The Books | TapeOp

The Books don't record like most of us. On a cheap PC with next-to-free software, Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong make sounds that are basically unaltered, yet sound foreign. They select from a huge variety of sources — VHS tapes from thrift stores, found sound, DAT recorders lent to friends that come back with god-knows-what on them and more. Then they edit, edit, edit, and through this work they nail the essence of the song. Their emphasis is on composition — what story is the song telling? The Books forge powerful, distilled themes into music that launches into your ears and hits your heart like nicotine. When I first heard The Books, I was immediately struck by Nick and Paul's complete lack of pretension. The Books are not trying to prove how clever they are. What a relief.

How do you get so much love to tape?

P: We don't use tape — it's hard drives, actually. N: By protecting our high end — between 5 and 20 kHz. No cymbals. That opens up the love. P: Be good to your ears. N: It's a sensational quality that we are looking for. It always involves something totally human — sounds that meet you halfway, not in your face, but they don't recede into the background, either. They are there to be played with. We put together a body of sounds that all have a quality. It's like cooking — if you have good ingredients, you can't go wrong. There are those things that you can listen to over and over and still love the millionth time you've heard them. That's the kind of thing we're looking for — the perfect hook — but hopefully not that annoying.

How do you feel about the Lost And Safe reviews? Many said the same thing — that you were writing more conventionally.

N: I don't get that at all. It's a complete misinterpretation of that record. The idea that it's conventional or pandering to an audience is just ridiculous to me. That's never how I thought about it.

They needed to have something to hang their hat on and they all read each other's work. They seized upon your singing, Paul.

N: That's exactly what happened. That's why I stopped reading criticism in general. It's not helpful to me anymore. We're looking for a kind of integrity in the compositional process and you know, the voice is the most powerful sound that we have because it is so rich in every possible way. It tells you about identity, it tells you about gender, the intellectual world and the purely physical sound world.

I can tell if someone is clenching their ass by how their voice sounds.

N: Yeah. You really can tell. It's nice to have that kind of directness. Having said that, our interest in the voice is not to tell our story, it's to tell a human story, a more universal kind of story. So the fact that it's my voice [on Lost And Safe] is completely arbitrary to me. If I could get somebody else to sing I would. We've been coming across a lot of texts — from ancient Buddhist texts to opening up the newspaper — as well as found sounds. Videos now are also a big part of what we do. Automatic lyrics wherever you go. We are always listening with ears that are trying to remove pretensions — our own preconception of what it is — to hear it for what it actually is in that instant. We look for those things that will allow a re-contextualization that brings a higher level of meaning to it. It's an old style of working. The Zen masters had the whole idea of giving people these absurd problems to work on in order to undo their rational minds to the degree that they're open in a subconscious way to reality. I think that's a wonderful technique and music is really good at doing that.

Where do you two believe you fit in the world of music?

P: I don't see much of a music world at all!

N: That's a good answer! I think our sample collection by now sort of tells the story of our own aesthetic. We are just not concerned with the mainstream and we never have [been]. Of course I grew up listening to '70s rock music — everything from Aerosmith to Billy Joel.

P: I think there is some kind of devotion to music that is entirely unpretentious that runs through almost the entire history of music as we know it. Bach for instance — it's complete honesty. I believe he had very little interest in putting his ego into his music. Pure devotion.

What did they call it before it was "classical"?

N: Church music.

P: They certainly didn't call it "baroque."

N: It was always in the context of religion.

I believe the reason we first made fake reverb was to make it seem like the music was in a cathedral.

N: That makes sense. I hate reverb for that reason.

P: Yeah. Reverb screws everything up.

How's a song constructed? Take "The Lemon Of Pink", for example.

P: That's an interesting question because that song and that whole record began with that first sample. A loop of that sample, which is from a record — a cosmetics 7" single — the "Lemon Of Pink" is a lipstick color from the fifties.

And the walking on gravel?

N: That was me on a playground swingset. And I had one of those pull chains made from little chrome balls and I was rubbing it over the corner of a file cabinet, too.

P: African workers are in there...

The woman's voice — what does she say besides "Subtle details"?

N: "Subtle details have to be eschewed."

So you started with a loop?

N: Anne Doerner was a big part of it. She is a woman I met when I was down in North Carolina after I hiked the Appalachian trail in 1991. I ended up working in a bed and breakfast — The Sunnybank Inn — but everybody called it Elmer's. Elmer ran the place. I basically took Anne's job when she left there. Elmer is a total Luddite. So picture these electronic musicians clandestinely setting up shop in his basement.

