Watching Nick Zammuto at his eco-ranch home in Vermont, one cannot help but be taken by the heartfelt beauty of it all: Here’s the young dad grilling pizzas, playing with his children; there’s his pregnant wife cutting a pie filled with homegrown blueberries. In family and in music, the man once behind The Books is an auteur of authenticity, alternately (and at times simultaneously) wedding opposites: playful and ponderous, analog and digital, organic and synthetic, permanent and ephemeral, fuzzy and foreboding. By repeating and reversing loops, twisting samples and sometimes funneling a sound from a speaker through a PVC pipe into a mic, engineer-wizard Zammuto builds songs that “move forward as they move backward.” As this album is in its nature autobiographical—album titled Zammuto, band called Zammuto, recorded in the Zammuto homestead studio-shack—this review must be biographical.
Cut to 1999: Nick Zammuto lives in the same New York apartment building as cellist Paul de Jong. The two bump into one another and soon form The Books, a band whose collages augured the information inundation that has so become part of our tumbled, tweeted and ‘liked’ lives. Their debut Thought for Food stands as one of the few albums in recent memory that sounded new when released. The subsequent discs, while not a revelation in the same way, were interesting: samples of strings, children, gurus and Gandhi creating New Age music for people who would never say aura. By 2010, the albums tapered off; in April 2011 The Books made their final tour. At that point, Zammuto was ready “to transcend the ‘Simon and Glitchfunkle’ scene.”