Catching Up With... The Books

Daughter: Mommy! Daddy! Mom? Dad?

Father: You have no mother or father.

Daughter: Yeah I do.

Father: I don’t know you.

Daugher: …Daddy?

Father: Don’t touch me. Don’t call me that in public.

Those lines are the first moments of “Motherless Bastard,” a composition by sound architects The Books. The young girl is standing over the jellyfish tank in a Los Angeles aquarium staring at the alien creatures, bugging her dad to pay attention. But listening to “Motherless Bastard,” you wouldn’t know that.

Taken out of context, you don’t hear a girl annoying her father. You hear her voice—excited at first—quickly change to a fearful, confused quiver. You hear her panic, her very human sense of abandonment. The moment, which was accidentally recorded by Nick Zammuto, half of The Books, while he was filming the jellyfish, is set over a bed of slow bedroom guitar and plaintive strings. The piece isn’t a song; it’s a feeling.

Pairing minimalist musical composition with found-sound samples, The Books are masters at manipulating emotions—not through histrionic lyrics or even affecting melodies, but through showing us clearly the moments that pass us by everyday.

With a two-week tour this month and an untitled fourth record entering it’s final stages of creation, The Books’ Zammuto and Paul de Jong caught up with Paste about the beauty of the human voice, Bach’s flute sonatas and how Home Alone helped the new album.

Paste: You’ve said that The Books was just a studio project at one point, but obviously you’re touring now. How do you think the detailed nature of the music translates live?
Zammuto: That was the greatest frustration. We knew we were going to lose a lot of detail the moment we tried to bring it to the stage—just because of the loudness.
Jong: And the audience. The whole concept of playing live...
Zammuto: The key is we don’t want to be the center of attention. So we decided to make our lead singer a video. The solution to the problem was to start working with video. All of our shows are synced in a very detailed way with a video; everything we play has a one-to-one relationship with what’s going on the screen.
Jong: We had to draw up a whole idea of how to recreate the experience of what’s on CD, but also to replace it by making it not just music, but an interesting performance.

Paste: Do you guys make each of the videos?
Zammuto: Since we started touring, we’ve been going to thrift shops everywhere we stop. Every chance we get. We look for VHS tapes. VHS is being thrown out at a massive rate right now. It’s a great time to be collecting them. We just found avalanches of amazing stuff, so we’ve been going through it and making sample libraries. Finding interesting themes and cutting it together. We do shoot some of own stuff when we need to, but it’s mostly a collage of stuff we found over time.

Paste: That’s a similar approach to the one you take towards your music; I can see the correlation.
Jong: There are definitely similar aesthetics. I think we’re just very attracted to the notion of found material—re-contextualizing historic material. And it’s catching up with us. We started out with older material on vinyl, then eventually moved to cassettes and VHS tapes. Before long, CDs will be completely obsolete too. 

Paste: What were some of the most interesting VHS tapes you found for the show visuals?
Zammuto: Oh man [laughs]. The health and beauty section is pretty incredible. I love the "how to apply cosmetics" videos. And there was this whole rage in the '90s of "facercize." It’s like the natural facelift, where you contort your face to develop your facial muscles to reduce sagging. You get these amazing head-on shots of people doing these exercises. And out of context, they’re just so strange. Have you ever heard of galvanic cell stimulation?

Paste: No…
Zammuto: It’s where you attach an electrode to various parts of your body and it shoots electricity and causes your muscles to contract. You can do it with almost any muscle you have. They make these electrodes for your abs, for your face. So I got these great videos of eyebrows moving up and down in very unnatural ways.
Jong: There was an entire culture being created over the 1% (of body development) we control; 99% is genetic and we can’t do anything about it. It’s so funny.
Zammuto: Summer-camp videos are another interesting set to watch. A lot of nature videos, animal videos. And of course there are a lot of religious videos, people trying to sell you strange products.
Jong: The religious stuff is probably about half of our videos. It’s a big elephant in the room. It’s also stuff that’s really difficult to use. There is unforgettable material in it, but it’s pretty heavily loaded. It’s hard to sever it from its original context to do something new and meaningful. But we’re trying.

