Hey All,

Our first show is tonight in Northampton, MA at the Iron Horse. Full tour dates below:

03/28/13 Thu Northampton MA Iron Horse Music Hall
03/29/13 Fri Hamden CT Spaceland Ballroom
03/30/13 Sat Middletown CT Eclectic House
03/31/13 Sun Montreal QC Il Motore
04/01/13 Mon Toronto ON The Garrison
04/03/13 Wed Grand Rapids MI Ladies Literary Club
04/04/13 Thu Evanston IL SPACE
04/05/13 Fri Iowa City IA Mission Creek Festival
04/06/13 Sat Minneapolis MN 7th Street Entry
04/07/13 Sun Northfield MN Carleton College
04/08/13 Mon Grinnell IA Grinnell College
04/10/13 Wed Cleveland OH Beachland Ballroom
04/12/13 Fri Columbus OH Wexner Center
04/14/13 Sun Red Hook NY Bard College

Some new surprises in store? Can?t wait to play!

Nick

Amazing deal on the Books Box today only.

And don’t forget, our European Tour begins this Friday in London:

Nov. 30 London, UK. Birthdays
Dec. 1 Utrecht, NL Le Guess Who Festival
Dec. 2 Brussels, BEL Autumn Falls Festival, Le Botanique
Dec. 3 Amsterdam, NL Paradiso
Dec. 4 Berlin, DE Kantine am Berghain
Dec. 5 Hannover, DE Feinkostlampe
Dec. 6 Schorndorf, DE Manufaktur
Dec. 7 St. Gallen, CH Palace
Dec. 8 Rennes, FR Transmusicales Festival

Can’t wait…

See you soon!

Nick

After playing about 70 shows in North America this year, it?s time to cross the ocean. Here are our European dates:

Nov. 30 London, UK. Birthdays
Dec. 1 Utrecht, NL Le Guess Who Festival
Dec. 2 Brussels, BEL Autumn Falls Festival, Le Botanique
Dec. 3 Amsterdam, NL Paradiso
Dec. 4 Berlin, DE Kantine am Berghain
Dec. 5 Hannover, DE Feinkostlampe
Dec. 6 Schorndorf, DE Manufaktur
Dec. 7 St. Gallen, CH Palace
Dec. 8 Rennes, FR Transmusicales Festival

We are also playing a very special one-off performance in NYC on January 26th where we plan to debut new material in the works? and maybe even some live sculpture:

Jan. 26 New york, NY Le Poisson Rouge

We had such a great time opening for Ultraista at LPR, we are honored to be invited back to headline.

On a more personal note, I?d like to thank everyone who came out to support us on our epic fall tour, thus far. We were so heartened by the warm (and sometimes deafening) response to the new band, we are charged up to get started right away on a new record. You all are an inspiring group of people, and it?s been a pleasure to get to know you better on the road. As I?ve done before, I plan on opening up our studio process by releasing work in progress along the way, so please stay tuned. I also plan on finishing the Books Blog Series; i?m glad there is so much curiosity? bear with me, i?ve got a lot on my plate.

Lastly, my deep thanks to the band? Mikey, Gene and Sean. What a year! You guys destroy every night. My family and I can?t thank you enough for your selfless dedication and extraordinary talent while giving birth to this new project. I look forward to years of productive music making and further hilarious adventures on tour. You?ve brought this thing to life in a way that goes beyond anything I could have dreamed and hoped.

much love,

Nick

The west coast leg of our fall tour starts today in Phoenix, AZ. We’ll work our way up to Vancouver over the next week and a half, then fly to the Walker in Minneapolis for a very special one off. Then Europe in December: The band has become quite the well oiled killing machine, and we’re honored to have the amazing AU opening for us on all these dates. Can’t wait to play for you.

10-29 Phoenix, AZ - The Crescent Ballroom (w/ AU)
10-30 San Diego, CA - Soda Bar (w/ AU)
10-31 Santa Barbara, CA - Muddy Waters (w/AU)
11-01 Los Angeles, CA - Bootleg Theater (w/ AU)
11-02 Santa Cruz, CA - The Crepe Place (w/ AU)
11-03 San Francisco, CA - The Independent (w/ AU)
11-05 Portland, OR - Doug Fir Lounge (w/ AU)
11-06 Vancouver, British Columbia - The Biltmore Cabaret (w/ AU)
11-07 Seattle, WA - Barboza (w/ AU)

11-10 Minneapolis, MN - Walker Art Center (w/ Eluvium)

11-30 London, UK. Birthdays
12-01 Utrecht, NL Le Guess Who Festival
12-02 Brussels, BE Autumn Falls Festival, Le Botanique
12-03 Amsterdam, NL Paradiso
12-04 Berlin, DE Kantine am Berghain
12-05 Hannover, DE Feinkostlampe
12-06 Schorndorf, DE Manufaktur
12-07 St. Gallen, CH Palace
12-08 Rennes, FR Transmusicales Festival

We will be carrying large format home screenprinted posters of Zebra Faces and Butts, as well as the BOOKS BOX, and new shirts etc…

See you there!

Nick

Hey All,

We are beginning the second leg of our immense fall tour tomorrow down in DC. So far the shows have been EXTREMELY fun, and the band is getting scary tight. See our remaining tour dates below:

Also here?s a short (15 min) documentary about the band and our creative process made by our friend Matt Day as hosted on Pitchfork TV:

09-26 Washington, DC - U Street Music Hall (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
09-27 Brooklyn, NY - Williamsburg Park (w/ Givers, Gotye)
09-28 Boston, MA - Museum of Fine Arts (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
09-29 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda?s (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-01 Nashville, TN - The Basement
10-02 Little Rock, AR - Stickyz Rock?n?Roll Chicken Shack
10-03 Denton, TX - Dan?s Silverleaf (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-04 Austin, TX - The Mohawk (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-05 Houston, TX - Fitzgerald?s (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-06 Baton Rouge, LA - Spanish Moon (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-08 St Louis, MO - Luminary Center for the Arts (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-09 Chicago, IL - Schubas (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-10 Cincinnati, OH - MOTR Pub (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-11 Pittsburgh, PA - Andy Warhol Museum (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-12 Ithaca, NY - The Haunt (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-13 Northampton, MA - Iron Horse (w/ Lymbyc Systym)

