A Brave, Loud World
The Books inhabit a loud world. It screeches and squeals, shouts and bangs and crashes and explodes. It's the same world in which we all live, where neighbors have their televisions turned way too loud, where sirens wail and cars backfire and people scream at one another perpetually for no discernable reason; where sounds are in constant, grating conflict.
"Our interest is in making some sense of it, giving us a piece of mind, and letting us know that everything is okay," Nick Zammuto speaks softly from The Books' Milwaukee hotel room. "That things can coexist peacefully. It's a nice thought."
Zammuto is resting after a three-day van ride down from Vancouver, while his partner in crime, Paul de Jong, is on thrift store duty, scouring the city's secondhand shops for their most outlandish and obscure VHS fare to incorporate into the relatively new visual aspect of the band's live show.
"We started working with video, and it's our new pride and joy," smirks Zammuto. "It's really been a blast. What we're looking for is outdated instructional videos, weird religious stuff, advertisements for outdated products, exercise tapes. Every once in a while, we come across one that is just so tasteless that we have to buy it."
It's just another element in the endless collage of ideas that is The Books. "My background is in chemistry and visual arts," Zammuto explains. "I was more interested in firing rubber bands at my guitar than playing it. I just wanted to record the sound of it, and rework the sound as a separate thing. That's where the music is coming from, the need to express this current situation that we're in, being overwhelmed by noise from all different angles, and then having to figure out a way to deal with it that's useful."