Words by Carmen Yuen
Photo by Nino P.
Januar 17th, 2004

The Books are hard to shelve. Their elusively-titled new album, The Lemon of Pink (TomLab), hints at the unclassifiable nature of their music – you’ll hear folk instruments right beside blues scatting and samples of a typewriter and TV dialogue. For the Books, words are for playing with, and their songs are inhabited by voices, from a Japanese airline stewardess to Einstein. Perhaps the best way to describe their music is visually; their incongruent sounds are cut up and juxtaposed like the elements of a Dada or Surrealist painting. When you listen to the Books, ideas and images flow into your consciousness, pulling up surprising connotations, as if you were drifting into a dream.

Some of this innovation certainly stems from the distinctive stories of the collaborators. Massachusetts-born Nick Zammuto worked in art preservation and became fascinated with sound sculptures and music, before abandoning the urban landscape of Los Angeles to trek along the Appalachian Trail. Paul de Jong, who grew up in the Netherlands, studied the cello from a young age and experimented extensively with sound recording and manipulation. Paul and Nick met in New York, clicked over their musical experiences, and made Thought for Food, 2002′s critical masterpiece. Enter Anne Doener – who Nick met during his wanderings – the supplier of sublime vocals featured throughout The Lemon of Pink.

The Books may sample and mix textures, but their music is overwhelmingly warm, especially since Nick sings on the new album. However, there remains a level of removal from the rarely-photographed duo, and fittingly, the Books respond jointly to e-mail interviews.

The Lemon of Pink is on numerous ‘best-of’ charts in Europe, and the indie music scene is buzzing about the Books. What are your feelings about this reaction to your music?
Surprise, delight, goosepimples, general self-consciousness, acute self-love, debilitating echophrenia, aphasia.

How is the response different in Europe and the United States?
It’s difficult to generalize, since everyone’s response seems to be so personal. We would like to think that people who enjoy the music probably have more in common with each other than they do with many of their countrymen.

It’s hard to imagine how your music would translate in a live environment. First, there’s the nature of the pre-recorded samples, and second, your music seems to warrant a unique stage experience. What are your live shows like?
There has only been one show so far, in Chicago last October at the Third Coast Festival. Nick thought it felt like being unexpectedly bitten by a jellyfish while floating in amniotic fluid. Paul thought it felt like a hot-dog-eating contest, in reverse. Anne saved both of our asses. It was a set in which we played extended versions and reinterpretations of some of our tracks from both albums. We also threw in a few traditional tunes with alternative instrumentations. We all played our instruments (cello, guitars, bass, banjo, fiddle), made various vocalizations, and triggered samples and rhythm tracks from a sampler. We didn’t have a computer with us; in fact, we’ve never owned a laptop.

Who do you want to tour with?
Anne! Ideally, if we tour, we’d like to tour on our own.

If you had an unlimited concert budget, what type of live production would you create?
We would keep it very simple and spend a lot of time rehearsing. A really good clean amplification is very important for getting the kind of subtleties we’re interested in, and a quiet, focused venue is key. As far content goes, we are thinking quite out of the box. We don’t like to waste anything, so an unlimited budget might not be necessary. Ideally, we would be self-sufficient in transportation, cook our own meals, avoid luxury hotels, camp out.

I would describe the Books’ music as being very visual, especially after looking at your unconventional website and reading about Nick’s background in art. In your opinion, how does visual art figure into your music?
Film, painting, sculpture, cooking, chemistry and music is all the same thing at their center. As Lao Tzu said, “Things are only distinguished by distinction.” We try to name things as little as possible, and focus on connections and flow. One of our long-term dreams is to compose in such a way that music and image arise simultaneously. We are starting to build up libraries of images and videos that are similar to our sound libraries, and we are making connections between images and sounds that could grow into full-length productions.

If I were to associate the Books’ music with any artistic movement, it would be Dada. I see a similarity between the ‘random’ samples in your music and the juxtaposed, pre-made fragments in Dada collages. “Explanation Mark” reminds me of Dada spoken-word recordings of nonsense syllables and phrases. What do you think of this connection?
Hmmm…We always thought of “Explanation Mark” as a love song. Dada is a little nihilistic for our taste, but you can’t blame them considering it was a direct reaction to the moral, political and economic chaos induced by WWI. The beautiful thing about the ‘question everything’ mentality of Dada is that it spawned surrealism, which is much more up our alley. The surrealists were interested in expressing a total freedom of imagination, and they were on the right track until they started writing their own manifestos.

Some reviewers have focused only on the absurdity, humor and randomness of The Lemon of Pink. What are they missing?
Random? We’re not random. We are control freaks. They might be missing the music, the subtleties, the flow, the dynamics, the narrative. Some people freak out when overt literal meaning is removed from language, but you get used to hanging if you hang long enough.

Many of the lyrics in your songs are minimal and repetitive. How much meaning do the words convey, especially in paradoxes such as ‘With your eyes closed, close your eyes‘? How should people approach the lyrics that don’t always make literal sense?
Try it! You can close your eyes with your eyes closed. Nonsense is not always no-sense. Rationality can only go so far in music, and in experience in general. The absurd is the back door to the profound. It’s like the front door is locked, so you have to go around back and find the key hidden in the garden.

