Abderian Isomorphisms Clad in Velvet Cloaks: The Books in North Adams
by golyadkin
It's been quite a while since I talked to Nick Zammuto and co-conspirator Anne Doerner of The Books, who put out a rather startling album called The Lemon of Pink last year. The website I wrote for at the time was one of the many that fell all over themselves to throw good words at Nick, Anne, and fellow Book Paul DeJong (in Europe at the time of this discussion). The review I posted was written in what I reckoned to be the ramshackle, free-associative style of the album, and as such made very little literal sense. (I didn't say it then, so I'll say it now: hear this album.) Nick somehow came across the review and saw it - saw beyond the unsightly hubris of it - for what it was, which was a glowing mash note to musicians who had fashioned something innovative, something no less friendly for being so immaculate and polished, a joyful and sometimes very funny album that reached deep and often into the '03 bag of tricks and pulled out something timeless.
I reached Nick and Anne at the rooming house they sometimes share in North Adams, Massachusetts. It's the house where they shaped The Lemon of Pink from an ever-burgeoning library of found sounds, and from guitars, cellos and banjos frozen in liquid nitrogen and prodded and tonged to fit just so. It's also where they helped plant the seeds that became Gregory Whitehead's alternately hilarious and chilling radio play The Loneliest Road, which saw broadcast on the BBC last year. It's probably here, now that after two albums (the first being the equally inventive Thought for Food) they have everyone's undivided attention, that Nick, Paul and Anne will decide just what they're going to do next.
Nick: Anne, you can hear me too?
Anne: I can hear you.
Nick: Oh good. Okay. So we can all hear each other.
golyadkin: Great. All right, so I guess, why don't I start by asking you how you feel about the response you've been getting for the album?
Nick: It's mind-boggling. I mean, our heads are spinning rapidly. It's been incredibly encouraging. I don't really know what Anne thinks about it, (laughs) but...
Anne: I don't think much about it.
Nick: I think the thing that surprises me is just the range of responses. You know, everybody seems to comment on a different thing, or to have a different take on it, so that's the most satisfying for me is just seeing how everybody interprets it in a different way, and brings what they have to it.
golyadkin: Well, the album's such an open-ended kind of work. It seems like a game of free association for anyone who's listening.
Nick: Yeah. It's the same for us. I mean, electronic music is just 99% listening and 1% action. It's the audience as much as anybody else. So it's nice to see it come together.
golyadkin: How much difference did the studio make this time?
Nick: Well, the only difference in the programs we were using was just, we had a new computer so it was faster, basically, so we could do more layering and have finer control over the mastering and stuff like that, but the physical conditions were much different, cause we pretty much set up our shop here in North Adams, where Anne is living now up in this ramshackled old house on this hill in North Adams, kind of overlooking this post-industrial wasteland that is North Adams now. It's kind of one of those towns that all the industry moved out, got exported in the seventies, (and) the town went from a population of thirty thousand people to about ten thousand people over four or five years, so it was like a really serious crash, and the town is still recovering. But it was sort of an ideal place to work on this kind of stuff because the rent was very inexpensive and there's tons of space and it's really quiet. We got this old place up on the hill and we were living in this five apartment building, but I was the only person in the whole building, so we had free rein over the place.
Anne: The studio was like this little pantry off the kitchen.
Nick. Yeah, it wasn't really a studio.
Anne: I didn't even really know it was a studio until much later.
golyadkin: So the actual environment doesn't make that much difference towards the end result?
Nick: No, I think the process is still pretty much the same. Paul and I have sort of identical set-ups, so we were able to pass ideas back and forth through CDRs and stuff like that, and then when we had an idea going, he would come up from New York City and stay at the apartment in North Adams and we would live our domestic lives, and make music and improvise, and go through the sample collection and see how things fit together, and then we would go our separate ways again and work on things on our own, and come back and see what progress we'd made. By the end we really had to sit down and finalize everything. We did all of our own mastering and stuff like that, so the way you hear it on the record is the same exact way it came out of our studio, which is a satisfying thing for us, to have that kind of control. You know, Thought for Food was made in several different places over a long period of time, but The Lemon of Pink was pretty much made all in that single room, so it was the stable frame of reference that made a big difference for us, I think.
Anne: There was also the feeling of time pressure to finish it.
Nick: Yeah. Well, it was constructive as well as destructive, I think.
Anne: But it sort of made it more like itself.