10-29 Phoenix, AZ - The Crescent Ballroom (w/ AU)
10-30 San Diego, CA - Soda Bar (w/ AU)
11-01 Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour (w/ AU)
11-02 Santa Cruz, CA - The Crepe Place (w/ AU)
11-03 San Francisco, CA - The Independent (w/ AU)
11-05 Portland, OR - Doug Fir Lounge (w/ AU)
11-06 Seattle, WA - Barboza (w/ AU)
11-07 Vancouver, British Columbia - The Biltmore Cabaret (w/ AU)
11-10 Minneapolis, MN - Walker Art Center (w/ Eluvium)

Wonder what the new band sounds like live? Here?s 5 songs from our recent performance in Athens, Georgia. It was a very spirited night, have a listen. We?ll be embarking on a massive North American tour next week, so please help spread the word and drag all your friends to the show. We promise a memorable night filled with amazing performances and hilarous videos (synched in classic Books style). We?ve done everything we can to keep ticket prices low? and with our recent rehearsals we were able to add a bunch of new songs including some ?Books? favorites. You?ll recoginze Gene and Mikey from the last Books tour and if you haven?t seen Sean Dixon play the drums you are in for a special night! Dates below?

09-05 Charlottesville, VA - The Southern
09-06 Richmond, VA - The Camel (w/ Marionette)
09-07 Raleigh, NC - Hopscotch Music Festival (w/ Built to Spill, Jesus and Mary Chain)
09-08 Asheville, NC - Grey Eagle
09-09 Knoxville, TN - Pilot Light
09-10 Atlanta, GA - The Earl
09-11 Tallahassee, FL - Club Downunder
09-12 Birmingham, AL - The Bottletree

09-14 Kansas City, MO - Richard Berkley Riverfront Park (w/ Chairlift, Gotye)
09-15 Bloomington, IN - The Bishop
09-16 Cleveland, OH - Jacobs Pavilion (w/ Chairlift, Gotye)
09-17 Columbus, OH - LC Pavilion (w/ Chairlift, Gotye)
09-18 Detroit, MI - Fox Theatre (w/ Chairlift, Gotye)
09-19 Hamilton, Ontario - Casbah Lounge
09-20 Toronto, Ontario - Molson Amphitheatre (w/ Chairlift, Gotye)
09-21 Montreal, Quebec - Jacques Cartier Pier (w/ Chairlift, Gotye)
09-22 Burlington, VT - Signal Kitchen
09-26 Washington, DC - U Street Music Hall (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
09-27 Brooklyn, NY - Williamsburg Park (w/ Chairlift, Gotye)
09-28 Boston, MA - Museum of Fine Arts (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
09-29 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda?s (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-01 Nashville, TN - The Basement
10-02 Little Rock, AR - Stickyz Rock?n?Roll Chicken Shack
10-03 Denton, TX - Dan?s Silverleaf (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-04 Austin, TX - The Mohawk (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-05 Houston, TX - Fitzgerald?s (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-06 Baton Rouge, LA - Spanish Moon (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-08 St Louis, MO - Luminary Center for the Arts (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-09 Chicago, IL - Schubas (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-10 Cincinnati, OH - MOTR Pub (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-11 Pittsburgh, PA - Andy Warhol Museum (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-12 Ithaca, NY - The Haunt (w/ Lymbyc Systym)
10-13 Northampton, MA - Iron Horse (w/ Lymbyc Systym)

10-29 Phoenix, AZ - The Crescent Ballroom (w/ AU)
10-30 San Diego, CA - Soda Bar (w/ AU)
11-01 Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour (w/ AU)
11-02 Santa Cruz, CA - The Crepe Place (w/ AU)
11-03 San Francisco, CA - The Independent (w/ AU)
11-05 Portland, OR - Doug Fir Lounge (w/ AU)
11-06 Seattle, WA - Barboza (w/ AU)
11-07 Vancouver, British Columbia - The Biltmore Cabaret (w/ AU)
11-10 Minneapolis, MN - Walker Art Center (w/ Eluvium)

Please support us on our very first headline tour, and keep this thing going. Can?t wait to play for you all.

Yours truly,

Nick

I recently had the chance to master a beautiful record that I think you might enjoy?

It?s a Texas band called Twigs and Yarn (Stephen Orsak and Lauren McMurray) and this is their first release.

You can hear it on their Japanese label ?Flau? here:

http://flau.jp/releases/28.html

I fell in love with it while working on it,

Hope to see you out on tour this fall!

Nick

Here?s my walk-through of the Books Box? strictly limited to 1000 copies.

Watch me drink my second beer ever!

The Books - The Box from Nick zammuto on Vimeo.

release July 24, 2012. Order while supplies last http://temporaryresidence.com/descriptions/trr207.php temporaryresidence.com / zammutosound.com

Much Love and Thanks for all your support over the years!

Hope to see you this fall at a show,

Nick Zammuto

Home <http://www.zammutosound.com>

Twitter <http://twitter.com/#!/zammutosound>
Soundcloud <http://soundcloud.com/zammuto>

Thank you all for the tremendous support so far. We’ve loved our time on the road with Explosions in the Sky and are gearing up for our first big headline run this fall. Hope to see you all at a show… The band has really gelled over the spring and we can’t wait to play for you.