P: It was all very quiet — everything we did was very closely mic'd. I don't believe he even knew what was going on down there.

N: That's where I met Anne. We ended up traveling around and playing music together a lot. We spent three weeks in the Utah desert. I made some recordings there where all you can hear is the noise floor of the recorder. I still use those recordings every once and a while to create digital silence that has body. I would lend Anne my DAT and she would make these amazing full-length tapes — field recordings — her yard, chickens running by — every eight minutes or so there would be these two-second fragments of violin solos. So that's where those come from. We snipped them out, tuned them up a little bit and put them over that loop and that's all it was.

Is it Anne singing, "We went through hell"?

N: Yeah! That was an improvisation that she did. She would never take on that musical persona — like this kind of Ricky Lee Jones voice — if someone was in the room. Every once and a while she'd pull it out. I'd never heard her sing like that before ever. When I heard it I was like, "Whoa!" But she can pull stuff like that off. She's very evasive.

Is it a piece of a longer passage?

N: She was singing about our trip to the desert. I selected pieces of it for their sound. Not so much for the literal meaning. I think "hell" refers to the dryness and the hotness of it, that and the emotional intensity of spending so much time with one other person in that kind of environment.

It's one of my favorite moments in music. How about the banjo? You're chopping that up a lot.

N: I played Anne's banjo made from a walnut tree stump from her friend's front yard. I'd make improvisations and then cut out the parts that would speak to me — tiny little six beat loops — something unexpected that would fall outside the idiom of what would normally come out of my fingers.

It sounds like "super fingers." Normal fingers can't fret like that.

N: Exactly. That was the level of unreality that I always wanted — "super strings." I was working in a café when I made that song. I remember making that main melody — which can have either a waltz or a 4/4 part underneath it and work equally well. That was always the plan — to have a polyrhythm built into it. I was feeling unproductive because I had to go to this stupid job every day. So for two weeks I woke up at 5:30 in the morning and I worked on the song for three hours before I'd go to the café job. And "Lemon Of Pink" was one of those mornings.

That was done on a PC?

N: Yes. Everything we do is on a PC. It's cheap and straightforward. We don't do a lot of DSP work. All we need to do is layer acoustic sounds and have basic control over EQ.

It sounds very hi-fi.

N: That's ironic because it's not made with particularly decent equipment. I think because we protect the high end there isn't that clashing going on. Our overtones let things breathe and things can come forward a little bit. You can't listen to it in a car the same way you listen to a rock record.

P: One of the hard things about playing live is you end up with too many tones that compete and you end up with a lot of room reverberation that you cannot control. Then it ends up becoming something completely different than we set out to do. Live there is so much more improvising.

N: 16-bit sound is capable of producing a dynamic range live that people don't usually explore because there's so much compression and over-amplifying involved.

Do you guys regularly collect found sound andifso, what do you use to do it?

P: I believe that if I walk around with a sound recorder then I'm not really going to get the sounds I'm looking for any way. You really don't know where you're going to find them. That being said, we've gone out with recorders.

N: I have a portable DAT and I also use my video camera. The "Mommy Daddy" sample at the beginning of "Motherless Bastard" actually happened — it wasn't staged. I was videotaping jellyfish at the Aquarium of the Pacific in Los Angeles. That's an actual little girl with her father looking at a Portuguese man-o-war. We put it on the DVD in its original context. You can tell when you hear her that she has been dragging her father around all day and he's getting punchy and playing around with her. She goes on to describe the jellyfish — but she does it in Spanish. And it's really fast. So she's this bilingual kid. I didn't even realize it was on there until I got the tape home.

I feel like the music following the clip is a kind of requiem, a balm or ballad for the poor child.

P: It has a strange sentimental side to it. I agree.

Why is your editing so organic?

N: We should go back to Paul's side of the sample hunting. P: It's the beginning and an end of a sample. It has to connect to the silence around it. It has to connect to the rhythmical element in the music. It is the rhythmical element in the music. If it doesn't connect then it has a special meaning. It has very particular meaning. If it doesn't connect then it's a disembodied sample — it's not what we're looking for.

So in the context of each measure and also in each whole song each sample or loop has to clock back into itself and plug in? Each one becomes a unit, or a piece?

N: Yeah. It's a synergy. It becomes more than the sum of its parts. And it's impossible to predict how that will happen unless you actually hear it. But you know it when you hear it. And so you're throwing everything together and seeing what naturally finds itself.