Nick: Yeah, I mean the way I was thinking about it was, we basically had eight months to finish a record, so that's two tracks a month, or one and a half tracks a month, so we tried to keep to that schedule. I can't really keep more than one track in my head at any one time, so I had to work sort of sequentially through things, or I'd just get lost if I had too many things going on at once. I had to kind of focus my energy.
golyadkin: Were there any tracks that you got bogged down in?
Nick: At times, yeah. I mean,. my process is lots of ups and downs; it like giving birth, it's essentially painful in some way, but really worthwhile in the end. So yeah, I would just dream music and wake up music. It was very much my whole life for the time when I was working on it.
- ADHERE RECANT -
Part of the fun of The Lemon of Pink is in imagining where all those sounds originated. I blew the mystique for one of them - that's Nick's mother laughing halfway through "take time". Even when you know, though, it only helps you appreciate the workmanship behind it all. Anyone can record their mother laughing hysterically, all you need is a few dead baby jokes and a Panasonic RR-QR150. How, though, does it occur to you to bleed the sound of a flute right beside it to draw out harmonic effects? The phonic splice-and-dices that comprise the tracks "explanation mark" and "ps" are exhausting just to think about making. (The source material for "ps" can be found at the Brave New Waves website - it's Patti Schmidt interviewing the Books. It ended up sounding like a very different conversation indeed: my pal Rob Wood calls it "the most accurate replication of what it's like to be on mushrooms ever put to disc".
There's a lot of disparate, decontextualized voices on this album, and it only sems to make the end result seem pointedly personal. This is important: the technologies of capturing sound and feathering a track's bed with it is so often used for self-aggrandizing purposes. For over twenty years, rappers have been building temples to themselves out of mob movie quotes and disc jockey ramblings. Other sound collagists use the decontextualized to build political or cultural cluster bombs (Negativland, to name the most immediate). It's the improvised nature of the Books' sound sculptures that enable an intimate connection to be made with it. For the Books, it doesn't matter who did what where, only that it is given freely.
Nick: Yeah, it's sort of unimportant for us. It helps dissolve our egos. I mean, Paul said it beautifully one time, he said you can't process your own voice, you have to give it to somebody else, at least for a little while. So you can give it away and let it come back to you. You can't take ownership of it otherwise it becomes too egoistic.
golyadkin: I guess, from the stuff I've been reading, I can assume that you and Paul have sort of been getting to know each other in the process of making this music?
Nick: Oh yeah, for sure. We started right off the bat just working together. We kind of knew instantly that there was something that would happen if we got our stuff together.
golyadkin: And is it getting easier?
Nick: It's getting different. And uh, we've become really good friends, and we're sort of on this crazy adventure together and we lean on each other a lot for support, but we also try to give each other as much space as we need as well, and do our own things. So we try not to put a lot of pressure on each other. I think our primary goal at this moment, as our heads are rapidly spinning, is to stay sane and figure out what is going to satisfy us, and how we want to continue with our work, because we definitely want to continue with it. But we're absolutely not sure that we want to take the standard path, cause it just seems not worth it in so many ways. So we're going to try to figure out what we want to do, when we're going to do it, and we're going to take our time.
golyadkin: Would you be interested in doing more things like The Loneliest Road?
Nick: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that project was great. It felt really at home to do that kind of work. I think Gregory was just exceptionally good at what he does and very easy to collaborate with, so that made it easy.
golyadkin: How did he get in touch with you?
Nick: He heard our record somehow, and e-mailed us saying, you know, I'd love to work with you, and it turns out that he lives a half an hour from here. It kind of fell in place. We met him before he even started really working on the project, so we were kind of there as it was being spawned. We gave him a bunch of music even before he started writing the script and he ended up taking our improvisations and driving around the southwest in this rent-a-car and listening to the music until he made these characters as he was driving around Nevada. And he came back and recorded all the voices, and Paul and I just sat down in the studio for about two weeks straight and helped him put it all together and tighten it up.
golyadkin: Do you know if there are any plans to release it as a cd?
Nick: No, we talked to Gregory about this a little bit, but it's sort of on the back burner now. Making it more widely available would be nice, but I don't think it's going to go out of style anytime soon, so we haven't been rushing.
golyadkin: What about film?