If you live in the Western Mass / Albany area we are playing a show in Hudson, New York tomorrow night at Club Helsinki:

06-29 Hudson, NY - Club Helsinki

The rest of the tour starts in early september and covers most of North America:

And please remember, the future of the band depends a lot on how these first shows go, so please spread the word and drag your friends along. I promise you an amazing show filled with incredible musicianship and hilarious videos. If you’ve not seen our drummer Sean Dixon play, you are in for a real treat. He’s like a ninja behind a drum kit. The live set will include songs from the new record, a bunch of Books tracks, and the crowd favorite ‘The Greatest Autoharp Solo of All Time’ which can only be seen live…

09-05 Charlottesville, VA - The Southern
09-06 Richmond, VA - The Camel
09-07 Raleigh, NC - Hopscotch Music Festival
09-09 Knoxville, TN - Pilot Light
09-10 Atlanta, GA - The Earl
09-11 Tallahassee, FL - Club Downunder
09-12 Birmingham, AL - The Bottletree
09-14 Kansas City, MO - Richard Berkley Riverfront Park *
09-15 Bloomington, IN - The Bishop
09-16 Cleveland, OH - Jacobs Pavilion *
09-17 Columbus, OH - LC Pavilion *
09-18 Detroit, MI - Fox Theatre *
09-19 Hamilton, Ontario - Casbah Lounge
09-20 Toronto, Ontario - Molson Amphitheatre *
09-21 Montreal, Quebec - Jacques Cartier Pier *
09-22 Burlington, VT - Signal Kitchen
09-26 Washington, DC - U Street Music Hall
09-27 Brooklyn, NY - Williamsburg Park *
09-28 Boston, MA - Museum of Fine Arts
09-29 Philadelphia, PA - Johnny Brenda’s
10-01 Nashville, TN - The Basement
10-03 Denton, TX - Dan’s Silverleaf
10-04 Austin, TX - The Mohawk
10-05 Houston, TX - Fitzgerald’s
10-06 Baton Rouge, LA - Spanish Moon
10-08 St Louis, MO - Luminary Center for the Arts
10-09 Chicago, IL - Schubas
10-10 Cincinnati, OH - MOTR Pub
10-11 Pittsburgh, PA - Andy Warhol Museum
10-12 Ithaca, NY - The Haunt
10-13 Northampton, MA - Pearl Street Nightclub

10-29 Phoenix, AZ - The Crescent Ballroom
10-30 San Diego, CA - Soda Bar
11-01 Los Angeles, CA - Troubadour
11-02 Santa Cruz, CA - The Crepe Place
11-03 San Francisco, CA - The Independent
11-05 Portland, OR - Doug Fir Lounge
11-06 Seattle, WA - Barboza
11-07 Vancouver, British Columbia - The Biltmore Cabaret
11-10 Minneapolis, MN - Walker Art Center !

^ with Explosions in the Sky
* with Gotye
! with Eluvium

Thanks everyone!

Nick

While building up my collection of acoustic samples, I had become quite obsessed with using EQ as a sound sculpting tool and ended up buying a used 31 band equalizer to play with. The sound of my refrigerator in North Adams was particularly complex, and I remember spending one long evening trying to isolate all of the various drone notes in that sound, from the low machine rumble, through the stack of harmonics produced by the compressor, to the high buzz of electrical system and the hiss of the freon. For the first time I fully realized that what the brain perceives as single sound was actually made of dozens of related sounds over a broad spectrum and it was a life changing epiphany for me. By using EQ to break sounds apart, my ear slowly learned how to do the same thing organically, and over time I found I could mentally suppress all but a tiny window of hearing on a particular sound. It became somewhat of a meditation practice. I would go out in a public place and listen to sound stratify into it?s component layers. I felt a little guilty destroying the unity of sound, shredding it mentally into little slices, but I had reached a point of no return, in a sense. What evolution had created over eons to produce a fluid sensation of vibrations in air (i.e. hearing), I was undoing by conscious effort, turning each nerve ending in the snail of my ear into an independent organism. I had learned about Fourier transforms in chemistry, for spectrum analysis in identifying compounds, and final made the connection that hearing is a perfect realization of this principal, born out over countless millennia of creatures competing for that sensory edge. AND, in fact, hearing had nothing to do with objective reality, as I had previously assumed: Hearing is a tool for survival, with a long history of idiosyncratic adaptations. Sensation itself is colored in this way. Not transparent. And, so then, what could be transparent or objective? It was all unraveling.

Moving to New York City felt like a further assault on my faltering grasp of wholeness. So many people living in parallel, all thirsting for opportunity, made me worry all the time. It made sense for me to go there, and as an artist I was supposed to go there. I had won an art fellowship from college when I graduated, just enough to live on for 6 months or so. I moved in with Julie during the early part of 2000, and tried to continue my work, albeit in miniature, given the space limitations. At the time I was working on a project called ?Noisy Filing Cabinet?. I had installed two twelve inch subwoofers inside of a metal filing cabinet: one in the top drawer, one in the bottom. Any sound that I played through them became radically distorted by physically rattling the Cabinet. Somehow the concept fit with my newfound environment, being stuck in a tiny apartment in a very loud place. It also became a metaphor for my continuing realization that hearing itself is radically colored, both by the mechanics of it, and the myriad preconceptions of the person attached to it. There was nothing subtle about the Filing Cabinet. I only have the audio portion as it appeared from my computer, so there are no filing cabinet sounds here, just the ?dry? input audio. You?ll have to imagine what the cabinet did to these sounds. Here?s a few sections of it:

Notice here that many of these sounds also appear in ?The Books? first track, ?Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again?. I started work on that track just a few weeks after these Cabinet tracks, having met Paul in the weeks between. I had a broken mandolin and an awful guitar that I sampled many of those acoustic notes from, and EQing them to create maximum impact in the Cabinet. Around then I spent a day sampling golf and tennis on television, which is where that crow and club/racket swats originally came from. I hadn?t owned a TV in years, but was drawn to it whenever there was one in the room. I always loved golf and tennis on TV because of the amount of ?silence? in them. Because the players need to concentrate, presumably, the crowd noise is at a minimum during game play, so it makes for very dynamic sampling with a lot of unintended sounds accidentally making their way onto broadcast television. There aren?t that many unintended moments on TV so they seemed extraordinarily special to me.

When Paul came to the apartment that first time to play that cello/piano duet with Julie, I was quite taken by the sound of the cello. I had never been up close to a cello being played before and I was blown away by the warmth and richness of the sound. I loved the way it filled up the entire spectrum of sound with harmonics stretching all the way up to the hiss of bow hair on the strings, and longed to dig my EQ into it. Also I loved the gentle attack and laziness of the string response, since it seemed an incredible counterpoint to the tight angular sounds I?d been working with.

