Though its upcoming album heavily samples self-help and hypnosis cassettes, The Books won’t put you to sleep
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Now 10 years into its career, New York-based folk experimentalist outfit The Books has had a long head start on its peers. Building playful, melodic songs from cut-up audio snippets that cover everything from spoken word to found sound, the duo helped spearhead the notion that sample-based music could be at once playful and heady.
It's been quite a while since the pair released any new music, though. Its last album proper, Lost and Safe, was released in 2005 and was followed only by an anthology of samples, Music for a French Elevator and Other Short Format Oddities, in 2006.
On the phone from New York City, Books founders Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong explain what they've been up to for the last few years. “We both have families now,” de Jong says. “They've been taking up a lot of our time. And we've been refocusing on expanding our video and sound libraries. I've been working on a soundtrack for a documentary for a long time.”
De Jong wasn't the only one dabbling in the world of film, either. Zammuto used the time off to work as an editor on a feature-length film. Now, the two minds have reconvened to focus on their fourth proper album, and dabbling in film has given them a fresh perspective.
“Coming back from working in a visual medium has changed how I think about music,” Zammuto says. “I think this record has longer lines in it as a result. It's more themed in a way, from track to track. Each track is a universe that's more contained, and it seems to be a natural progression. It feels right.”
The pair’s fourth album, which does not yet have a title, counts among its audio sources a variety of samples from self-help and hypno-therapy tapes. As Zammuto explains, it was a risky choice that paid off. “It's easy to imagine how this could be a very bad idea, like ‘You are getting sleepy’ but actually there's a lot of energy in those productions. They try to bring you into sort of a trance state where you can imagine things more clearly, and oftentimes they use energy that's very unique. To borrow that energy and re-contextualize it in different ways has been really fun to do — and they speak so slowly and clearly that it's easy to recut what they say.”
As much as they enjoyed making the record, the pair still has to face the business side of the music industry. All the self-help tapes in the world don’t make it any easier to wade through the myriad options for releasing music these days.
“It's as challenging as you make it for yourself,” de Jong says. “You can't rely on record sales, even if you make a completely saleable record. That part of the market is vanishing before our very eyes. That's not really a complaint. What it did to us was actually force us to develop a light show to aid our performances onstage. It's also forced us to seriously delve into video. The market shaped the way we make our art.”
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