P: It's almost as if every single sample is it's own background and foreground. It's almost up to the listener to choose what you focus on. It's fine-tuning of your listening behavior.

The voice is so naked, and so universal. We know exactly how to listen to a voice. A voice connects in every direction. It's almost as if every Books sample is a voice.

P: Yes! There has to be a clear human reference to many qualities within one sample. Whether it's the meaning of the words, whether it's the timbre of the voice. Whether it's male or a female voice — it has a time stamp on it because of the way it's recorded.

N: But to go back to an earlier question about where we get the samples — whether we're carrying recording equipment with us or not we have realized in the last few years that now is the time to collect VHS tapes. They are getting thrown away at such a rapid rate. There are piles of them in thrift stores and they're going to disappear in the next ten years.

P: It's 25 years of fringe social history that we're digging up here and it's really interesting. If you collect generally with an eye for the rare or the obscure or the unusual it kind of creates, when you cut it, a strange kind of quilt. A map that is a portrait.

N: Each image has an iconography to it as well as an actual history.

You've also made videos.

N: Yeah. We're careful about that. The movie version of the novel ruins the novel. We want our music videos to expand in the same way that the music expands. The images are not totally didactic or tied in a literal way to what you are hearing. We're not playing our instruments and lip-syncing and stuff like that. There has to be a meeting halfway with the images as well — attention to movement in an organic way.

You mentioned earlier that you first get your loop going. Then when it "clicks" you add to it.

N: There's a critical mass. It's like rolling up a snowball. When you get to a certain point where you have a body of sounds, when it starts to elevate itself in an interesting way you can start to figure out where the beginning is and where the end is. Then all the recordings you make in order to get it to flow from beginning to end is everything that's added from then on. And then there's that mastering layer where you clean up every volume and pan thing that you can.

P: When you have a library that starts to balance itself it starts to hum and the only thing that's missing is the music in there. That's a matter of rearranging — the joy of rearranging.

What about that song tears your head off on Lost And Safe?

N: "An Animated Description of Mr. Maps"? We wanted to use the CD for its full dynamic range, where we could save the loudness for a special part. So people will be like, "Should I turn it down? Or..." The way we made those sounds is we took a filing cabinet and mounted subwoofers inside of it so that they imparted their energy directly into the metal. We didn't even use "real" sound — we used subsonic sound to excite them - stuff that was under 20 Hz. We got either "left" or "right" depending on how we mic'ed it — in the outside or the inside. So I'd send in like 5 Hz.

Bup! Bup! Bup! Bup!

N: Exactly. I was tying tempo to pitch. I'm interested in the idea of a subsonic frequency being a tempo as well as a pitch. So when you speed it up digitally three octaves it actually becomes a tone.

It's different than playing the actual higher frequency tone because you have mechanically coupled the 5 Hz into the air, recorded it and then sped up the numbers using a chip.

N: It's like hitting a drum with a stick. The physical movement of the speaker is the subject matter. It allows you to work representationally because it's a speaker — but it's also an instrument as well, imparting its energy into another material. And of course the filing cabinet had a resonance itself. It had a nice sustain to it that pulled everything into a musical context. Once I found that I knew the ratios I needed to record the tempos at, I did a pitch transformation to get them to line up with the tempo of the music.

It's how movies get made — in the edit room.

N: Yes. And working with the frequency relationships is really interesting. I feel like I'm just beginning. There are so many directions to go in. We're working on a soundtrack for a documentary about Biosphere 2. They [the people in the Biosphere] documented it all themselves — the film consists almost entirely of their own footage. The music we're making for it is this combination of sci-fi and tribal. The way to connect those two things is a kind of modular way of recording where there's only certain tempos that we work in — there's twelve and they're all relationships to each other. I have a set of 12 PVC pipes that are tuned in a way then that resonates with those tempos. I can use a single pipe and record those tempos through it and you can add a tone to noise that way. You can record a stick breaking and it becomes a symphonic instrument, an entire xylophone or full percussion kit. Using those stick recordings and making all those 12 different tempos and playing those tempos through the PVC pipes, re-recording them, then taking those recordings and pitching them back using twelfth root of two [the irrational number 2^1/12 = 1.059463...] you can get a twelve-tone scale — all with the same tempo — so it becomes this virtual instrument. It becomes an incredibly powerful musical tool. That was the next step from the filing cabinet. First you make this horrible noise and then you gain more control over it and turn it into something cleaner and easier to use in a myriad of ways. It generates material that's so far outside of anything I've ever heard before, but at the same time it's so totally listenable.