Soon after that, Paul invited Julie and me for dinner at his apartment on the other side of the building. During dinner I noticed a large rack, mounted to the wall, full of many dozens of minidisks. By now this format is quite outdated, but at the time it was the go-to medium for rewritable digital audio. I asked Paul about them and he said that they were his ?reference materials?. He was in his mid 30?s and had recently been through a tough divorce. He had been going through a long period of general malaise, and one of his only comforts was watching films. According to him, he watched about 750 movies in the year leading up to when I met him. During then he got into the habit of sampling audio from films. Whenever there was a scene where the music or dialogue was particularly moving or unique in a way worthy of saving, he would hit record. Apart from that he also had a collection of rarities, like Shooby Taylor (the great scatting postman), and samples of speech from many famous historical figures. He didn?t have a computer, so his sample collection was entirely stored on these minidisks, and he would randomly listen through them whenever he was in need of inspiration.

I immediately saw a parallel between Paul?s collection and mine. His being more archival and mine being more of the present moment, it seemed a natural idea to bring the two collections together to see what would happen. He let me borrow a small collection of English words he had cut out of a record about pronouncing proper American English, along with a film about deaf children in France. I loved the way these sounded through the Cabinet, so I incorporated them into a couple sections of that project, before debuting it at a small show at the knitting factory in New York City, opening for Cex and Kid 606. (I had made some inroads with Carpark records in those early days). The next day Paul came banging on our door, apparently very offended by my use of his samples, accusing me of stealing them. I thought they were a gift, but apparently they were not. The idea of ?owning? samples seemed crazy, but I could see he was mad and I had to respect his point of view. I was still quite curious to explore his collections so I figured I could turn lemons into lemonade if we started a real project together. Since I had this fellowship money, and thought it a wise investment, I offered him $2000 dollars to buy a computer to organize his samples onto a more useful form. He took it, and thus ?The Books? were born, although it would be several more months before we gave it a name.

We set up his computer to run all of the same software I had, so that we could swap files efficiently. We started making basic cello recordings in my apartment, consisting of open notes and odd sounds that I could easily cut and rearrange. Meanwhile Paul started feeding me sounds from his collection. Within a few days I was putting the finishing touches on our first track:

I remember thinking at the time that electronica seemed overly cool and ?in the box? sounding. Although I loved Boards of Canada, Aphex Twin, Squarepusher, Daft Punk and the like, I wanted to work with the same tools in a way that was warmer, more human and more irrational. I loved the contradiction that digital music, which was a paradigm of the grid and microscopic control, could be made to sound a bit sloppy, like a collage with rough edges, tape and glue all over it. Both Paul?s and my work up until this point had sounded very esoteric in a way that was off-putting to most folks, and we both wanted to make a record that was more accessible, so at least our families wouldn?t be so ashamed to have to listen to it. Working with rough cut acoustic samples rather than synths, and spoken word far outside of the hip-hop break-beat context immediately felt like fertile ground.

The opening theme was a guitar part I recorded with Julie?s metronome running in the background. I looped and layered it with itself into a sort of cannon, which sets the tone and tempo. I threw the broken mandolin, guitar, golf and tennis sounds from the ?Cabinet? against the guitar loop with a kind of reckless abandon until a listenable rhythm emerged. Later I added a corresponding set of elemental cello sounds from our recent recording sessions. Around that time I sampled a daytime court show from TV, where a woman selling vacation tickets was being harassed by a man unsatisfied by his accommodations. She went on this jaw-dropping motor-mouthed rant about how she had lost her job and had a heart condition, and it turned out to be a great stand-in for a free-jazz like instrumental solo. If you listen carefully you?ll hear my voice slightly ahead, doubling the text, which I recorded by speaking each phrase as a loop until I ran out of breath. I isolated each ?out of breath? phrase and reassembled them to match the original so that it sounded as if I was constantly running out of breath throughout the entire rant. Then, behind her voice is a rhythm created by zipping my fingernail across one of those crackerjacks box style holograms, with the ridged prisms on the front surface. A sample from Kurosawa?s ?Seven Samurai? (one of my favorite films) ends her rant succinctly.

The cello solo in the next section was created by wiggling the playback cursor over a cello recording in the timeline of Soundforge, to give it that wiggle effect. ?Myself, April, Tammy, and Brad? were the plaintiffs in the next case on that daytime court show. Then there?s a sample of a film (Goddard, I believe), in Russian, where a man professes his love to a prostitute and has a heart attack mid sentence, instantaneously dying (as an echo of the previous heart condition). Then there is a sample of a Japanese fellow reading stock reports, which we selected purely for rhythmic reasons, not knowing until much later what he was actually talking about.

The hootenanny breakdown in the next section is just a digitally sped up cello/guitar improvisation that Paul and I recorded in the living room. Paul was able to create a chordal wash of cello textures that slow fades in until the next section, where the heavy Cabinet kick drives a loop consisting of a stretched out Dutch sample: an homage to Paul?s native language. The final sample is from the late great cellist Pablo Casals:

?Rainbow, rainbow, rainbow, all the music is a rainbow?

To me, it seemed the perfect way to end? a spectrum broken into it?s component colors, and presented as a pattern that reveals a deeper and more mysterious structure.