Paste: As you said earlier, your work is that of sound and visual collages. You’re putting together raw parts into a greater whole product. Would you call yourselves more musicians or architects?
Zammuto: Good question. I think both. I like the architect thing; I never thought of myself that way. I definitely think in three dimensions with sounds. When I’m composing, there’s a real space, and you can manipulate the space by what you add to it. For me, the musicianship comes second. I could just shoot rubber bands at my guitar to get the sounds I need. It’s more about being an engineer than a musical virtuoso on an instrument.
Jong: The instruments are simply good tools.

Paste: A lot of the samples you use were recorded of people who had no idea they’d end up in a song, meaning the voices speak very naturally. My favorite is the dialogue between a girl and her father, where the father is basically ignoring his child. Listening to all your collected samples, what do you feel like you learn about people?
Zammuto: Oh yeah. That’s what keeps us going. It’s incredible the insight that this material can give you. I was talking with a friend of ours about what music needs right now. He said that music needs to be more un-self-conscious. I think that’s a way to find it, working with elements like that little girl. I just happened to capture the talking; I didn’t even know until I brought it home and watched it. It wasn’t as nefarious as it sounds. It was just a dad who was tired about being dragged around by his daughter. But it plays on this universal human feeling of fear of abandonment. Can you ever really know anyone—even your parents?
Jong: The more you work with language on a microscopic level, the more I learn about what you can read in people’s voices. There is so much information carried just by the tone of the human voice. You get sensitized to it when you work with it every day.

Paste: Do you think people’s speech and thoughts have a natural musicality before you edit and cut the samples?
Zammuto: Oh, yeah. That’s the revelation we’re trying to achieve.
Jong: It’s the greatest musical instrument of all.
Zammuto: The spoken word has a musicality to it. It’s a wonderful thing to hear a voice and remove all the literal information of it and just hear it as a sound. To people who aren’t used to it, it sounds like our music just has a lot of jabbering. They want a less talky place to be when they listen to music. But once you figure it out, you can really hear the singing in it. We’re very careful how we place the spoken word so it does sing.

Paste: It’s been a few years since (the duo's last record, 2005's) Lost and Safe. How has the new material been taking shape?
Zammuto: Every song is its own universe on this record. It’s strange. Our sample libraries have grown so large since the last record that it allows us to go deeper. We find these themes, and we have a critical mass we need in order to explore them. For example, we kept finding these old Talkboy tapes in thrift shops. The Talkboy was a tape recorder marketed for kids, where you could change the pitch of your voice. It came from the Home Alone series; you may have had one.

Paste: I do remember those.
Zammuto: The tapes we got out of these things are just amazing — these kids with their own recordings. Again, it’s the feeling of un-self-consciousness. We found one tape that was a conversation between a brother and a sister. They were trying to share the toy and it was creating some issues; they get really made at each other. So the entire tape is them trading insults, and they get crazier and crazier. It’s got this beautiful arc. All we had to do is add a beat to it.

Paste: What is it about a sample that really stands out to you?
Zammuto: You get that feeling sometimes that you could listen to certain sounds over and over again and never tire of it. You hear it once and you remember it, but not in an annoying way, in a truthful way. It could be any set of parameters—maybe it’s musical quality, maybe the way a single note wavers. I think, more and more, we’ve been breaking language down. The hypnotherapy tapes we found talk so slowly and calmly without any music in the background, so you can easily cut it and exchange nouns and verbs and adjectives at will. So you can get some of the strangest sentences—stuff you could never come up with on your own. We’ve been re-cutting deeply, exploring voices in a way that recombines all the words. In a sense, it’s them, but in another sense it’s someone else.

Paste: What music do you listen to that has the same natural quality as the samples you use?
Zammuto: I find it all over the place. Sometimes it’s moments in larger pieces. I’ve been listening a lot of Gillian Welch. I love her voice. Her harmonies are just amazing. And we’ve both been listening to Phillip Glass.
Jong: I can’t get away from his music; there’s a real natural flow to it. I don’t really like flute music much, but I’ve been listening to Bach’s flute sonatas. When it’s played well, the music is in tune with breathing. It’s a natural rhythm. The two things go click and everything is…everything is right.