Nick: I'd love to. I'd love to work with that. I think that's a possible future for The Books as well. We're starting to put together an image library and a video library that's sort of really similar to our sound library, so we can kind of make video and music that arrives simultaneously in a way, so that the image is really connected to the sound. You know, instead of a music video, where you have the music and they just kind of slap a video on top of it, you have something that is more unified. So we're working in that direction slowly. (laughs) We're at the very early stages of that. Um, and working on other people's films as well, absolutely. If the right project comes along I think we would jump on it.
golyadkin: Yeah, I think there's something, um, like the first album is obviously food-centered, and I know that you're a chef, Nick, and -
Nick: Not really. Well, Anne's a chef too, she's cooking for this yoga retreat -
Anne: All right, we're both chefs. (laughs)
Nick: Oh no, Anne, you've got to tell him about the yoginis.
Anne: You don't want to hear about this.
golyadkin: Tell me about the yoginis.
Anne: I'm trying to make them sprout wings from their shoulder blades. With ginger.
(Nick laughs)
golyadkin: Um, could you elaborate on that?
Anne: Elaborate on that?
golyadkin: Yeah.
Anne: That's actually the best way to put it. I've got a job (cooking) at the local yoga centre, which is in this old mill. For a month, there's a class training women to be yoga teachers, and there are all these amazing, springy women who like to eat a lot.
golyadkin: Wow. Yeah. Well, as I was saying, with the food allusions, and with working with the computer you're also looking at the sound. Do you think at all about synaesthesia? Like, the crossing over of the senses, is that -
Nick: Oh, yeah. Of course. Although you have a complete straightedge (here). I've never dabbled in drugs of any kind. So my experience is sort of different from, like, that word means something probably different to me than to other people who have tried that sort of thing.
golyadkin: Well, it doesn't have to be drug-induced.
Anne: Yeah, it doesn't have to come from drugs, Nick.
Nick: Well, anyway, that's what I always associate it with, you know, seeing music as colour or something like that but for me it's sort of all unified sensation. Seeing things and hearing things at the same time, and it's all kind of unified in (your) mind which is this other organ, which is completely mysterious to me. It sort of synthesizes the world in a way that, you know, half of what you hear, you're not actually hearing, and half of what you see you're not actually seeing. It's this idea of intuition that comes from the combination of all these sensory inputs; um, there's something very subtle going on, and I think the only way you can appreciate that kind of subtlety is if you give up on the idea of anything coming in as sort of different things and think of it (as though) you're just yourself in the world and, um... so, yeah, when I'm in the studio I'm definitely not aware of sight or sound at all. It's very much just one feeling. Even my emotions, even my sense of rhythm, even my sense of pitch, is just all on the same pattern. And even playing live music, I mean, Anne and Paul are just unbelievable musicians, and when they get together, they just respond to one another in an amazing way, and I know it's not all by ear. There's something mysterious going on there.
- WHISTLE SING -
The Books were invited last October to play the Third Coast Festival's "Audio Cabaret" in Chicago. They were enthusiastically received; however to date, it has been their only live performance. It was, in Anne's terms, a "very grueling" experience.
Anne: We tried to create something live that was something like what had been recorded but since the recordings themselves came from really, really fragmented kind of art and we - you can appreciate this - kind of sequentially randomized the arrangements of things. It was really difficult to find lines that could be played instrumentally with the same natural machine grace. So we had to really try hard, and we spent a month at each others' throats basically rehearsing, and somehow we pulled together this tight little thing that was received by a very kind audience of audiophiles. But we didn't want to do another thing like that right away because if we do another show, we want there to be more freedom and more spontaneity. At least that's what I think we all feel.
Nick: Yeah.
Anne: And so even though we right away were offered a lot of different types of tours and things, we all decided for one thing that we wanted to take a break from each other, for another from music, for at least a few months. So we haven't planned any more performances. But we're starting to think about it again.
Nick: Yeah, I think it's undoubtedly part of the future of this project is that, you know, we're going to get together without any pressure and we're going to try to figure out a way to play a live show that satisfies us all. Without having to worry about where it's going to be played and we'll just get it down and rehearse it and get it all comfortable and then we'll try to find the right venues for it. So it's off in the future somewhere. Hopefully sometime soon. But really the response in Chicago was very positive, so that's encouraging. They didn't boo anything.
Anne: They stood up.
Nick: Yeah, Anne was like the ringer. Anne sang this one old Cajun tune where people were just, like, jumping out of their seats. So it was a weird mixture of... all we had was a sampler on stage with us in terms of electronic equipment, so we had tracks kind of prearranged that we could play along with, and then we also had free samples that we could trigger at any time with pads, and...
golyadkin: And Paul played his cello...
