Books - The freaks of the folktronica era

Books' music is a puzzle that falls apart and reassembles itself with every listen. The only certainty is its origin: the American folk-country and bluegrass tradition; everything else is its own shredding into a heap of sonic offcuts that only occasionally let a glimpse of "song form" shine through. The tools of the trade for the American-Dutch duo made up of Nick "Zammuto" Willscher and Paul De Jong are, on one hand, the scissors of cut-and-paste, which devour sounds and tear them to pieces, and on the other, the "glue" – their collection of samples and found sound (the "library" they ironically take their name from) – which goes on to build entirely original musical collages. Alongside the likes of Mum, Colleen, Four Tet and Manitoba, Books can be counted among the pioneers of that tangle of acoustic roots and digital manipulation known as "folktronica".

The story of Nick Zammuto and Paul De Jong begins in 2000, when the two met in New York. Their backgrounds couldn't be more different. Zammuto – Italian-American father, German mother – studied chemistry and visual arts before moving to the Big Apple, where he devoted himself to synthetic-organic music while also trying to make a living as a cook. De Jong, on the other hand, had music in his DNA: the son of musicians, he had been playing cello since the age of 5, before specializing in theatre of the absurd, composing scores for ballets and graduating in music; after moving to New York, he studied at the Manhattan School of Music and taught cello, assisting the ninety-year-old electronic music pioneer Otto Luening.

Zammuto and De Jong, however, soon realized they shared a great musical love – for the American folk tradition – as well as a morbid curiosity for hunting down "samples", whether stolen snatches of street talk, sonic fragments or noises of every kind. These passions had already led Zammuto to record an electronic trilogy on CD-ROM titled "Solutiore Of Stareau" (1998-2000), whose third installment would later be reissued as "Willsher" (Apt B, 2000). Drawing on their personal collections of sounds and samples, the two began cooking up their bizarre musical meatballs, always seasoned with generous doses of humour.

When their first collages landed on the desk of Tom Steinle, boss of Tomlab, the Books adventure officially began. Invited to make an album over an extended timeframe by 2002, the two worked mostly on the road: De Jong split his time between New York and Holland, while Zammuto, gripped by a sudden mystical crisis, dropped everything to walk the 2,200 miles of the Appalachian Trail on foot, from Maine to Georgia. Despite the distance, the two kept in touch through phone calls and a steady exchange of mini-discs. Only once Zammuto settled in New York, working as an assistant hotel manager, could the album finally come to life in the freezing basement of the Elmer's Inn.

An unprecedented melting pot of glitch textures and electro-acoustic scores, Thought For Food (2002) throws the listener off balance from the very first notes, scattering a series of "clues" to be patiently gathered in order to decipher its puzzle. It's a constant "treasure hunt" in search of sounds and their expressive potential, in a subtle game of additions (of rhythms, samples, instruments) and subtractions (everything fading into ambient languor, down to silence, a component that's anything but secondary to the record). Three elements form its skeleton: acoustic guitar, violin (or cello) embellishments, and vocal fragments. Around this triad unwind skeins of folk lullabies completely turned inside out: chords chopped up and reconstructed with audio-editing software, in a work of cut-up not too far removed from John Cage's avant-garde techniques. Only a handful of other instrumental touches are added – gusts of synth, accordion phrases, sporadic percussion or bass lines ("Mikey Bass") – but always sucked into a vortex of ticks, hisses, bleeps and loops.

The oblique genius of Brian Eno, the irreverence of Faust, but also the dazed classicism of the Penguin Café Orchestra hover over these twelve chamber-music miniatures for freaks of the folktronica era. Even the apparent nonsense of the vocal samples follows its own peculiar logic: in "Read, Eat, Sleep", for instance, over a bed of acoustic arpeggios and synthetic bells, the voices spell out the words "r-e-a-d- e-a-t- s-l-e-e-p", before alternating different pronunciations of the word "aleatoric", until the main voice explains: "By digitizing thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric music", thus describing the formation process of a phantom "aleatoric music".

