I was always an avid fan of The Books, the collage / sample-based musicians with four excellent albums and a load of delightful b-sides. I'd read rumors that they disbanded around 2012 in an unpleasant way. Half of the band - Nick Zammuto - released solo music but I always wondered what happened.

This 2018 Interview with Paul de Jong - the other half of the band - doesn't really give much insight into why the band broke up but it does provide some insights into their creative process that I'd never read before. Here are a few excerpts from de Jong I rather enjoyed...

Regarding The Books sample library:

A large part of The Books' creative process consists of finding, choosing and combining the right samples. On an album like The Lemon of Pink are hundreds, maybe even thousands. 'It could be a few words, a sigh or a whole minute of babble', De Jong explains. 'Background noise or a musical note. As long as it's interesting and I have the idea that I want to have something to do with it.' De Jong now has a gigantic archive in a kind of coach house behind his house, in which everything up to the digital age is welcome, from VHS tapes to cassettes and LPs. 'But nothing is mainstream, everything is obscure. For example, there are no feature films in there, only instructional tapes, from education, the medical world or the church.' The archive consists of about 350 boxes, which De Jong digitizes one by one. For this purpose, he has built a setup of ancient computers in a separate room. 'All they have to do is absorb video or sound. In the title, De Jong types out as many words from the fragment as possible. 'Then you can simply find samples later with Microsoft's search system.'

On the lack of looping samples:

'When I listen to how samples are used nowadays, I feel very related to how hip-hop cuts and loops. In The Books we never really looped, because I am absolutely convinced that you have to change something when you repeat it. If you repeat a recording identically, your subconscious immediately notices that. That does not mean that you hear more, but actually that you get used to it the second time and hear it less the third time. You hardly hear the essence of the sample anymore, but know it. That does create a lot of space for other elements, such as text, which occupies an essential position in hip-hop.'

There's plenty more but I'll let you go read it yourself.

Stumbling on this was a nice reminder to revisit all of the old releases from The Books but also a gentle nudge to listen to the latest solo material from both de Jong and Zammuto.