Nick: Yeah, Paul had his cello and I had my guitar and Anne played fiddle and banjo and guitar sort of simultaneously, and we all had microphones, and so that's what the stage looked like, anyway. It was just a simple setup. I think that makes a lot of sense for us to kind of keep it as simple and stripped-down as we can for a live show. But we were able to achieve a pretty wide range of different styles and different sounds with what we had, so even though it it was difficult and we all had our doubts while we were putting it together, I think in the end it's... I think of it fondly.
(Anne laughs)
Nick: And positively.
golyadkin: Maybe it'll be easier next time.
Nick: Yeah, I think so. I hope so. (laughs)
golyadkin: Do you start with the samples you kind of want to work with and then build tracks underneath, or is it the other way around, or...
Nick: Anyway you can imagine. It happens in all different kinds of ways.
golyadkin: So there's no "process".
Nick: Yeah there's definitely... yeah. I mean, what we do is kind of, before we even start composing - like right now, we're in this process of just gathering raw materials from everywhere. I mean, I've just been - that's what I do all day long now is just try to find inspiring things -
golyadkin: Do you feel pressure to -
Nick: ...my friends and my family, and my own ideas. I'll sit down and play the guitar and try to find ideas and then, we have a huge body of sound, and we kind of just listen to it and listen to it and listen to it until it becomes kind of fingerprinted in our brains and then, it's amazing, but things just start to crystallize out of that, where certain pairings just seem right, you know, whether it's a certain rhythm with a certain sample or something like that, it kind of sets a tone that naturally wants to extend itself and sustain and evolve. That's usually how our tracks start is some basic sea crystal, and from there we just sort of build it in our own idiosyncratic ways.
golyadkin: How do your friends and family feel about being captured on record?
Nick: (laughs) Well, I try to treat them with complete respect, and I think -
Anne: His family loves it.
Nick: Yeah, they seem to be some of our -
Anne: His mom listens to his record at least five times every day.
Nick. Not every day, no.
Anne: Every time she talks to me.
Nick: No, she likes it because every time she listens to it she hears something different, and of course she has the most amazing laugh in the universe; I mean she's just, she picks up a big part of our hard drive just with her laughing. It's just like instant happiness when I hear my mom's laugh, so I tend to use it quite often.
- DEPLANE ARRIVE -
golyadkin: What's next for both of you? What's down the road for The Books and for yourselves as individuals?
Nick: Death. (laughs) Yeah, eventually. Maybe a - whoa, what was that? Oh I got a call-waiting thing.
golyadkin: Oh okay. Good thing we're wrapping it up then.
Nick: Actually, its' very loud.
Anne: Can you hang up on it?
Nick: No, it's just going to ring until they hang up.
golyadkin: Well, that's difficult.
Nick: I'm sorry, what was the question? Oh yeah, what's coming. I have absolutely no idea.
golyadkin: Except there's someone on the phone.
Nick: Well, I just applied to school, so I may be back in school sometime soon. I applied to a grad school for the visual arts and sculpture and I'll try to incorporate music and sculpture and video in kind of a way, kind of an "English" way, so if I can get in I think I'll go. But at the same time I think I can use a lot of that schoolwork for The Books in one way or another, so the project won't be nonexistent during that time, it'll just be probably a little slower. And uh, I like to hike a lot, so I'll probably do that sometime again soon, for an extended period. But as far as The Books go, we'll just kind of play it by ear and see what happens. I mean we kind of talked it over and, we're going to have to do another record eventually, so we might as well get the ball rolling now. So now we're in kind of the early stages of trying to figure out what the next record is going to sound like, and what kind of approach we want to take. But, uh, no specific plan. Oh, we just got a cool gig composing for an elevator in Paris.
golyadkin: Wow.
Nick: We're going to do three or four tracks, like thirty second tracks for an elevator in Paris, so when the elevator arrives people are going to have a certain chance of hearing our music, I think, or something. I guess it's pretty much up to us what we want to do. But we have a pretty large backlog of French samples that we want to tap into in some way. And I don't speak French, so...
golyadkin: I'm sure that will add to it.
Nick: But Paul and Anne both speak French so I'm sure they're (laughs) um, they'll be able to contribute in a more literary way. So we'll see.
golyadkin: Okay. We'll I'd like to thank you both very much for your time.
Nick: Sure. Anything else you want to talk about, let us know.