The vocal samples are wildly varied (and hilarious). There's sports commentary in the opening "Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again". There's a countdown in "All Our Base Are Belong To Them", pierced by noisy guitar chords, with the "real" singing (the only one on the record) echoing Pink Floyd's "Mother". On "Contempt", a male dialogue dusts off the questions Brigitte Bardot asked her husband in Jean-Luc Godard's film of the same name ("What about my ankles, do you like them?", "My thighs... do you think they're pretty?") in a surreal sketch, slowed down and wrapped in waltz cadences in the guitar-and-violin duet. "Motherless Bastard" is the small drama of an abandoned child ("You have no mother and father... they left, they went somewhere else"), immersed in a sweet, Fahey-esque bucolic piece for guitar, cello and bass drum.

Elsewhere, the Books' files surrender to delusions of pure Dadaist stock, releasing Latin American scents on "All Bad Ends All", losing themselves in the ambient mists of "Thankyoubranch" or staging the pantomime of "Deaf Kids". The only track with (almost) coherent meaning is "Getting The Done Job", for banjo and double voice, which seems to reshuffle the deck of Richard Thompson's songwriting. The curtain closes on a "Silenzio", spoken in Italian.

An eccentric carousel of sonic inputs, Thought For Food brings the Zammuto-De Jong firm's library into the underground's finest salon, making people cry miracle at the altar of "folktronica". Perhaps all the Books are missing is one small extra push toward a definitive synthesis of their "collage-ism", as seductive as it is, at times, scattershot.

Encouraged by the unexpected success, the pair move their studio into a small, freezing apartment in North Adams, Massachusetts, and begin work on their second album, The Lemon Of Pink, again released by Tomlab in 2003. Joining them is their friend Anne Doerner, who lends her clear voice to their alchemy. For the first time, then, the duo also makes use of original "vocals".

The Books' laptop music, this time, sifts through the history of Japan, from the Middle Ages to the present, revisiting it in a gallery of naive sound panels. Micro-electronics, strings, voices (in English, Japanese and — once again — Italian) are set into new collage-songs, like communicating vessels in a continuous osmotic flow. Thirteen chamber sonatinas that, compared to the debut, pay the price of feeling "already heard", while gaining in refinement and formal polish. In short: depending on taste, it's either the classic "mature album" or the first sign of a possible mannerism.

The overture of "The Lemon Of Pink Pt. 1" says it all: within a minute, a piano riff lifted from a crackling old vinyl, a banjo, scattered violin fragments and a sampled female voice repeating the phrase that gives the album its title all follow one another, before Doerner's "human" singing takes over. In the second part, instead, the title track turns into an abstract sketch for cello.

Playing with sounds the way Hervé Tullet played with colours in the almost identically titled children's book "Pink Lemon", the Books indulge in all sorts of tricks and gags, moving with a lightness of touch worthy of the best O'Rourke. They have a female voice recite (in Italian) the months of the year (the restless cello sonata of "S Is For Everysing"), hand the (initially) country score of "Tokyo" to a cyborg (on which even the voice of a Japan Airlines flight attendant appears), graft electro veins onto post-rock textures ("There Is No There", with a lovely final banjo solo), mutter excited whispers and giggles across the 55 seconds of "PS", and even quote Pier Paolo Pasolini's "Medea" ("Non c'è niente di naturale nella natura, ragazzo mio") on "Take Time". The record's roots-folk apotheosis, meanwhile, is the more composed "Don't Even Sing About It", where the unhinged spirit of Will Oldham wanders among string music-boxes, western echoes and cello flourishes.

A jewel of folk Dadaism, The Lemon Of Pink stands as the refinement of a project born almost as a game and grown into one of the most talked-about "cases" on the indie scene of recent years. Meanwhile, Zammuto and De Jong keep expanding their library of "found sound" and instrumental recordings. Renowned radio producer Gregory Whitehead invites them to compose the soundtrack for his radio drama (winner of a Sony Award) "The Loneliest Radio", which debuts on the BBC in autumn 2003. The Books then play their first-ever concert, alongside Whitehead himself, at the Third Coast Audio Festival in Chicago (October 2003). Alongside their work on sound, the pair also begin building a library of images, which goes on to fill their website.

Having left the freezing studio-apartment in North Adams for a cosier Victorian house, still in Massachusetts, the two folktronica pioneers continue, with Lost And Safe (2005), their work of hybridisation between traditional acoustic instruments (cello, guitar, mandolin, banjo) and electronic gadgetry. The album also incorporates a new set of sounds and instrumental treatments, including vintage keyboards and homemade electroacoustic recordings. The duo pushes harder on integrating original lyrics with samples, in an attempt to shape something closer to the concept of a "song" and to showcase Zammuto's progress as a singer. The result is 11 tracks that, while losing something in sheer inventiveness and unpredictability, still manage to preserve the freshness of a formula that, on its third outing, risked showing signs of wear.

