Audio By Carbonatix
Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto formed the Books in 2000, shortly after being introduced by a friend. The two were drawn together by their mutual love of collecting and manipulating the sounds around them: De Jong was into sampling old movies and vinyl, while Zammuto had been making field recordings of his friends and family and places he’d visited. Fusing together various loops and fractured pieces of dialogue, the pair has created ambient sound that’s often feels mechanical yet is mostly organic. We recently spoke with Zammuto about how the Books’ songs are assembled and the act’s forthcoming DVD.
Westword: Do you guys have a typical approach to composing, or does it…?
Nick Zammuto: There’s absolutely no system to it except persistence. We’re always looking for new material. The way we catalogue it, we don’t save entire records or entire VHS tapes. We’ve started working with a lot of video now, too, so that’s been our primary activity, sample-wise, recently — VHS tapes. We got over 2,000 of them on our last tour, so we’re starting to filter through those. Basically, we go through each audiotape, videotape, record or whatever we find that looks interesting. We save the snippets that we find to be satisfying — that really say something or make us feel something every time we hear them — and then we just file them all away. Then there’s some improvisation, coming up with rhythmic ideas, melodic ideas and seeing how the two can fit together. We find some kind of relationship that’s synergistic, and the snowball starts rolling from there. More sounds get added to that work, with that kernel at the center, and we sort of expand the group of samples. And then from there we can decide how it might begin or end, or how it’s going to flow over time.
Your DVD comes out this month. What do we have to look forward to?
It’s our first attempt at making videos, so it’s sort of based on what we’ve been using during our shows. We have videos projected behind us. We’ve been synching all this found video footage with tracks from our records, and we’ve also done a few new tracks where we’re kind of composing the music at the same time we’re creating the video. It’s more of a synergistic thing than a music video, where the image and the sound are much more interrelated. The visuals can actually carry the rhythm to a large degree with our new work. So some of that is on the DVD as well. I think we have nine tracks off of our records, and four other tracks that are previously unreleased studio recordings. Then there are some extras, too — like Paul did this Shakespearean soliloquy back in 1983 that’s fairly priceless, so we threw that on there, and a couple of other things.