Links:
thebooksmusic
tomlab
It's been quite a while since I talked to Nick Zammuto and co-conspirator Anne Doerner of The Books, who put out a rather startling album called The Lemon of Pink last year. The website I wrote for at the time was one of the many that fell all over themselves to throw good words at Nick, Anne, and fellow Book Paul DeJong (in Europe at the time of this discussion). The review I posted was written in what I reckoned to be the ramshackle, free-associative style of the album, and as such made very little literal sense. (I didn't say it then, so I'll say it now: hear this album.) Nick somehow came across the review and saw it - saw beyond the unsightly hubris of it - for what it was, which was a glowing mash note to musicians who had fashioned something innovative, something no less friendly for being so immaculate and polished, a joyful and sometimes very funny album that reached deep and often into the '03 bag of tricks and pulled out something timeless.
I reached Nick and Anne at the rooming house they sometimes share in North Adams, Massachusetts. It's the house where they shaped The Lemon of Pink from an ever-burgeoning library of found sounds, and from guitars, cellos and banjos frozen in liquid nitrogen and prodded and tonged to fit just so. It's also where they helped plant the seeds that became Gregory Whitehead's alternately hilarious and chilling radio play The Loneliest Road, which saw broadcast on the BBC last year. It's probably here, now that after two albums (the first being the equally inventive Thought for Food) they have everyone's undivided attention, that Nick, Paul and Anne will decide just what they're going to do next.
Nick: Anne, you can hear me too?
Anne: I can hear you.
Nick: Oh good. Okay. So we can all hear each other.
golyadkin: Great. All right, so I guess, why don't I start by asking you how you feel about the response you've been getting for the album?
Nick: It's mind-boggling. I mean, our heads are spinning rapidly. It's been incredibly encouraging. I don't really know what Anne thinks about it, (laughs) but...
Anne: I don't think much about it.
Nick: I think the thing that surprises me is just the range of responses. You know, everybody seems to comment on a different thing, or to have a different take on it, so that's the most satisfying for me is just seeing how everybody interprets it in a different way, and brings what they have to it.
golyadkin: Well, the album's such an open-ended kind of work. It seems like a game of free association for anyone who's listening.
Nick: Yeah. It's the same for us. I mean, electronic music is just 99% listening and 1% action. It's the audience as much as anybody else. So it's nice to see it come together.
golyadkin: How much difference did the studio make this time?
Nick: Well, the only difference in the programs we were using was just, we had a new computer so it was faster, basically, so we could do more layering and have finer control over the mastering and stuff like that, but the physical conditions were much different, cause we pretty much set up our shop here in North Adams, where Anne is living now up in this ramshackled old house on this hill in North Adams, kind of overlooking this post-industrial wasteland that is North Adams now. It's kind of one of those towns that all the industry moved out, got exported in the seventies, (and) the town went from a population of thirty thousand people to about ten thousand people over four or five years, so it was like a really serious crash, and the town is still recovering. But it was sort of an ideal place to work on this kind of stuff because the rent was very inexpensive and there's tons of space and it's really quiet. We got this old place up on the hill and we were living in this five apartment building, but I was the only person in the whole building, so we had free rein over the place.
Anne: The studio was like this little pantry off the kitchen.
Nick. Yeah, it wasn't really a studio.
Anne: I didn't even really know it was a studio until much later.
golyadkin: So the actual environment doesn't make that much difference towards the end result?
Nick: No, I think the process is still pretty much the same. Paul and I have sort of identical set-ups, so we were able to pass ideas back and forth through CDRs and stuff like that, and then when we had an idea going, he would come up from New York City and stay at the apartment in North Adams and we would live our domestic lives, and make music and improvise, and go through the sample collection and see how things fit together, and then we would go our separate ways again and work on things on our own, and come back and see what progress we'd made. By the end we really had to sit down and finalize everything. We did all of our own mastering and stuff like that, so the way you hear it on the record is the same exact way it came out of our studio, which is a satisfying thing for us, to have that kind of control. You know, Thought for Food was made in several different places over a long period of time, but The Lemon of Pink was pretty much made all in that single room, so it was the stable frame of reference that made a big difference for us, I think.
Anne: There was also the feeling of time pressure to finish it.
Nick: Yeah. Well, it was constructive as well as destructive, I think.
Anne: But it sort of made it more like itself.
