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Dec 16, 2010 By Hays Davis Web Exclusive

Dig just a bit between stacks of books and knick-knacks at second-hand stores and you may uncover old cassettes containing years-old cultural marginalia or tiny windows into the lives of strangers. And if you glance up you may find a member of The Books at your side, glowing at the discovery of a stash of audio detritus.

Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto have spent more than a decade gleaning lost recordings and blending them with original music. The Way Out, the duo’s fourth full-length release, makes use of some priceless self-help cassettes, answering-machine messages, and recordings of some expressive children who were obviously outside the reach of adult supervision. Those who are just picking up on these masters of what one might call “re-contexting” will have the perfect opportunity to explore their back catalogue when The Books’ first three albums are reissued on CD and LP this winter.

Zammuto and de Jong spoke with Under the Radar in August, shedding some light on their construction/recording process, and describing how they came to be possibly the least likely artists to be tapped by the French ministry of culture to provide elevator music.

Hays Davis: I understand that, when you first got together talking about musical ideas, you played Nick a Shooby Taylor (known as “The Human Horn”) recording, along with some of the rest of your collection of recorded samples.

Paul de Jong: Yeah, that’s absolutely correct. When I had just moved to New York City in the early ’90s, WFMU, the radio station in New Jersey, they were the only ones who knew about Shooby Taylor, and they had they had issued this cassette of his recordings. So I just basically fell in love with the completely outrageousness of Shooby Taylor. It’s funny and it’s kind of un-self-conscious. In a way, it’s brilliant and very original, and at the same time it’s terribly bad, but there’s nothing like it! It’s just full of life. But I played that for Nick. He almost died laughing. He just thought it was the greatest thing. That’s one of the many touchstones that we discovered.

When you first met and began discussing interests, what elements in particular led you two to consider working together?

Paul: We both came from conceptual and hermetic artistic backgrounds in which we created whatever we want without being too concerned whether anybody but our friends or colleagues would be able to relate to it. We were really into taking an experiment into its utmost. I think when we met we were both at a point where we both felt we want to bring all these results, and our professional art, to a fruition of our complimentary efforts that a larger audience could relate to.

Tell me about how you came to produce elevator music for the French ministry of culture.

Paul: We were asked by two artists who were curating a larger commission by the French ministry of culture, and the ministry of culture was putting up this multi-million-dollar new office building in Paris. I guess there is a rule in Paris where one percent of the total of some of the project has to be spent on the arts. They covered their walls, and then they were looking for projects for the other things. They asked 20 different musicians to compose tracks for elevator music, to be not longer than one minute. Punching the buttons for the floors, it works like a randomized way to play back those tracks. There’s some little algorithm attached to it that chooses which one is up. That’s really all we were told and we took the opportunity to pull from our sample library all the French samples that we could find, and we made four short tracks out of it.

Over the years, has it become easier or more difficult to find interesting recordings that you feel work well within the context of The Books?

Paul: I guess that’s a two-sided question that would be interesting if I answered the first half and Nick answers the second half. I often am the digger for samples in the field, and I can tell you that I don’t find it particularly hard to find good material. It’s literally everywhere. There is an abundance of it, and I know I’ll never cover it all. [Laughs] It’s really a matter of how many hours you put into it, how much good material you get out of it. But then there’s the second element, of placing it in the music, and I think Nick can talk about that.

Nick Zammuto: From the compositional side, I think we wait for more of a critical mass now before the compositions start, because we have access to so much more material since we’ve started stopping at thrift shops along the tour routes. For example, we kept finding all these summer camp videos wherever we went. And it would be cool to make a video out of one summer camp, but if you have 30 of them it’s the summer camp video of all time. So, we’ve been waiting for the sample library to reach its critical mass, where it makes sense to really dig in and find patterns in a larger group of related materials. I think we’ve been waiting longer before diving in, and it’s a more demanding process as we go along. We just need more material all the time. It’s sort of like a snowball.

Looking toward The Way Out, a focus on self-help tapes as a source seems like a perfect framework for the kind of work that you two do. There must have been plenty of source material available for that.

