Giving back borrowed Books

The Books might take their inspiration from found sounds and scraps of recorded music and dialogue, but the results are ambitious, sweeping soundscapes, writes Jim Carroll

Sampling is an art-form favoured by many musicians. Hip-hop producers, for instance, regularly and casually create beats from breaks repatriated from dusty funk or jazz records. The old becomes the new and, as long as credit is given and the appropriate royalties are paid, everyone is happy.

The Books are also samplers, but they work with a different tranche of source material. When Paul de Jong and Nick Zammuto go seeking sounds to use, they tend to go into rhapsodies over crackly movie dialogue, archaic radio shows, scraps of archivist folk, and other miscellaneous snippets of sound.

While other found-sound scientists will follow the art-music trail, de Jong and Zammuto take another fork in the road, balancing these snippets with pop melodies and folk hooks to create a hugely beguiling and always inventive brand of sound.

Sometimes, their samples become the track (Venice from their Lost & Safe album is based around a commentator describing a Salvador Dalí exhibition in Venice), but it's more often a case of a fusion between the samples and The Books.

As they travel between shows in Philadelphia and Washington DC, de Jong explains that his immersion in sound gathering began in childhood. The Dutch-born classically-trained cellist was always surrounded by music and large record collections. "My grandparents had LPs of classical music and my father brought us to contemporary concerts from an early age.

"I remember learning how to operate a radio at the age of three and I used to love to spin through the shortwave dial. I remember listening to a lot of random stuff the radio would pick up from police scanners and transmitters. For me, all these sounds - from the radio, from the unconventional playing techniques at the concerts and from strange records that my father, a medical doctor, would have of heart murmurs - became really natural to me. In my mind, all these sounds had an equality to them."

De Jong moved to New York to study at the Manhattan School of Music where he met Zammuto, who was living in the same building. Zammuto had abandoned a career as a chemist to release experimental music for such labels as Apartment B and Infraction. The pair quickly discovered a shared interest in sound and MiniDisc recordings, which led to their first record (2002's Thought for Food) and roars of acclaim from the stalls.

Besides internet and media praise, many acts who'd influenced The Books returned the favour. Interviewed by this newspaper in 2005, Brian Eno said he was a huge fan of their work.

"When I hear them, I think 'I should have done that'," said Eno. "That's when I know I am really impressed by something. The best things they've done are absolutely outstanding and put everything else in the shade. That's the benchmark, that kind of originality and attention to detail." It's easy to understand why Eno fell for them. Working along similar lines to Eno's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts collaboration with David Byrne, The Books create one wonderfully shifting soundtrack and soundscape after another.

What's interesting to note is how the nature of their compositions has changed over time. Their last album, Lost & Safe, is a far more conventional and coherent set of tracks than their earlier work. This, says de Jong, is largely due to performance demands, something which was not the case when the duo began working together.

"We did make Lost & Safe with more coherent instrumentation because we had the live show in mind. In the beginning, we weren't planning on touring because we're pretty much a studio project. If you listen to our earlier records, it really does sound like something which lives in a studio and not on the road.

"But right from the start of The Books, though, we began to get offers of shows which made us think. We certainly make more money from touring than we do from selling records. It was the reason why we started touring. We just were not making enough money to make even a basic living. We don't have health care, for instance, because we can't afford it." As a result, the pair found themselves creating music with a live performance in mind. "Yes, it's fair to say that we wanted it to be more effective onstage," says de Jong. "But it's also a more natural progression in our compositional development that we moved in that direction.

"It took us quite a while to arrange the pieces before Lost & Safe into interesting, performable forms. We were not looking for something which gave an exact replication of what's on the records. What we're looking for is something which sounds interesting for a live audience." That, for The Books, does not involve a continuing search for new-found sounds. "It's impossible to be always looking for new source material because it dulls your mind," says de Jong. "You do reach a critical mass and you have to move onto a stage where you listen deeper to what you have already collected and to what you know are very strong."

Much of the material which The Books have sampled comes from musical eras which had a very identifiable signature sound. De Jong believes modern music also has similar distinctions. "The individual tones are down to how the music is produced and the wide availability of recorded sounds. It's a similar concept to how visual art and literature developed collage as an art form in the 1920s and 1930s. You would see this interest in decontextualising and recontextualising sources.

"In a way, it's a great palette that we're working with and the tool we have now is the computer. Software and technology have taken the place of traditional instruments for a lot of people. It is very easy for people to record sounds now at a decent quality and use these to compose music." As an example of this, de Jong points to how children approach music-making.

"I like seeing how kids who have learned how to play traditional instruments combine this know-how with computers and technology in a way which has never happened before." For The Books themselves, future chapters may well see less reliance on found sounds than has been the case to date. "It's more than possible," says de Jong. "I don't know if I'd call it a natural progression, but if we have a strong idea that doesn't call for using found sounds, we will go that way. There is no pressure to use what we have. Composition is about picking out the right idea and following it through.

"It's about elimination. Ideas are a dime a dozen so you have to pick the right ones, the ones with the strongest potential. You have to do what's best for the music itself."

• The Books play The Sugar Club, Dublin on May 17