Nick: Yeah, I mean the way I was thinking about it was, we basically had eight months to finish a record, so that's two tracks a month, or one and a half tracks a month, so we tried to keep to that schedule. I can't really keep more than one track in my head at any one time, so I had to work sort of sequentially through things, or I'd just get lost if I had too many things going on at once. I had to kind of focus my energy.
golyadkin: Were there any tracks that you got bogged down in?
Nick: At times, yeah. I mean,. my process is lots of ups and downs; it like giving birth, it's essentially painful in some way, but really worthwhile in the end. So yeah, I would just dream music and wake up music. It was very much my whole life for the time when I was working on it.
- ADHERE RECANT -
Part of the fun of The Lemon of Pink is in imagining where all those sounds originated. I blew the mystique for one of them - that's Nick's mother laughing halfway through "take time". Even when you know, though, it only helps you appreciate the workmanship behind it all. Anyone can record their mother laughing hysterically, all you need is a few dead baby jokes and a Panasonic RR-QR150. How, though, does it occur to you to bleed the sound of a flute right beside it to draw out harmonic effects? The phonic splice-and-dices that comprise the tracks "explanation mark" and "ps" are exhausting just to think about making. (The source material for "ps" can be found at the Brave New Waves website - it's Patti Schmidt interviewing the Books. It ended up sounding like a very different conversation indeed: my pal Rob Wood calls it "the most accurate replication of what it's like to be on mushrooms ever put to disc".
There's a lot of disparate, decontextualized voices on this album, and it only sems to make the end result seem pointedly personal. This is important: the technologies of capturing sound and feathering a track's bed with it is so often used for self-aggrandizing purposes. For over twenty years, rappers have been building temples to themselves out of mob movie quotes and disc jockey ramblings. Other sound collagists use the decontextualized to build political or cultural cluster bombs (Negativland, to name the most immediate). It's the improvised nature of the Books' sound sculptures that enable an intimate connection to be made with it. For the Books, it doesn't matter who did what where, only that it is given freely.
Nick: Yeah, it's sort of unimportant for us. It helps dissolve our egos. I mean, Paul said it beautifully one time, he said you can't process your own voice, you have to give it to somebody else, at least for a little while. So you can give it away and let it come back to you. You can't take ownership of it otherwise it becomes too egoistic.
golyadkin: I guess, from the stuff I've been reading, I can assume that you and Paul have sort of been getting to know each other in the process of making this music?
Nick: Oh yeah, for sure. We started right off the bat just working together. We kind of knew instantly that there was something that would happen if we got our stuff together.
golyadkin: And is it getting easier?
Nick: It's getting different. And uh, we've become really good friends, and we're sort of on this crazy adventure together and we lean on each other a lot for support, but we also try to give each other as much space as we need as well, and do our own things. So we try not to put a lot of pressure on each other. I think our primary goal at this moment, as our heads are rapidly spinning, is to stay sane and figure out what is going to satisfy us, and how we want to continue with our work, because we definitely want to continue with it. But we're absolutely not sure that we want to take the standard path, cause it just seems not worth it in so many ways. So we're going to try to figure out what we want to do, when we're going to do it, and we're going to take our time.
golyadkin: Would you be interested in doing more things like The Loneliest Road?
Nick: Oh yeah, absolutely. Yeah, that project was great. It felt really at home to do that kind of work. I think Gregory was just exceptionally good at what he does and very easy to collaborate with, so that made it easy.
golyadkin: How did he get in touch with you?
Nick: He heard our record somehow, and e-mailed us saying, you know, I'd love to work with you, and it turns out that he lives a half an hour from here. It kind of fell in place. We met him before he even started really working on the project, so we were kind of there as it was being spawned. We gave him a bunch of music even before he started writing the script and he ended up taking our improvisations and driving around the southwest in this rent-a-car and listening to the music until he made these characters as he was driving around Nevada. And he came back and recorded all the voices, and Paul and I just sat down in the studio for about two weeks straight and helped him put it all together and tighten it up.
golyadkin: Do you know if there are any plans to release it as a cd?
Nick: No, we talked to Gregory about this a little bit, but it's sort of on the back burner now. Making it more widely available would be nice, but I don't think it's going to go out of style anytime soon, so we haven't been rushing.
golyadkin: What about film?