Next track: ‘Contempt’

Thanks for reading,

Nick

(Please attend our upcoming shows in June: 17 Houston, TX*, 18 Mobile, AL*, 19 Tampa, FL*, 20 Miami FL*, 6/21 Athens, GA*, 22 Charlottesville, VA*, 23 Baltimore MD, 25 Morgantown, WV*, 26 Tue Chicago, IL*, 27 Nashville, TN*, 29 Hudson, NY, *with Explosions in the Sky)

(Please support our family and music by buying or donating here)

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Since my illness caused me to lose a semester at school, it would have been awkward to graduate after a fall semester, so I opted to skip the fall semester of ?98, to balance it out. I was 23, and up until that time I had only lived either at home or in a dorm. It was time for me to get my own place. I was tired of living ?on the hill? as it were. I grew up in Andover, MA, a somewhat snooty middle class suburb of Boston, and although I didn?t attend the famed academy there, even the public school felt a little stilted. From Andover High I went straight to Williams College, in Williamstown, MA, which in many ways was a smaller microcosm of Andover, albeit more rural. Don?t get me wrong, my parents gave me the gift of an amazing childhood, but I started to feel very out of place in those towns. I craved a more ?real? place, where the struggle for survival was a bit closer to the surface. North Adams MA, a dilapidated mill-town gutted by outsourcing in the ?70s, was very much the other side of the tracks from Williamstown, and I knew that was where I wanted to set up shop:

This was my first apartment there. It was a building with four apartments and only two were usable. I moved in the early summer of 1998, into a sprawling two bedroom with extremely warped floors? so much so that if I spilled water in the kitchen it would flow all the way into the second bedroom at alarming speed. The rent was $280 per month. I had just bought my first computer (a Gateway P166). Up until then I had only used campus computers, and happily lived without email. A friend of mine had recently introduced me to the music of Tom Jenkinson (Squarepusher), Richard D. James (Aphex Twin), Boards of Canada, Tortoise, and Oval. The extent of my musical experience before then was tooling around with a bass guitar (starting late in high school) and listening to rock, mostly Rush at first, and then later Primus, Fugazi, NIN etc.

When I first heard ?Electronica? it changed me. It was like being given permission to make the music in my head. It was music that completely swapped foreground for background. The inhumanly fast drum beats of ?Feed Me Weird Things? and ?Boy/Girl Mix? took the lead while chords and melodies carried the rhythm. DSP replaced instrumental swagger. Vocals were completely forgotten and not missed. ?Millions Now Living Will Never Die? was the sound of band recorded, fetishistically deconstructed and reassembled, essentially using the studio as if it were an omnicient member of the band. ?Systemisch? was just the sound of broken cds? the original music flattened and re-inflated using glitches as percussion. It was subversion bordering on perversion. I was a moth to the flame.

Although I always loved music, instruments tripped me up, and band dynamics seemed an impossible hurdle for my introverted self. When I realized that you could make records without having a band, at home, in a manner akin to building with legos, I was immediately hooked. I won a small painting prize, and with the cash I bought a sampler/effects unit called the Ensonique ASR-X and got Cakewalk for my computer, a couple midi cables, two cheap condenser mics, and I was ready. The summer of 1998 was one of the best of my life. I worked without speaking to anyone for days at a time. By design, there were no distractions, and I was completely absorbed and in love with sound. That first summer I made three records. Here are some of the tracks:

The first record was a 70 minute long bass guitar improvisation made by playing my bass through two independent loopers, and then post processing with radical EQ changes. This idea came from a series of late night ?concerts? I did on weekends in our dorm, where my friends would come and immediately fall asleep.

The second record was 60 minutes and made entirely of the sound of vinyl records, scratched in rhythmic patterns, recorded into the sampler and sequenced using midi. It?s practically unlistenable! (I still use this process today as seen in Matt Days video):

The third record was a much more varied, songy approach, with pseudo verses and choruses. I switched from Cakewalk to Sonic Foundry?s ?Sound Forge? and ?Acid? around this time, which were better at dealing with a lot of samples. (The first track is a section of the ?record scratch? tracks above, rerecorded through PVC pipes with controlled feedback):

This last track came directly out of the Clinton impeachment hearings and was my first foray into spoken word sampling.

Around then I started building simple contraptions to re-record sound through. One of the first was a three foot diameter ¼? steel plate with a miniature subwoofer installed directly at it?s center. I recorded simple tones and samples through it, based on the natural resonances of the plate, and then sequenced those recordings into a set of three tracks called the Plate EP. Here?s a track:

(Both the ‘Solutiore of Stareau’ 3 disc set and ‘Plate EP’ are now available in our webshop)

By the end of the summer I was out of money and needed a job. Because of my connections in both art and chemistry I had previously volunteered at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center, and got to know James Martin, who was head of the analytical department there. Jamie was (and still is) king of the microscopes, and he hired me to help out at the lab, preparing slides and running infrared and electron microscope scans. Mostly we were identifying materials used in famous works of art for the purposes of restoration or dating and authentication. For example, certain pigments became commercially available at specific points in history, so if you identified ?titanium white? as a pigment, you knew the painting was made after 1920 or so, and the information could be used to root out fakes.

Somehow, the combination of doing microscope work by day carried over to the way I would work on music at night. Around that time I got my first stereo tape recorder (a Sony DAT, with a stereo condenser mic). The first recording I made with it was a walk around North Adams, during an evening outdoor market. I walked in and out of all the buildings, through crowds and down alleys, and along busy roads, and when I got home I immediately got in bed, turned out the lights and listened to the recording. It was a deeply spiritual experience (for lack of a better word). Since I had never experienced audio of that fidelity before, it was as if time itself was somehow physically captured on to tape. Every detail was present in a hyper-real kind of way, even more so than experiencing it first hand. In the recording, every building had it?s own sound, and space would shift and open up as I would pass through a doorway into the crowd outside. Sounds were arranged in 360 degrees, with volume and color of reverberation describing distance and direction? an incredible amount of information captured in such a short period of time, as if a single second could expand to fill an hour. I remember thinking that it would take months to describe everything contained in the recording? again I had that feeling of brightness from when I was sick; that nothing is ordinary. And now I had the ability to capture it and build with it.

