During Thanksgiving I found myself going through old boxes of adolescent artifacts, tucked deep in the corner of my closet, piled up and kept. Upon taking one out and seeing what was inside, I was immediately filled by the vapors of misplaced memories: a journal from 8th grade, burnt CDs, and some photographs from high school football games, taken with distant friends. Each memory meant something, but as a whole, the box of things became a vessel in and of itself. It became an entity of it's own through an amalgamation of various potent, yet certainly composite rediscovered things; a collage.
Many of the most poignant songs by The Books share a feeling of age and memory, packed into a song. Like my box, they're composed as an eclectic mix of suggestions tethered together. This is due to songwriting that reverberates with a halcyon air: of distant memories, preserved as they were—as an artifact of memory. These songs hold the capacity to trigger the consciousness to a certain place and time. The Books are masters of incorporating, syncopating, and pasting together "found sound" into a piece that becomes something entirely new, the resulting music becoming an elevated vestibule of memory and sound that functions independently of their scattered parts.
"There Is No There" by The Books is a perfect melding of found sound and songwriting. It begins with individual electronic notes bouncing off of original guitar samples. This elaborate and clean introduction to the song quickly breaks into a dated monologue by Albert Einstein on the topic of Gandhi:
I believe that Gandhi's views were the most enlightened of all the political men of our time. We should strive to do things in his spirit. Not to use violence in fighting for our cause, but by non-participation in anything you believe is evil.
The fuzzy recording of Einstein's voice placed within the meticulously recorded samples might seem jarring and uncomfortable, but it's not; "There Is No There" functions as a whole, blending memory and music. Underlying this monologue, one can hear guitarist and singer Nick Zammuto's electronically tuned, ethereally enhanced voice consuming the sample of Einstein's voice into the song's entirety.
As the song progresses, Zammuto's multi-tracked vocals illuminate the space in between banjo and guitar notes before going back to a piercing and hyper-deliberate guitar style which creates all of the percussion needed in the song. This effect is achieved through their recording process: instead of sitting down and recording each instrument individually, they go a step further and record each note independently of each other, one by one. They then take the singular notes and paste them together creating what Zammuto calls a "collage."
What The Books create isn't merely musicianship with overdubbed voice clips; instead, the writing itself is structured and fundamentally predicated on the incredible deliberation behind each and every note placed in its perfect space. It's the found sounds that sampled by The Books that feel the most spontaneous. In an interview with Pitchfork, Mark Richardson asks, "Were you thinking at the time, 'I'm going to use these [found sounds] in a piece?'"
Zammuto responds by saying:
Not really, no. I think it's the same with Paul...we just have these things because we love them so much and it makes us happy to listen to them. The fact that they can fit into music is incidental. It's just so unpredictable how or if we'll later use a sample in music that, when you're looking for samples, it's important to just go for what moves you in one way or another.
Many of the vocal clips included in "There Is No There" suggest this incidental sampling aesthetic. The songwriting itself takes priority, then the pasting of field recordings can be tactfully included. Throughout their catalogue of music, these found sounds can range from old clips of their mothers speaking on tape, to Einstein wistfully speaking about Gandhi's cause—anything that "moves you in one way or another."
The Books manage to invoke a clean form of retrospection. Through their punctilious recording they invoke a pining in the listener, a yearning for sometime or some place, encapsulated in song. From a vast collection of their own field recordings and sound clips they're able to apply the last piece to their collage. Unfortunately, The Books are on hiatus, but what we do have is a perfectly packed box waiting to be opened.