Nick: I'd love to. I'd love to work with that. I think that's a possible future for The Books as well. We're starting to put together an image library and a video library that's sort of really similar to our sound library, so we can kind of make video and music that arrives simultaneously in a way, so that the image is really connected to the sound. You know, instead of a music video, where you have the music and they just kind of slap a video on top of it, you have something that is more unified. So we're working in that direction slowly. (laughs) We're at the very early stages of that. Um, and working on other people's films as well, absolutely. If the right project comes along I think we would jump on it.
golyadkin: Yeah, I think there's something, um, like the first album is obviously food-centered, and I know that you're a chef, Nick, and -
Nick: Not really. Well, Anne's a chef too, she's cooking for this yoga retreat -
Anne: All right, we're both chefs. (laughs)
Nick: Oh no, Anne, you've got to tell him about the yoginis.
Anne: You don't want to hear about this.
golyadkin: Tell me about the yoginis.
Anne: I'm trying to make them sprout wings from their shoulder blades. With ginger.
(Nick laughs)
golyadkin: Um, could you elaborate on that?
Anne: Elaborate on that?
golyadkin: Yeah.
Anne: That's actually the best way to put it. I've got a job (cooking) at the local yoga centre, which is in this old mill. For a month, there's a class training women to be yoga teachers, and there are all these amazing, springy women who like to eat a lot.
golyadkin: Wow. Yeah. Well, as I was saying, with the food allusions, and with working with the computer you're also looking at the sound. Do you think at all about synaesthesia? Like, the crossing over of the senses, is that -
Nick: Oh, yeah. Of course. Although you have a complete straightedge (here). I've never dabbled in drugs of any kind. So my experience is sort of different from, like, that word means something probably different to me than to other people who have tried that sort of thing.
golyadkin: Well, it doesn't have to be drug-induced.
Anne: Yeah, it doesn't have to come from drugs, Nick.
Nick: Well, anyway, that's what I always associate it with, you know, seeing music as colour or something like that but for me it's sort of all unified sensation. Seeing things and hearing things at the same time, and it's all kind of unified in (your) mind which is this other organ, which is completely mysterious to me. It sort of synthesizes the world in a way that, you know, half of what you hear, you're not actually hearing, and half of what you see you're not actually seeing. It's this idea of intuition that comes from the combination of all these sensory inputs; um, there's something very subtle going on, and I think the only way you can appreciate that kind of subtlety is if you give up on the idea of anything coming in as sort of different things and think of it (as though) you're just yourself in the world and, um... so, yeah, when I'm in the studio I'm definitely not aware of sight or sound at all. It's very much just one feeling. Even my emotions, even my sense of rhythm, even my sense of pitch, is just all on the same pattern. And even playing live music, I mean, Anne and Paul are just unbelievable musicians, and when they get together, they just respond to one another in an amazing way, and I know it's not all by ear. There's something mysterious going on there.
- WHISTLE SING -
The Books were invited last October to play the Third Coast Festival's "Audio Cabaret" in Chicago. They were enthusiastically received; however to date, it has been their only live performance. It was, in Anne's terms, a "very grueling" experience.
Anne: We tried to create something live that was something like what had been recorded but since the recordings themselves came from really, really fragmented kind of art and we - you can appreciate this - kind of sequentially randomized the arrangements of things. It was really difficult to find lines that could be played instrumentally with the same natural machine grace. So we had to really try hard, and we spent a month at each others' throats basically rehearsing, and somehow we pulled together this tight little thing that was received by a very kind audience of audiophiles. But we didn't want to do another thing like that right away because if we do another show, we want there to be more freedom and more spontaneity. At least that's what I think we all feel.
Nick: Yeah.
Anne: And so even though we right away were offered a lot of different types of tours and things, we all decided for one thing that we wanted to take a break from each other, for another from music, for at least a few months. So we haven't planned any more performances. But we're starting to think about it again.
Nick: Yeah, I think it's undoubtedly part of the future of this project is that, you know, we're going to get together without any pressure and we're going to try to figure out a way to play a live show that satisfies us all. Without having to worry about where it's going to be played and we'll just get it down and rehearse it and get it all comfortable and then we'll try to find the right venues for it. So it's off in the future somewhere. Hopefully sometime soon. But really the response in Chicago was very positive, so that's encouraging. They didn't boo anything.
Anne: They stood up.
Nick: Yeah, Anne was like the ringer. Anne sang this one old Cajun tune where people were just, like, jumping out of their seats. So it was a weird mixture of... all we had was a sampler on stage with us in terms of electronic equipment, so we had tracks kind of prearranged that we could play along with, and then we also had free samples that we could trigger at any time with pads, and...
golyadkin: And Paul played his cello...