I started making a lot of recordings and cutting out the moments with the clearest brightness. I would never make a recording with the intention of capturing anything in particular? it was more about just having an open net to catch what would drift by. I liked to be physically moving while recording, and to be able to change course quickly if need be. I would then bring the recordings home and pore over them, trying to hear what was actually there rather than trying to reconstruct the narrative around the sounds. There were always moments that went beyond all expectations? maybe just one sound in a hundred or a thousand, but enough to make it a positive gamble. Like the sound of stepping on a pine cone, or a car driving over a loose manhole cover, or a knife cutting through an apple, or the drone of a certain air-conditioner. All ordinary things with spectacular sounds, useful in music if placed in the right context: a comfortable pocket that could bring out their transcendent qualities. This is how my sample library began, and I would always have it handy while working on tracks so I could quickly audition a lot of unexpected combinations to see what worked. And I found I could hardly predict what would work, it was mostly trial and error. It was a good feeling to divide work into two parts. First: open ended enrichment of the library, and then alternately: intensely focused compositional work. The two activities refreshed each other and kept me engaged.

I met Julie Wolfe at the conservation lab in late 1999, just as I was re-entering school for my last semester. She was working in the objects department and we started seeing each other often, connesting over our mutual love of art and science. My final classes were all art classes except for a great class on geo-chemistry and mineralogy, a subject I still love (rocks). I finished up an art thesis based on the ?sound sculptures? I had been making. Here?s a video of some of them.

Later that year, Julie ended up getting a job in the conservation department of the Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and moved down there. I would visit her often in the apartment I would eventually move into in Inwood just north of Washington Heights. I was not a fan of the city. It put me on edge to be there. The first 24 hours were always exhilarating, like a sugar rush of stimulation, followed by a strong feeling of sensory exhaustion and existential dread. Yet I loved my time with Julie, getting to know the city together, and taking advantage of her citywide art pass that she had as a Guggenheim job perk.

After graduating Jamie put me on a project to examine common pigments in colored pencils, to determine which were archival quality. I received 212 colored pencils each with the manufacturers names scraped off of them. I cut the tip off of each one, ground it into a fine powder, extracted the pigments with a series of solvents, and allowed the solvents to slowly evaporate, leaving beautiful crystals of pure pigment behind. Each crystal had it?s own inner logic which helped with identification, along with their infrared fingerprint which we collected by rolling a fraction of a milligram of the pigment out on a tiny diamond window and carefully aiming an infrared laser through the area we wished to study, using a specialized microscope. The results lead to somewhat of an exposé of the crappy pigments used in the colored pencil industry, and the introduction of archival grade pencils by several manufacturers.

After the pencil tip project was over I moved in with Julie. She allowed me to set up my studio desk in our tiny living room next to a baby grand piano left by the previous tenant. Julie played piano since she was young and would play it often. Julie?s sister, Lisa, a concert violinist, lived across the courtyard in the same building. She was good friends with a cello player named Paul de Jong. Julie knew a duet for cello and piano and invited Paul over to play it, and that?s how I met him.

I?ll continue here in the next entry?

Thanks for reading!

Nick

(Please attend our upcoming shows in June: 17 Houston, TX*, 18 Mobile, AL*, 19 Tampa, FL*, 20 Miami FL*, 6/21 Athens, GA*, 22 Charlottesville, VA*, 23 Baltimore MD, 25 Morgantown, WV*, 26 Tue Chicago, IL*, 27 Nashville, TN*, 29 Hudson, NY, *with Explosions in the Sky)

(Please support our family and music by buying or donating here)

zammutosound.com, zammutosound.tumblr.com, soundcloud.com/zammuto, twitter.com/zammutosound, facebook.com/zammutosound

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In order to revisit the beginning of ?The Books? I?ve got to summon some pretty worn memories. Like anyone, there have been so many phases and places I?ve been through since then, that my cursory memories of that time have become somewhat cartoonish. I think a great quality of music, like with smell, is it?s ability to conjure up deep-seated memories from the more unworn parts of the mind; places where the acidity of everyday thought has not melted and reformed them into oversimplified pictures. So I think the best place for me to start is by listening to the first track ?The Books? made (well before we had a name):

It?s been almost two years since I remastered this track and I haven?t listened to it again until now. And, once again, my memory of the sound of this track is flat compared to the re-experience. Something about the un-glossy crackle of the surface of sound that snaps me back into the feeling of those days in the spring of 2000, in ?upstate Manhattan?. We lived at 30 Seaman Avenue, Apt. 4H, just north of 200^th St (Dykman Ave) on the A. I was living with my girlfriend, Julie Wolfe, and I had only lived in the city for a short time, having recently moved down from North Adams, MA where I lived during college. Julie and I met at the Williamstown Art Conservation Center; she was (and still is) an ?objects? conservator, and I worked in the ?analytical? department, mostly doing microscope work and identifying pigments and binders in paintings, for the purpose of helping to restore them, or rooting out fakes.

I studied chemistry in school, with the original intention of having a career as a biochemist. When I realized that biochemistry, in practice, consisted of mixing one extremely dilute clear solution with another, I quickly hopped over to organic chemistry, which was more my speed with its colors and smells and occasional ether fires. I was drawn to organic chemistry also for the pictures: 3d diagrams of molecules smashing together extremely quickly in microscopic space in vast numbers. Which leads to my first (of many) digressions? (bear with me).

In 1996 I got a summer job in a lab that studied liquid crystals, a branch of materials science that studied compounds that are both ordered and fluid at the same time. A contradiction really? a rule breaking state of matter that had properties of both solid and liquid, the most famous application being the LCD (liquid crystal display) you?re likely looking at now. Mostly my job was synthesis? taking two molecules and intentionally making a third, then purifying the desired compound away from all the junk I created by accident (a necessary inefficiency in chemistry, as in life, is the unintended consequences). When we had a candidate for a material that would show liquid crystalline properties we would throw it under a polarized light microscope and heat it up until it melted. When most crystals melt they go totally dark under the microscope (like water), but liquid crystals do this:

That?s right! Fuckin? amazingly beautiful! And the pattern moves and flows as the temperature changes. Which leads me to digression 2:

Art. What a stupid word. Sounds like a painful turd. When I was a kid I would try to paint like Bob Ross. It took me until my first year in college to realize that Art gets a lot more complicated when neurotic self-consciousness gets involved. Pretty becomes ugly and vice versa. Your mind becomes a battle ground for conflicting belief systems, and you tighten a tourniquet around the part of your spine that connects your brain to your body. Every thought becomes a high stakes experiment. Language becomes pure manipulation. Everything becomes relative. For or against. In parallel with my study of chemistry I took a lot of art classes at school. I always thought visually, and being in the studio alone at night was relaxing, so kept taking classes despite the impending existential nightmare. I remember going out to dinner with a teacher of mine, named Sheila Pepe. I attempted to take solace in chemistry. ?There?s Truth in chemistry?, I would argue, ?Chemistry is real, stuff is real. It?s made of chemicals.? She would look at me, roll her eyes in a loving way, and say ?Nick, chemistry is just another way of looking at things.? A chink in the armor. This feeling tore me up; that my view of science and it?s values were naïve, and my innocence was becoming a hindrance to my education. I think the biochemical term for this is ?denatured?. I was becoming denatured. Then digression number 3:

I got cancer. In the winter of 1997 I was diagnosed with Hodgkin?s disease? a relatively rare form of lymph cancer that was slow growing, but required immediate treatment. I was 22 at the time. I dropped out of school for the spring and moved back home to the Boston area to start radiation therapy to my neck and chest. This news made me numb and stupidly idealistic at first? I felt fine, and was actually in good shape at the time, so it all felt a little abstract, except it derailed me, narrative wise. I expected a straight shot through school into a lab job, but all of a sudden there was this time to sit and notice stuff. Given my shift in perspective on mortality, noticing stuff became somewhat of a consuming job. Then there was the radiation. Imagine the worst sunburn of your life on both the outside and inside of your body. That?s what it was like. Beyond that I lost my sense of taste. Eating candy, which I always enjoyed, became like chewing asprin. I couldn?t swallow anyway, so my attention shifted to walking, listening to music, and making stuff? mostly painting with an airbrush I bought leading up to the treatment. I was making terrible abstractions of the natural world, mostly, and listening to ?The Police? box set and Primus.

It was the first time in my life (that I could remember) that I was not in school in March, April and May. In this liminal place, sitting on the side of the tracks as it were, noticing stuff was getting easier. Like listening to a bell ring to silence, it was not as if the bell was getting quieter, it was as if the background was getting louder and overwhelming the tone of the bell. Everything became brighter and more mysterious; ordinary things became strange and scary. The namable parts of things were overtaken by the phenomenon of them, everything having a history that was ultimately untraceable. As the fatigue from the radiation kicked in, those days sprawled into each other in a dreamlike way. My relationship to my body was interrupted in a way that made me look at myself like a specimen. I was disembodied. Again, denatured. Like a fried egg.

Going back to school that fall, I had what most people with a life-threatening illness have: an overdeveloped sense of urgency: as if life was running out and everything had to be done to the utmost. Since medical technology had given me a ?second chance? it somehow meant that I had to do something ?important? and fast. I threw myself into a chemistry thesis, working long hours in the lab, trying to succeed at making a molecule that, it turns out, was quite difficult to make. I quickly became exhausted and frustrated and short on temper and friends. Things were already losing their brightness, dampened by my own designs for them. My chemistry professor pulled me aside one day and said that I was the type of scientist that would have been better off in the 1800?s when the frontier was more open, and being ?mad? was still a useful trait for a scientist. I felt embarrassed by this, but I knew she was right. I was never going to be satisfied working under florescent lights, striving for research money, publications, tenure or any of the necessary trappings of being a modern scientist. I quit my chemistry thesis right then. Feeling defeated, I started spending all my time in the art building.

For my first project I shaved my entire body, divided it into sections and took Elmer?s glue casts of every square inch of skin. It was a trick I had learned as a boy, and somehow I had no choice but to take it to its logical extreme. All the peeling felt apt given my recent experience with radiation burns. In fact, I developed an obsession with peeling of all kinds. Removing the surface. Having tried and failed as a chemist completed what cancer had started, which was essentially a flipping of foreground and background. The periphery seemed a whole lot more enticing than the center. The great thing about innocence is that it gives you a place to rest. This place was gone, and still is gone. But Art, for all it?s stupidity and pretense, feels like a genuine frontier (at it?s best). A place where being restless is valuable.

It?s at this point I moved to North Adams, MA and lived on my own for the first time. I?ll continue the story from here, moving to NYC, meeting Paul, and making that first track in the next entry?

Thanks for reading,

Nick

(Please attend our upcoming shows in June: 17 Houston, TX*, 18 Mobile, AL*, 19 Tampa, FL*, 20 Miami FL*, 6/21 Athens, GA*, 22 Charlottesville, VA*, 23 Baltimore MD, 25 Morgantown, WV*, 26 Tue Chicago, IL*, 27 Nashville, TN*, 29 Hudson, NY, *with Explosions in the Sky)

(Please support our family and music by buying or donating here)

zammutosound.com, zammutosound.tumblr.com, soundcloud.com/zammuto, twitter.com/zammutosound, facebook.com/zammutosound

Big news for ?The Books?. We are releasing an extensive limited-edition box set of all our releases plus a lot of bonus materials, both visual and auditory towards the end of the summer. I can?t reveal any details until we get the first demo copies in a few weeks, but I am very excited about this. It will be the perfect way to wrap up a project that I lived and breathed for the first 10 years of my career.

Leading up to the release I?ll be doing an extensive series of blog posts here, where I?ll attempt to remember where and how all of ?The Books? tracks were made, and fill in all the detail I can surrounding the recording process and strange trajectory of the project. I?ve been threatening to do this for a while and now the time has come? I need to do it now or risk forgetting it all if I wait any longer. I apologize in advance for blog entries that sprawl and ramble. Once again, the blog is located here, and I will post occasional notes on ?The Books? blog, but I?ll be primarily writing at zammutosound.tumblr.com.

The first post will be tomorrow? covering the track ?Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again? and the story leading up to ?The Books? early days.

Yours,

Nick Zammuto

Today at 3PM eastern on www.xpn2.org, an hour long live session with the new band with interviews in between. The host is the great Eric Schuman.

