The Brag

The Books
Omnivorous Listening
By Luek Telford

Paul De Jong – cellist, arranger and co-founder of avant-sample-digging duo The Books – is not feeling well. His rich German accent is thickened by an encroaching cold, but neither the illness nor his freezing New York surrounds can conceal the childlike excitement that spills into his voice at the merest mention of music.

The premise of The Books is a beguilingly eccentric one: find thousands of truly bizarre samples, and craft absurdly beautiful pop music out of them. The band formed in 1999, when De Jong and co-founder Nick Zammuto realised they had a similar penchant for collecting obscure recordings. “We both already had interesting collections that had not very much to do with each other, other than that they were really complementary,” he says. “We found out that we listened not in the same way, but in a similar way: we were both looking for that same emotional resonance in listening. I think that’s what compelled us.”

Their albums are dizzyingly dense and exhilaratingly unpredictable; it’s nearly inconceivable how the band begins to construct them. “There is really no one way to go about it,” says De Jong. “Every song is created in a vastly different way, but I think we just know how to anticipate certain compositional problems better.” The samples on their most recent record, 2010’s The Way Out, are ripped largely from old VHS, neglected spoken-word acetates and hypnotherapy tapes – painstakingly collated by the group from the charity shops of wherever their tours take them. “That’s kind of my side of the story in The Books; I’m the one who incessantly goes to thrift stores and record stores and book stores and buys all the stuff that nobody else is ever going to want,” says De Jong. “I just feel there is so much beauty to be found there; so much unusual stuff, obscure stuff.”

This hermetic search for such consummately esoteric detritus isn’t motivated by the same fetishism that dogs so many collectors, but nor does it hold that fetishism in contempt. “I’m not looking for mainstream. The mainstream preserves itself. I’m looking for that stuff that people tend to overlook, or put in the garbage… Those VHS tapes are going to be landfill pretty soon,” he explains. “I’m going for something that can become a more universal voice.”

Once found, De Jong presents the best samples to his collaborator, and the two go about the unfathomable task of assembling them into emotionally resonant compositions. “From there, it’s a matter of starting to combine a sample or two, or play along with a loop that seems to sound really good, that you just can’t get enough of,” he says. “You’ve got to want to hear samples over and over and over again, and every time you hear them a really special feeling you have about it gets stronger… The song grows from there, it attracts other samples, it attracts instrumental parts. There is not great magic to it: just spend a lot of time with stuff and it will kind of reveal itself.”

After three albums created from such an intensely involved process, you have to wonder what goal continues to motivate the music. “What’s the best thing that music can do? That people can transcend their daily worries and get a new perspective over their own lives. It’s a wonderful emotional tool; there are very few things that can do that. You can stare with a group of people at a painting, but it will not communicate in a way that music can communicate, throughout an audience. I think that the strongest quality of music is the fact that it gives people a tool to transcend themselves,” De Jong says. “That’s nothing mystical, it’s just wonderful.”

It’s a music that’s almost impossible to describe, but ‘wonderful’ is certainly a word that comes to mind of the pieces on The Way Out. From the bloodthirsty bickering of isolated children on ‘Cold Freezin’ Night’ through the full-body swoon of ‘All You Need Is A Wall’, there’s barely a second that doesn’t conceal some kind of errant delight, even though the source material is occasionally quietly unsettling. The nonsensical narrative of ‘The Story Of Hip Hop’, for example, was lifted from a children’s record released by the Rosicrucians – a pre-Masonic secret society built on ancient esoteric truths which, concealed from the average person, allegedly provided insight into nature, physics and spirituality. “That was an insane record I found,” says De Jong. “They put out a record with these four children’s stories, and one of the stories is about this grasshopper called Hip Hop. The first time I played it I kind of fell off my chair; you’ll never find a voice saying that in this day and age.”

De Jong grew up listening to a lot of classical music, so when pressed for his views on hip hop as a genre – one which clearly shares much with The Books’ compositional techniques – he responds quite frankly. “I don’t think very much in terms of genres at all. I really think about artists. I can, for instance, mention Outkast; the stuff they have done with samples – it’s not just virtuosity, it’s total skill and musicality. I think that’s probably the aspect of hip hop that I feel I can relate to most,” he says. “I’m an omnivorous listener, but I certainly have my main dishes that I always come back to. And they’re probably not what you think…”

What: The Way Out is out now through Spunk
With: High Places
Where: The Seymour Centre
When: Friday February 18

For the full transcript head to Luke’s blog – www.luketelford.wordpress.com/2011/02/21/paul-de-jong-–-the-books