It’s been about 12 years since ‘The Books’ began, and less than a year since we ended. Now that it’s over it’s time for me to jot down as much as I can about the project, the places it lived, and it’s odd life, before I forget it. As sad as I am that it’s over, it was an amazing thing to be a part of, and I’m grateful to everyone for their support and unbelievable kindness through the years. For those of you who are interested in the back-story, here it is… feel free to ask questions, I’ll try to answer them.

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 1997 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 1998 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

Hello Everyone!

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

Hey All,

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

I’m proud to say you can listen to the new ZAMMUTO album here at spin.com.

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

http://w.soundcloud.com/player/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fapi.soundcloud.com%2Ftracks%2F40510902&show_artwork=true

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

Free Download – ‘Too Late to Topologize’ (Album Version)

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

Here’s a video about what Jason (from So Percussion) and I are developing for our ‘Ecstatic Music Festival’ performance at Merkin Hall in NYC on Feb. 23.

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

The new band is playing it’s first ever shows:

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

‘A Day With’ Nick Zammuto

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

Here’s a stream of the new EP ‘Zammuto – Idiom Wind’ … Now available for presale at Make Mine. My heartfelt thanks to all who have listened, reposted, blogged and written about it this week! My heart is warmed. We’re very excited to debut the new material live next month…