We stopped by the ?World Cafe? studio at XPN Philly on Monday and recorded five songs? (if my memory serves me) Shape of Things to Come, Too Late to Topologize, Zebra Butt, F U C3PO, and our version of the Paul Simon?s ?50 Ways to Leave Your Lover.

It will be archived, as well (i think?)

enjoy!

Nick

http://www.spin.com/articles/stream-zammutos-bubbly-self-titled-full-length

As David Bevan writes:

?The long-awaited debut from Books co-conspirator Nick Zammuto?s new project

Early last summer, after his adored found-sound pop collage outfit the Books ended, co-founder Nick Zammuto began sharing new songs meant for a new band he supposed would become a ?three or four-piece? via his personal blog. Since then, he?s assembled that band for a spate of live dates (below) as well as a full-length recording, due next Tuesday via Temporary Residence. Though it?s a less conceptual and far more direct effort than anything we?ve heard from him yet, it still brims with the same implacable energy that garnered his previous work such a following. SPIN is premiering the full record exclusively here.?

Also, Molly and I are just finishing packing up the first shipment of Hand Screen-printed LP?s so if you ordered one, THANK YOU and they?re on their way.

It is a limited edition of 500 copies, signed and numbered and they look like this, as they are drying on our house (just need to trim and fold):

Please help us out in this early phase and order one before the tour starts next week.

Love,

Nick

Hey Everyone,

Here?s another track from the new ?Zammuto? album being released on April 3. It?s one of the last tracks I made for the record, and this is the first time I?ve posted it anywhere. It features Sean Dixon on drums, who is playing a 6/8 clave pattern double time with his right hand and halftime with his left. It?s a mind bending thing to watch. Gene Back made the string part by multitracking his violin, then placing the samples on a Nord keyboard. I?ll post a video of it soon. Thank for listening!

You can preorder the record here: we?ll send it out next week:

http://temporaryresidence.com/zammuto/

Also, here are the dates for our tour with ?Explosions in the Sky? in April, plus a few of our own shows. We just finished another round of rehearsals and the band is killing? don?t miss it.

04-05 Boulder, CO – Boulder Theater? * 04-06 Grand Junction, CO – Mesa Theater & Club * 04-07 Salt Lake City, UT – In the Venue * 04-08 Missoula, MT – Wilma Theater * 04-10 Seattle, WA – Moore Theater * 04-11 Eugene, OR – McDonald Theater * 04-12 Reno, NV – Knitting Factory * 04-15 Davis, CA – Mondavi Center * 04-16 San Francisco, CA – Palace of Fine Arts Theater * 04-17 San Francisco, CA – Palace of Fine Arts Theater * 04-18 Pomona, CA – Glasshouse * 04-19 San Diego, CA – Soda Bar 04-20 Visalla, CA – The Cellar Door 04-22 Flagstaff, AZ – Orpheum Theater * 04-24 San Antonio, TX – Backstage Live * 04-30 Brooklyn, NY – Glasslands 05-01 Annandale-on-Hudson, NY – Bard College

* with Explosions in the Sky

Best!

Nick z

http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F38479222&show_artwork=true

?Too Late To Topologize? (Album Version) from our upcoming self-titled debut LP ?Zammuto? Release Date: April 3rd on Temporary Residence.

Pre-order now (limited edition colored vinyl and CD): http://temporaryresidence.com/descriptions/trr209.php or Home-Screen-Printed Deluxe edition: http://zammutosound.com/physicalstore.cfm

One month until release!

love,

Nick

ECSTATIC MUSIC FESTIVAL – NICK ZAMMUTO AND JASON TREUTING (with Janus, Daisy Press, and Grey McMurray) from steve taylor on Vimeo.

I?ve been in love with So Percussion since their incredible record ?Amid the Noise? came out in 2006. So I jumped at the chance to work with Jason Treuting. We?ll be doing a few new laser and video based tracks at the show, as well as the crazy 3/2 drum thing that he?s teaching me in this video. Right now I?m working on a video called ?The Greatest Autoharp Solo of All Time? which we will also debut at the show.

Also, I?m working with The Janus trio on a new video based song called ?The Fig and the Finger?. I?ll post samples of all of these works in progress later this week.

Thanks for taking a look!

Nick

FEB 3: Mass Moca, North Adams, MA (Western Mass, our home town venue)

FEB 4: 92YTribeca, New York, NY (Downtown)

FEB 6: Brighton Music Hall, Allston, MA (Boston Area)

Don’t miss your chance to say you were there from the beginning! We’ll be playing mostly tracks from the upcoming Zammuto LP (out April 3 on Temporary Residence), along with some ‘Books’ songs, plus a few surprises. Before the set we will be screening ‘Achante‘, a short film about Haitian Vodou that we scored last year.

We will also be at SXSW in Austin in March, for the whole week, playing everyday.

‘Zammuto’ (the band) is a four piece rock set up: Nick Zammuto (yours truly on vocals, guitars), Gene Back (also from the Books, on electric guitar, organ, keys), Sean Dixon (Drums), and Mikey Zammuto (aka Mikeybass, on Bass). We just finished our second week of rehearsals and we’re all feeling giddy with excitement. As Mikey says, ” This will be Epic.”

Happily, the project has picked up a lot of momentum in the last few weeks:

The track F U C-3PO was named best new track on Pitchfork, you can listen to the Make Mine EP here:

And Prefix magazine just named us among the years most anticipated albums! (no pressure).

Also Matt Day made a short film about my life and artistic process which you can watch here: (Incredibly, it’s been viewed more than 20K times in the last week!)

Sorry if you live outside of the Northeast, we will be coming to your area by the fall if all goes as we hope…

Yours, Nick

Here?s a short documentary Matt Day made about my process and life at home and in the studio. We spent a day together last summer shooting this video, and hopefully he?ll be documenting the time leading up to the debut ?Zammuto? concert on Feb. 3 at Mass Moca. (more on this soon)

A Day With Nick Zammuto from Matt Day on Vimeo.

If you prefer YouTube here?s a link?http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NOE-By9AJc&feature=youtube_gdata_player