The Books
http://www.thebooksmusic.com
styles: sound collage, electro-acoustic. sample music
others: Prefuse 73, Dntel, Flim, Patrick Wolf, The Avalanches, musique-concrete
 Lost
and Safe
Tomlab, 2005
rating: 3.5/5
reviewer: mr p
The thing I love most about the Books is their ability to take the
most mundane, trivial observations and recontexualize them into
something more memorable, if not more meaningful. Exemplified in their
first two releases, The Books took advantage of their technological
resources and not only produced albums that play with the conventional
sense of time, but have made it as much a part of their music as the
actual sounds. Because of their
cut-and-paste syntactical rearrangements, self-sampling, and recontextualization
techniques, their music never felt quite linear. A tension between the
instrumentation and the almost anti-narratives of the samples pervaded
their music, implicating the listener in its curious
delivery. The Books never made sense, and that was the fun part.
The interesting thing about Lost and Safe is that this tension
is starting to find some resolution. In the opening track "A Little
Longing Goes Away," the typically spastic arrangements and confusing
collage of sounds are replaced by Nick's vocals and a minimal Hohner clavinet that
delicately accentuates
his voice. Yes, that's right. Vocals play a big part in this album,
and the vocals in this song (as well as "Smells Like Content," "An Owl
with Knees," "Twelve Fold Chain," and "None But Shining Hours") become
a structuring device that essentially deemphasizes the non-vocal elements,
especially the samples. Rather than listening and waiting for one
disconnected sample after another, you're listening to hear what Nick
is singing about, no matter how detached the lyrics are. This causes
the listener to experience the album in a much more outright narrative
fashion, as opposed to simply getting lost in the discontinuous
samples. The songs are not quite as confusing, good or bad.
Though the experience of these songs are much
easier to digest than their previous releases, Nick and Paul are still
creatively pushing themselves with this
album. This is particularly evident in the songwriting process. What's veiled is that a lot of the samples have
an aleatoric element (you should have a sense of what this means if
you've heard Thought for Food), as they were found in unmarked
cassettes at Salvation Armies across the east coast. In addition to
cello, guitar, mandolin and banjo, they also created new instruments,
like a set of tuned plastic drainpipes for "Vogt Dig for Kloppervok"
and a metal filing cabinet with subwoofers on "An Animated Description
of Mr. Maps" (which explains the stark dynamic shifts!). Indeed, The
Books are still exploring different ways to approach songwriting, and
that's very promising.
In our TMT interview with them, Nick said "There are those moments
where you have to really throw a wrench in your own process in order
to take a track to a place where it really wants to go." I suppose
Nick's voice is that wrench. Although he has a pleasant voice (think
Ben Gibbard's and Dan Snaith's vocal chords tied together with twine)
with some interesting lyrics, the vocals have the highest potential
for alienating their audience. My tastes obviously favor the aesthetic
of their previous albums, but I thoroughly enjoy this release and
respect their willingness to wrench-it-up. If you
like their previous albums, you'll definitely have fun hearing some familiar
samples (listen carefully to "If Not Now, Whenever"). Plus, songs like "It
Never Changes to Stop" and "Be Good to Them Always" are
among the
most intriguing songs they've penned yet. But if I could only take two
albums by The Books to Mars, I'd surely be listening to Thought for
Food and Lemon of Pink while the Earth's inhabitants blow
themselves up. That's not the case, however, so I'll definitely
consider throwing on Lost and Safe as I get blown up with
everyone else.
1. A Little Longing Goes Away
2. Be Good To Them Always
3. Vogt Dig For Kloppervok
4. Smells Like Content
5. It Never Changes To Stop
6. An Animated Description Of Mr. Maps
7. Venice
8. None But Shining Hours
9. If Not Now Whenever
10. An Owl With Knees
11. Twelve Fold Chain
 Lemon
of Pink
Tomlab, 2003
rating: 5/5
reviewer: mr p
Thought for Food, The Books debut release, was one of the most absorbing
releases of 2002. Sounding both complex and simplistic, the album was perhaps
only faulted by its slight (very slight) incoherence and inconsistency. However,
Lemon of Pink, their second release for Tomlab, replaces the faults with
their opposites (i.e. coherence and consistency) while still retaining the
complex/simplistic duality that has characterized the group's sound ever since
its inception.
