Anchor is Out Now.  You can order the 'Home silk-screened limited edition colored vinyl LP w/DL code' in our webstore.  

We apologize for the quietness this year... one of my sons has had cancer (for the third time) and he's been going through some very harsh treatments for the last 6 months.  He's a tough kid and the prognosis is good but it's knocked us out this year.  Thanks for your endless and beautiful support through all of this.  We couldn't do it without you. 

Contact us: nzammuto@gmail.com
or our Amazing Label: Info@temporaryResidence.com

WE JUST RELEASED A NEW  EP CALLED VERYONE:  YOU CAN HEAR IT AND PURCHASE IT HERE: https://zammuto.bandcamp.com/album/veryone




The amazing Filmmaker, Garret Harkawik, made a film about us:

No Needle, Just A Haystack from Garret Harkawik on Vimeo.




 
Listen to Anchor:




Official Video of for IO with the trebuchet we built:

Official video for Great Equator made using Electron and Light Microscopes:


Our Indiegogo Campaign Video from Summer 2013: 

Zammuto LP 2 from Nick zammuto on Vimeo.

A video describing my method of rhythmically scratching the 'locked groove' of vinyl records:

Scratch Edition from Nick zammuto on Vimeo.

Bass Projector from Nick zammuto on Vimeo.

Filmmaker Matt Day made a documentary about the studio, the home we built in Vermont, and the formation of the band leading up to our first shows in 2012.  You can watch it now on Pitchfork TV  

 

Blog

Zammuto – Birth of a New Band 

Hey all,

I can’t tell you how much fun I’ve been having in the studio recently. I’m just finishing the first tracks of the new project and wanted to share the very first one with you. It’s called ‘Yay’ and you can download it here:

https://www.yousendit.com/download/dkJvWGJIQzNGOFR2Wmc9PQ or https://soundcloud.com/zammuto/zammuto-yay

It will be a three or four piece band, hopefully playing shows by the end of the year…

I’ll only be posting this for 48 hours, then after that I’m counting on you to distribute it to your friends and loved ones however you can. I’ll be working on the new record throughout the summer (and for however long it takes), and whenever I have a ‘working draft’ of a new track, I’ll post it for a couple days. These won’t be ‘finished’ versions, when I have a solid albums worth I’ll revisit all the tracks to pull album together as a whole. Hope you like it! And be sure to download your copy now, since you won’t be able to get it from me after Saturday.

Thank you all so much for your support over the years.

Yours,

Nick


New Website – www.zammutosound.com 

Hey All,

Nick here. Sorry for the recent lull in my posts, but you can expect a flurry of activity over the summer, as I’ve been very busy in the studio:

image

Firstly, I’m going to start writing about all of the tracks on our first three records, as I did with ‘The Way Out’. As some of you may have noticed, I had a chance to remaster and redesign the records for our move to Temporary Residence, and revisiting those sounds really brought me back to the headspace I was in while working on those records. A lot of great, and hilarious and/or difficult moments that I’ll try to recount as I write about the tracks.

Also, I just put together a new website that archives my past work, and will be the central home of my new work:

www.zammutosound.com

I recently posted a huge amount of rare and ‘lost’ audio from my archives. Mostly it’s the music I made before the Books existed, and the soundtrack work I’ve done over the years for various productions since then.

And I’m just about to announce the birth of my new band, which will be focused on live percussion, keys, guitars, vocals, samples and video. I’ll be producing it here in my studio over the summer, rehearsing the band and blogging about it heavily. I’m just finishing the first tracks which I’ll share with you soon… here are all the related sites:

www.zammutosound.com

www.soundcloud.com/zammuto

www.zammuto.wordpress.com

www.twitter.com/zammutosound

Thanks in advance for visiting!

Nick


Interior Upstairs 

Hey Everyone,

Here’s the upstairs. One caveat before I start: not to overstate it, but I hate friggin’ drywall. So you’ll notice most everything is finished with knotty pine tongue and groove from our local saw mill. I love the warmth and ease of working with pine and it’s also the cheapest, and most readily available wood, which is an amazing combination.

Asa and Mikey on stairs

Heading upstairs…

Balcony Landing

At the top of the stairs is the landing where the original loft was. To the left (north) and right (south) is new construction that I completed in 2008.

Semi Vaulted Doorway to Boys Room

To the south is the entrance to boy’s room. There were a lot of super funky angles introduced into the design when I transected the original roof with the new one. To make things even odder, I tilted the ridge of the new roof 10 degrees upwards towards the south, to take advantage of solar gain, and deflect the north winds up and over the house. This gives the upstairs a very unique feel as it literally steps up towards the south in a gradient from cold to warm. I essentially built glorified California style dormers into the existing roof, and finished the joints leaving as much of the existing rafters as I could, which created the oddly shaped cathedrals to either side.