So here are the Books, setting off by gondola for "Venice", an exotic souvenir built around an asynchronous voice-and-music dialogue, complete with stolen Italian phrases ("così, più in là"), warm beats and sampled applause for garnish. The lively portrait of the enigmatic Mr. Maps is made surreal by percussive commotion ("An animated description of Mr. Maps"); while on "If Not Now, Whenever" it's even a ringing telephone that counterpoints guitar and voices. At other times the Books sound like a glitch version of Simon & Garfunkel ("Smells Like Content", a kind of stripped-down acoustic serenade, or the closing whisper-sung ballad "Twelve Fold Chain"). In their most contemplative moments, the two take refuge in a sleepwalker's ambient music, sublimated by the opening "A Little Longing Goes Away": a handful of chords sketching an ethereal watercolour, whispers, hums, faint dissonances — essentially a country ballad dissected and decomposed. This penchant for hushed sonorities returns on "Vogt Dig For Kloppervok", where a string intro spills into an assortment of glitchery, with a guitar arpeggio trying to hold some kind of course amid a tidal wave of treated voices, percussion ticks, doors opening and closing. The Books' scissors even manage to shred a potential rap track to pieces ("Be Good To Them Always"), turning it into a slow-motion video game for sampled voices, skipping percussion and dizzying keyboards; and the lyrics are no less mocking: "Oh how sadly we mortals are deceived by our own imagination", goes one line.

The duo's repertoire of tricks remains vast, but it perhaps starts to suffer from the lack of a more "musical" backbone. Paradoxically, it's precisely the attempt to create an album of "songs", a kind of idiosyncratic "singer-songwriter" approach, that turns out to be the record's least successful aspect.

Meanwhile, the Books work on preparing the show they'll take on tour (which will include both musical performances and collections of sounds and videos) and are commissioned by the French Ministry of Culture to create an elevator soundtrack, already nicknamed "elevator music", in homage to the Eno-esque "Music For Airports".

Running into the Books' post-folk is like sinking into one long "stream of consciousness", at times earnest, at other times purely tongue-in-cheek. It's a genuinely intriguing exercise in intellectual stimulation, even if occasionally weighed down by one mannerism too many. Like any self-respecting puzzle, it demands patience, curiosity and powers of observation, but in the end it rewards the listener, even leaving a smile on their face thanks to that subtle (self-)irony that has always kept the pair from spilling over into the kind of cerebralism practised by dissectors of (musical) corpses. Besides, how can you not warm to two accomplished avant-gardists who say "you can just call us Simon and Glitchfunkle"? And in the end, it's just music to listen to in order to feel safe when you're lost. Or is it the other way round?

After a five-year hiatus, marked by changes in the lives of the Books' two principals and by a difficult landing at the Temporary Residence label, the duo made themselves heard again in 2010 with The Way Out, an album offering a new take on their usual wealth of sounds, samples and melodic shards.

From the infinite sonic archive that made them famous, the duo extracts beats and enveloping loops, unusual sixties cadences, hints of choral harmony, timid lounge-pop twists, retrofuturist propulsion, acidic obsessive drifts, acoustic incursions, ironic hip hop quotations, hypnotic lapping sounds, playful analogue trinkets, and even dreamy narcoleptic episodes drawn from a reworked and warped slowcore.

On The Way Out, however, the Books' organized chaos begins to show its seams, crossing the thin line that separates a fully realized work from an intellectual exercise pursued for its own sake. This is, ultimately, an album that revels in its puzzle-like play of sounds and styles, whose mission seems to be sketching subliminal messages rather than delivering a finished, coherent product - albeit within the same whirling variety that was hardly foreign to their previous work either. Surreal, enjoyable in its own way, and certainly able to grab attention, The Way Out returns the Books to a kind of arty manipulation that is nonetheless just as self-referential, pale attempts at re-presenting (de)constructions only briefly capable of making sense of a puzzle too intricate to be reduced to mere aesthetics. After the losing-and-finding-themselves of the previous album, a way out now seems more necessary than ever.

Contribution by Raffaello Russo (“The Way Out”)

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