In addition to singing on the tracks, you incorporate numerous samples of different voices. The speech is sometimes recognizable, but it is also obscured, nonsensical, or spoken in a foreign language. What fascinates you about language and human communication?
We’re humans. Language is the richest thing that we have since it activates our minds so completely. Our brains evolved in parallel with our development of language, so in a sense it is the most human thing there is. Language not only carries literal meaning, but also personal identity, gender, emotion, local accents, slang, and it’s the most sonically complex sound we experience in our daily lives. Not to mention the visual component: written text, fonts, and handwriting. People are tuned into language in very intense and personal ways, so we are very interested in playing with it.

In the songs on The Lemon of Pink, the listener hears snippets of voices and everyday sounds, such as footsteps and TV dialogue. The effect isn’t jarring, but surprisingly soothing and familiar. It conjures up a dream atmosphere that reminds me of Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon. What influences do psychology and the subconscious have in your music?
The digital technology that is now readily available for editing and organizing libraries of sound has significantly expanded our ability to free-associate. We’re able to move very freely and intuitively through our world of sound so we can find compelling connections between otherwise disparate elements. In this way, we free up our subconscious minds to make decisions in music, without getting bogged down by the limitations of an organic memory. Not that we are technocrats, but it’s a deeply satisfying process.

Your music can be interpreted as being composed of two elements – the ‘traditional’ singing and melodies played by folk and classical instruments, and ‘experimental’ electronics and samples. How do these two elements interact? In writing, do you approach them separately or as a whole?
Always as a whole. They arise simultaneously. They converse with one another, and they support one another. We like that feeling of tenuous balance where everything will fall apart if one piece is removed.

What are some interesting ‘origin stories’ about the sounds and samples on The Lemon of Pink?
The first spoken interview we ever did was on CBC’s Brave New Waves. Our interviewer, Patty Schmidt (“P.S.”) sent us the uncut recording of the entire session, and one evening we just cut out all content and ended up with the ambiguous giddiness that became the last track on The Lemon of Pink. The funny thing is, we never met Patty, since we talked to her from the CBC studio in New York via satellite while she was in Montreal. It was the most abstract flirt imaginable. Brave New Waves put the entire interview online, so if you’re interested in hearing the origin, surf to their archives.

When you go out and record sounds, what catches your ears?
We like sounds that are idiosyncratic; sounds that have elements that are difficult to describe. We are also interested in sounds that have valence, sounds that can plug into other sounds. We’ve found that there are very few acoustic sounds that aren’t like this. Loud sounds, on the other hand, tend to just blind our ears.

Can you describe some of the goodies in your ‘Must Use’ folder on your computer?
Well, we have the numbers 1 to 1,000,000 in French. (A few are missing.) We found an older fellow saying, ‘If you work very hard, my boy, someday you may become, ehhh, women.’ We have Louis Armstrong saying, ‘Yeah, sometimes I feel like a whole mess of black-eyed peas and rice.’ We have an English lady who says, ‘Somewhere above the middle of the front of the top of front, a little beneath the middle of the front of the top.’ And now we have four or five more whiskey sodas.

As a scholar of Eastern philosophy, I thought it was interesting that you discussed Lao Tzu in an interview. When I first heard your music, I didn’t form this particular connection, but some of the lyrics remind me of Zen koans, and your music certainly has a Taoist playfulness and embracement of nature. Can you explain the connection, and how these ideas are relevant to you and your understanding of the world?
Nature is a most generous counsel to most of our problems. We all spend a lot of time outside walking around, whether we are in the city or in the mountains. Overstimulation can be a real problem. We all have a deep need for silence, some sort of stable place to refresh our minds and bodies. Taoism and Buddhism have offered some very practical methods for being quiet.

Overall, do you feel that people are ‘getting it’?
In the sense that everyone seems to get something different out of it, yes.

The Books’ music has elements from many genres, making it difficult to compare to the music of other bands. Which artists do you feel are on the same wavelength as you?
It’s a good time for music since the means of home production and distribution have become more widely available – it’s the new folk music. We feel very connected to this approach, but in terms of what we listen to regularly, our bandwidth is fairly broad. It would be unfair to single anyone out, because there are so many and they are so varied and there are good things in all ‘genres’. Genre is ‘something that is happening which is not happening at all.’ We are endlessly curious.

Listeners seem to form very different personal reactions to each of the songs. Do you try to convey a particular theme, message, mood, or personal experience in each song?
We are not one person, so playing and composing together is a way of getting to know each other. We pass through all different kinds of spaces, shared idealisms, and personal hang-ups. So, at the same time we are trying to stay true to ourselves, we have to remain respectful and open to the collaboration. In the end, this is what is conveyed.

Is the listener to form his own surprising connotations as he listens to the music?
Yes, the more you put into it the more you get out of it, hopefully. For us, making this music is like playing in the waves; it’s part active and part passive. We hope that it feels the same way for the listener.

What’s next for the Books?
Read, eat, sleep.