Fronted by Nick Willscher Zammuto and Paul de Jong, The Books' shtick, if you
will, is the masterful use of Western and Eastern vernacular as both form and
content. At one moment, the words are used as additional rhythmic texture – in
other moments, the words are utilized for literary purposes. As stated on their
website, however, The Books' goal is not to "appropriate or take possession of
sound, but rather to re-contextualize within a musical continuum." So, instead
of playing the voice samples exactly in the context recorded, The Books strip
all contextual meaning by cutting them up, playing snippets, or overtly mixing
sentences around. Thus, in the fashion of the Assemblage visual artists, The
Books create new thoughts about their found objects by placing them under a
different light.
But with all the dialectical processes in work (form/content, sample/live,
complex/simple), there's no synthesis, no hybridization, no watered-down
combination of the pairs. In fact, it's hard enough to discern between a sampled
instrument and a live instrument, and it's precisely this ambiguity that keeps
the album ticking. In short, Lemon of Pink is an amalgamation of
disparate elements that bounce off one another without shooting out of orbit - a rich introduction
to the world of sample music. And it just so happens to be one of the best
albums of 2003.
1. The Lemon of Pink
2. The Lemon of Pink
3. Tokyo
4. Bonanza
5. S is for Evrysing
6. Explanation Mark
7. There is No There
8. Take Time
9. Don't Even Sing About It
10. The Future, Wouldn't That Be Nice?
11. A True Story of a Story of True Love
12. That Right Ain't Shit
13. P.S.
 Thought
for Food
Tomlab, 2002
rating: 4.5/5
reviewer: almost cool
This is one of those little gems of an album that will unfortunately slip by
most people. Arriving on the smaller (but definitely upcoming) Tomlab label out
of Germany, the disc is part sound-collage, part electro-acoustic, and just
plain fun all around. The duo of Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong mix acoustic
guitars, found sound samples, stringed instruments, programmed beats, and all
kinds of other little digital tricks for a disc that breathes an uncommon amount
of life with a human touch. It's one of those releases that sounds like kind of
a mess when explained (keep that in mind), but is actually quite refreshing and
fun.
For a prime example, one need look no further than the first track of "Enjoy
Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again," Opening with a simple guitar
melody, the track layers on sound samples from different sporting events (golf
and tennis) in a rather clever way, while adding another layer of manipulated
guitar. Eventually, a couple other samples come into the mix (one of a lady
blathering on and on about something) before the whole track speeds up and slams
into a pretty segment with cut-up guitars and violin. See, I told you it sounds
like a complete mess, but even after repeated listening it somehow holds
together.
Part of the reason the disc is successful is that the group allows the tracks to
breathe on their own. Things aren't piled on so thickly that you can't
distinguish one element from another, and that actually works to their advantage
as they turn vocal phrases into musical elements and digitally manipulate the
real instruments in just the right ways to fill in the gaps. "All Bad Ends All"
is a jaunty little track with another simple guitar melody that is layered with
little clicks, samples of glasses tinkling, kids giggling, and people talking.
Again, it sounds like it wouldn't work, but it's toe-tapping every damn time it
comes on.
While it may not seem like it at first (simply because their sources come from
so many different places), one of the definite knacks of the group is choosing
samples that have a spontaneity to them. "All Our Base Are Belong To Them"
(turning around a well-worn internet joke phrase) mixes in samples of people
laughing and talking, as well as backyard animal life, but the plucky little
guitar melody and singing (one of the only tracks on the disc with it) all flows
together so nicely that every time a sample of a woman laughing rolls around, I
find a smile coming to my face. On a more melancholy side of things "Motherless
Bastard" begins with an absolutely odd sample of a bit of dialogue between a
little girl and her father(?) before flowing into easily the most stirring track
on the disc.
Strictly musically speaking, nothing too complicated is going on within any of
the tracks, but it's the combination of everything that creates a satisfying
whole. Sure, there are tracks on the disc that simply don't work as well as
others (the two short album closing tracks of "A Dead Fish Gains The Power Of
Observation" and "Deaf Kids" contain little of the subtlety and excellence that
the previous 10 do), but that's a minor nitpick with an otherwise unique disc.
I'll be honest in that it probably isn't for everyone, but as mentioned above,
there's something about Thought for Food that's refreshing and simply
feels more natural than most records making use of heavy digital manipulation.
There now, hopefully that made some sense.
1. Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again
2. Read, Eat, Sleep
3. All Bad Ends All
4. Contempt
5. All Our Base Are Belong to Them
6. Thank You Branch
7. Motherless Bastard
8. Mikey Bass
9. Excess Straussess
10. Getting the Job Done
11. A Dead Fish Gains the Power of Observation
12. Deaf Kids
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