Bookish Charm

January 23, 2006 at 2:16 pm · Filed under audio

* The Books: The Lemon Of Pink Pt 1 (7.5 mb) | The Lemon Of Pink Pt 2 (2.5 mb)
From The Lemon Of Pink : TomLab : tom32

The Books

I’ve been hearing about this band, The Books, for awhile now in various magazines and internet arenas, but never really paid attention to the hype. But I finally decided to take the plunge and get some of their music. And from the first note I was captivated. The duo, Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto, have created an extremely engaging soundworld. Collaborating via snail mail and the interweb, strings are played and then cut up and reassembled and samples and vocals filter in and out of consciousness.

If you emptied 50 jigsaw puzzles onto your kitchen table, blindfolded yourself and put all of the pieces together by faith and instinct, sweating over the smoothness of each connection, working at it and working at it until finally you were finished, confident that each piece was precisely where it was meant to be, and after all that effort, you took a deep breath, removed your blindfold, looked at your work and saw something new, something inexplicable and strange and overwhelmingly comforting, something that felt exactly, impossibly, right, then you would have The Books. 

(Jorge Just)

I feel like this music existed in my subconscious long before I actually heard it.

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4 Comments

  1. Jay (r's friend from cincy) said,

    January 24, 2006 @ 11:57 pm

    Thanks for the info and the tracks - I’m going to be in philly in march and was planning on seeing jose gonzalez at the international house while I’m there. he’s playing with the books and death vessel (2 bands I knew nothing about), so I appreciate the introduction. any thoughts on D.V.?

    also, i loved the will oldham/tortoise post a little while ago. great stuff.

  2. cb said,

    January 25, 2006 @ 2:41 am

    Oh cool.

    I’d love to see The Books live (I wonder how they go about reproducing their sound). Sounds like that’ll be a great show, though I don’t really know anything about death vessel.

    Glad you liked the will oldham/tortoise. They’re kind of a strange combination but, ultimately, they work very well together…

    -cb

  3. rachael said,

    January 25, 2006 @ 12:51 pm

    Actually The Books are coming to Schuba’s in Chicago on 3/13 - my birthday! I was kinda thinking about going…. Jay, if you see them first, let me know how the show sounds.

  4. Jay said,

    January 25, 2006 @ 1:23 pm

    looks like you’ll hear em first - my show’s on the 25th - if you go, I want a full report.

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