Nick: Yeah, Paul had his cello and I had my guitar and Anne played fiddle and banjo and guitar sort of simultaneously, and we all had microphones, and so that's what the stage looked like, anyway. It was just a simple setup. I think that makes a lot of sense for us to kind of keep it as simple and stripped-down as we can for a live show. But we were able to achieve a pretty wide range of different styles and different sounds with what we had, so even though it it was difficult and we all had our doubts while we were putting it together, I think in the end it's... I think of it fondly.
(Anne laughs)
Nick: And positively.
golyadkin: Maybe it'll be easier next time.
Nick: Yeah, I think so. I hope so. (laughs)
golyadkin: Do you start with the samples you kind of want to work with and then build tracks underneath, or is it the other way around, or...
Nick: Anyway you can imagine. It happens in all different kinds of ways.
golyadkin: So there's no "process".
Nick: Yeah there's definitely... yeah. I mean, what we do is kind of, before we even start composing - like right now, we're in this process of just gathering raw materials from everywhere. I mean, I've just been - that's what I do all day long now is just try to find inspiring things -
golyadkin: Do you feel pressure to -
Nick: ...my friends and my family, and my own ideas. I'll sit down and play the guitar and try to find ideas and then, we have a huge body of sound, and we kind of just listen to it and listen to it and listen to it until it becomes kind of fingerprinted in our brains and then, it's amazing, but things just start to crystallize out of that, where certain pairings just seem right, you know, whether it's a certain rhythm with a certain sample or something like that, it kind of sets a tone that naturally wants to extend itself and sustain and evolve. That's usually how our tracks start is some basic sea crystal, and from there we just sort of build it in our own idiosyncratic ways.
golyadkin: How do your friends and family feel about being captured on record?
Nick: (laughs) Well, I try to treat them with complete respect, and I think -
Anne: His family loves it.
Nick: Yeah, they seem to be some of our -
Anne: His mom listens to his record at least five times every day.
Nick. Not every day, no.
Anne: Every time she talks to me.
Nick: No, she likes it because every time she listens to it she hears something different, and of course she has the most amazing laugh in the universe; I mean she's just, she picks up a big part of our hard drive just with her laughing. It's just like instant happiness when I hear my mom's laugh, so I tend to use it quite often.
- DEPLANE ARRIVE -
golyadkin: What's next for both of you? What's down the road for The Books and for yourselves as individuals?
Nick: Death. (laughs) Yeah, eventually. Maybe a - whoa, what was that? Oh I got a call-waiting thing.
golyadkin: Oh okay. Good thing we're wrapping it up then.
Nick: Actually, its' very loud.
Anne: Can you hang up on it?
Nick: No, it's just going to ring until they hang up.
golyadkin: Well, that's difficult.
Nick: I'm sorry, what was the question? Oh yeah, what's coming. I have absolutely no idea.
golyadkin: Except there's someone on the phone.
Nick: Well, I just applied to school, so I may be back in school sometime soon. I applied to a grad school for the visual arts and sculpture and I'll try to incorporate music and sculpture and video in kind of a way, kind of an "English" way, so if I can get in I think I'll go. But at the same time I think I can use a lot of that schoolwork for The Books in one way or another, so the project won't be nonexistent during that time, it'll just be probably a little slower. And uh, I like to hike a lot, so I'll probably do that sometime again soon, for an extended period. But as far as The Books go, we'll just kind of play it by ear and see what happens. I mean we kind of talked it over and, we're going to have to do another record eventually, so we might as well get the ball rolling now. So now we're in kind of the early stages of trying to figure out what the next record is going to sound like, and what kind of approach we want to take. But, uh, no specific plan. Oh, we just got a cool gig composing for an elevator in Paris.
golyadkin: Wow.
Nick: We're going to do three or four tracks, like thirty second tracks for an elevator in Paris, so when the elevator arrives people are going to have a certain chance of hearing our music, I think, or something. I guess it's pretty much up to us what we want to do. But we have a pretty large backlog of French samples that we want to tap into in some way. And I don't speak French, so...
golyadkin: I'm sure that will add to it.
Nick: But Paul and Anne both speak French so I'm sure they're (laughs) um, they'll be able to contribute in a more literary way. So we'll see.
golyadkin: Okay. We'll I'd like to thank you both very much for your time.
Nick: Sure. Anything else you want to talk about, let us know.
Links:
thebooksmusic
tomlab
posted by gibletquesterrs at 1:04 PM
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