Open to interpretation

>> The Books let listeners distil
meaning from a chaotic world

FOREWORD THINKING: The Books

by JACK OATMON

To guitarist/bassist/singer Nick Zammuto, the American half of the Books, life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying something different from each passing perspective. Together with Dutch cellist Paul de Jong, Zammuto is in the business of conglomerating the percussive tribulations, melodic details and incidental harmonies of our chaotic existence and weaving them deftly together with evocative string instrumentation and sweet, hopeful vocals to compose rumbling collages of music that aurally articulate the human experience.

“My interest in the music is sort of a way to tune all of this unbelievable noise,” says Zammuto. “We’re just saturated by tons of different media all of the time now. The music becomes a way to make sense of all of the noise. Instead of letting it make me mad, I want to laugh at it. I want a way to enjoy it, so the music has been a way to turn everything into something that’s more spiritually satisfying, rather than hearing bad news all of the time.”

Listening to the fantastical results of the Books’ unique method of “tuning” the noises of the world, one inevitably wonders how they manage to congeal so much sonic aggregate without simply sounding random.

“Every track is totally different, so there’s no real system to it,” Zammuto explains, “although it tends to come in an evolutionary sort of way. We’ll start off with something, it could be a rhythm or a riff of some kind, a melody or just a sample of a spoken word, and then we kind of throw sounds at it and see what sticks. Over time, we develop a body of sounds that works together and supports itself. From there, it’s easier to decide how the track will begin and how it will end, how it will move over time. So it’s like rolling up a big snowball, then pulling it apart again.”

As with any project that draws its raw components from the ambient data of the surrounding world, the Books’ albums are laden with the kind of allusion and insinuation that sets curious minds wandering.

“I don’t think it’s necessarily to produce any particular kind of thinking, except just to sort of sharpen people’s experience of hearing. We always talk about meeting people half way. If you make something that’s too didactic and hits you over the head too hard, then the listener’s just going to reject it, like any authoritarian thing. Then if it’s too subtle, it will just be lost on people. So there has to be this middle ground where it’s pregnant with meaning, but exactly what that meaning is is completely dependant on who is listening to it. So you bring what you have to it and you complete the music by listening to it. That’s how the music is designed—left open to interpretation.”

There’s certainly a lot of interpretation to be drawn from Zammuto and de Jong’s compositions, each of which feature a rhythmic track of sampled percussion as well as synchronized video for the live performance, which consists of the duo noodling their strings over top of the songs’ pre-arranged beats and samples.

With Mantler at Saints showbar on
Saturday, April 14, 9 p.m., $18