Nick: It naturally came out of what Paul was collected. When we were on those tours he found hundreds of tapes that fit the profile of this kind of outdated self-help tone. There was so much of it we just started making tracks of it, and it turns out there was at least enough for three tracks. We used those to bookend the record.

Paul: Every format of recorded media reflects the period of time in which it was used, so I guess the ’80s were particularly heavy on self-help. It’s moved to the Internet now, but back then it was just on cassettes. It was also a cheap way for kids to record. The cheapest and the first real home-recording device was cassette recording. That’s why we keep finding kids recordings. It’s really unusual. There’s just nothing like it.

What was the source of the recordings with the rough-talking kids on “A Cold Freezin’ Night”?

Nick: There was a movie in the ’90s called Home Alone 2, with Macaulay Culkin, and there was a tape recorder in that movie that he uses to disguise his voice when the bad guys are looking for him. All the kids who saw that movie really wanted one of those tape recorders so they started marketing them to kids. It was called The Talkboy, and so, all throughout the mid-’90s, kids are recording stuff on these tapes, and we just kept finding these tapes in thrift shops that just said “Talkboy” on them. Lo and behold, all the kids’ voices on that track, “A Cold Freezin’ Night,” come from a few of those Talkboy tapes. When you give a tape recorder all inhibition just goes out the window, and I think it’s a pretty universal thing. When you give a kid, especially a boy, a tape recorder, they find every reason in the world to use all the curse words that they know, so that’s what’s up with that. I think a lot of people assume those are our kids but they’re definitely not.

Paul: It’s funny. I think if you would ask kids to do it, it wouldn’t have come out the way they do when they’re completely uninhibited, in their own world, playing with each other with a cassette recorder. Adults are not in on that.

There are some amazing moments drawn from your self-help recordings. What was the source of the sample that makes a reference to the listener being filled up with orange liquid?

Paul: That’s actually from a record, an LP. There’s a really particular quality to these self-hypnosis grooves. They kind of have a word that they keep repeating to snap you into or snap you out of self-hypnosis. One of the elements that all of them have is that usually these people speak very clearly and slowly, so their language, their voices, are easy to cut, and the words are easily rearrangeable into a new narrative. And we just make them say the stuff that they really didn’t say to begin with, but they’re kind of asking for it.

And then there’s the great track-closing line, “And now go put on some undergarments and go deeper.”

Nick: Yeah, it’s definitely like the keystone to the arch. [Laughing] It’s so unexpected.

Have you run into any clearance issues with any of the material you’ve used?

Nick: So far so good.

Paul: I think this might be our most daring record in that respect, but I think we’re pretty damn careful. So, no, we haven’t really run into that.

You did an admirable job of blending found recordings with your own music on The Way Out. Is it important for you to make those tracks as seamless as possible?

Nick: Yeah, we certainly want to keep it unclear. We’d prefer to have people guessing than to make it too obvious. That’s the way we try to disappear into the process as much as possible.

Do you spend a great deal of time tweaking the finished pieces before you release an album?

Nick: Yeah, I think we’re both extremely anal about what our tolerance is for it, and over time it’s just getting worse and worse. The demands of the music are greater and greater every time we sit down to make a track. I was talking to Jeff Tweedy over the weekend. We played at a Wilco festival in our hometown, in North Adams here, and he said to me, after the show, “I think you put more work into one track than I have ever put into an album.” I guess that’s how we operate, to go as far as we can with the production, but still to hopefully have not like an over-polished quality. It’s not like we sit down to record them in a day; it usually takes months of work to get a track.

That’s never occurred to me. Rather than over-polished, your tracks just sound obviously well-constructed.

Nick: It’s important, when we’re making the music, to know when to stop cleaning things up. Like, don’t remove all the noise from a sample. You don’t want to remove the signature of the medium that you’re working in, but, at the same time, it has to translate the first time people hear it. You’ve got to be real careful about how you mix everything together.

(www.thebooksmusic.com)