the kind of music I grew up with. I was singing along to Zeppelin in the car when I was five years old. As far as musical training goes, I have practically none. I came into music through the visual arts and started making sound sculptures, which introduced me to working with sound.
Voice: I’m guessing you’re probably behind the storming industrial drums on “An Animated Description of Mr. Maps.”
NZ: Yeah, I had that idea a long time ago, to install a subwoofer inside of a filing cabinet and sort of play on the whole idea of industrial music. I went to Wal-Mart and bought this really cheap filing cabinet and put a subwoofer inside of it. It sort of had this resonant frequency to it already, which became the tuning for the track. It was roughly C-Sharp. We tuned everything to that.
Voice: So do you do most of the writing and creating of the music together?
NZ: Well, it’s a little of both. We oftentimes work alone at home and then when there’s work that requires both of us-either we’re synthesizing large pieces together or we’re doing mastering-we tend to do that together. Our main studio is up here in North Adams. It’s nice and quiet; there are no distractions here. There’s no nightlife whatsoever.
PDJ: We put together a library of sounds, and then before we start on something we usually make kind of a folder that we call the “must be used folder” and it’s kind of a distilled library. You can make selections out of it. We often listen to those over and over again, together and alone, until we can get a shared concept of what we’re working with.
Voice: How do you pick out these samples?
NZ: They sort of pick themselves out. It’s a process of trial and error really-we just sort of try everything and we save what really works. It’s difficult for us to tell what’s really gonna work. Sometimes we have an intuition about it, but most of the time it’s a process of random mutation and evolution.
Voice: With all samples, there seems to always be historical baggage attached to each. Do you think a lot about how other people will interpret the snippets that you use or is it more your appreciation of certain elements of the samples that attracts you to them and leads you to use them?
PDJ: It’s a very personal thing. We have very personal relationships with these samples and you can’t really compare how other people listen to them and how we do. We’ve seen the birth of a lot of them and seen them in their raw form-have heard them in context. Besides, I don’t think I really know all that well how Nick interprets them, and I’m quite sure it’s the same with him. There’s so much unknowable about the connection of the ear to the mind. It’s hard to tell.
Voice: Do you ever read through reviews and just find a reviewer picking up on a sample and interpreting it in a way that you never would have thought of?
NZ: Oh, yeah. That’s definitely something that we invite. Our music kind of meets people halfway. Oftentimes reviews that we read are greatly entertaining, be they positive or negative-people’s honest responses are fascinating and unpredictable, and we like it that way.
Voice: As far as Lost and Safe goes, did you approach the album with a specific goal or idea?
NZ: Yeah, we always sort of conceived of the record as going from birth to death, through the stages. Each track, at least for me, represents a stage in life in some way. I don’t know if people will ever really get that, and I don’t really care, but it was a way for us to think about it.
Voice: It seems that this album really gives you a greater opportunity to express yourself now that you are writing and singing. How has that transition been?
NZ: It’s been a nightmare. I’m just not much of a singer, and I never thought of myself that way, but because of the circumstances it seemed like the right thing to do a lot of the time. We wanted to work more with words, in and of themselves; play with found texts, incorporate more lyrics. It’s been sort of a revelation to me over the past year to work in that sort of a way.
PDJ: At some point we were looking to put the samples and the found texts to slightly different use. We needed that. After The Lemon of Pink we began thinking immediately about how to expand those possibilities for language. Now we have come to the point where we are far more purposefully looking for samples that have to do with lyrics, and also lyrics get influenced by samples we really want to use.
Voice: How has it been translating that for the live shows?
PDJ: Before we started making Lost and Safe we did quite a lot of thinking about that. We kind of had an inkling that we were going to be playing live at some point. We played one small set in Chicago just after The Lemon of Pink was out and we quickly found out that there were just a few pieces that we really thought we could pull off as convincing live pieces. That kind of explains the more coherent instrumentation of Lost and Safe. We have an easier time translating that to the stage.
Voice: I was reading the financial note on your website. Do you have any words for the kids out there downloading independent music?
PDJ: If you eat two hamburgers less you can buy a whole record.
NZ: It’s hard to say whether file sharing has really helped us or hurt us. The fact remains that most people assume that we’re doing alright because we have a couple records out, where in reality we barely scrape by and we cannot afford essentials like health insurance. I think it’s mostly a problem of communication. If our fans really knew what our situation was then they’d be more apt to buy our records or buy a t-shirt from us. Unfortunately the system of distribution doesn’t want the truth to get out. We make one dollar each on every CD we sell, which is nothing. We’re left out in the cold a lot, and I just don’t think people recognize that.
PDJ: Our needs in composing and producing are very small. We work on computers that are not fancy at all, we don’t have a separate working building, we don’t have any soundproofing, we record in Nick’s bedroom (which, by the way, has great sound), we don’t have fancy microphones. For Lost and Safe the only investment that we made was buying one new microphone.
Voice: Where do you see your sound going from here?
NZ: I have a feeling that playing live will influence the way we think quite a bit. What that means I’m not sure. We’ve also started working with video a lot, which has been fascinating, so we’re trying to figure out how to make videos that arise simultaneously with music, in terms of production. Put sound and image together in a way that they completely mutually support each other, so that if you take one away the other won’t make sense. That’s a dream of mine, to move in that direction.
Voice: Do you think your next project might be a DVD?
NZ: Yeah, and our live show has quite a lot of video in it. Stuff that we’ve been collecting. Some old family stuff and some crazy stuff-Japanese videos of children under their desks during earthquake drills. Things like that.