Veiw from Studio, Duck Pond
Here’s the veiw from Molly’s studio southwards to the boy’s room.
Looking Into Boys’ Room from Studio
Why two doors? We figured some day they would want their privacy, so we can easily build a wall when the time comes. For now we love it as one big sunny room, about 12×28 feet.
Low Bay Windows in Boys Room
I got the octagons and the large bay windows also from salvage. Oftentimes McMansion builders change their minds on windows midstream, and unload them through a restore, lucky us. Here’s Sepp’s bed on the west: (you can see the chimney from the sun-room stove here, and the angle of the gambrel which is at 5 degrees, so the roof is slightly tortioned. For the life of me I can’t figure out why tortioned roofs are not more common, I find the subtle curve to be quite pleasant.)
Boy Bed 1
and Asa’s bed to the east:
Boy Bed 2
The view from Asa’s bed:
Large Low Windows
The skylights are standard Andersens which I retrofitted to the metal roof. The roof is framed by 2×10’s which I dense packed with blown in cellulose insulation (essentially chopped up newspapers). If you buy more than 20 bags of the stuff you get a free blower rental. Every boys dream. There is also a thermal break of 1/2inch polyisocyanurate sheets under the tongue and groove. The room performs really well, never too hot, never too cold.
Skylights, Tortioned Gambrel Ceiling
Here’s what our bedroom looked like when we moved in…
Master Bedroom before Renovation
Here’s how we renovated it:
Master Bedroom After Renovation
Just to the left, which you can’t see, is a claw foot tub and sink on a stone pad, which I plumbed directly above the bathroom downstairs in 2006.
Future Production Studio Site
The next big project (if you all keep buying our records and coming to our shows) is to build a full production studio/rehearsal space on the site of the original farmhouse. I really hope i can do this sooner rather than later, I can’t wait to start building again…
I’ll happily try to answer any questions, should you have them.
Thanks for reading.
Nick

Looking into Studio

Looking north into Molly’s studio you can see how these angles play themselves out. The shelves are structurally integral to holding the extra snow load created by the roof valleys above. No two rafters are the same length in this design, which is probably why people don’t usually build this way, but since the labor was free I didn’t mind the extra time it took, and I got very good at compound miter cuts. I learned the hard way that good carpenters spend very little time measuring, it’s usually much more effective simply to hold the piece where it needs to be and mark the cut in place. I got the curved windows from that same salvage yard at a super discount. This is the view of our little pond out of the curved window. Molly tries to keep it shoveled for skating.


Question About Tuning 

cash4oneness asked: I hope it isn’t too lame to ask you; is the guitar part for “All You Need is a Wall” played in standard tunning? Love the new album either way.

Nick here… for all practical purposes it’s a drop D tuning, except the whole guitar is tuned down a half step to c#. the tuning i usually play in is c# g# c# c# g# c#. the middle two c#’s are tuned in unison with the same gauge string on both. weird i know, but super resonant, and makes for interesting close harmonies through the midrange


Interior Downstairs 

Hey All,

Nick here, again. Thanks for all of interest in my last post about our home. At your request, here are some pictures of the inside of the house I took last winter. I’ll show you the downstairs tonight and the upstairs tomorrow. (Please excuse the kid clutter in most of these pictures:)

Usually we enter the house through the sunroom. The planting bed under the windows and the mudroom area by the door are thinset with Vermont slate, and the floors are local maple from the saw mill at the bottom of our hill. I got the six 4’x6’ windows from a salvage yard in Brattleboro; they are old double paned sliding glass doors, I think. We use the planting bed to start seeds ahead of the growing season. By March this year, Molly had hundreds of seedlings of all kinds ready to go, and tomatoes by mid summer. There is built-in storage for shoes, growing supplies and tools underneath.

Here’s my brother Mikey juggling. You can’t really see it clearly but the thermometer on the center post reads 85 degrees at around 10am in February, That’s all from the heat of the sun.

On cold winter nights (below 10F) we start a fire in the little cast-iron stove you see here, which is just enough to keep the plants alive without using too much firewood. The entrance to the rest of the house is the last door on the left. The wall on the left was originally an exterior wall, which is conveniently well insulated from the sunroom, so we can open windows during warm hours and close them at night, which makes this a ‘partitioned’ passive solar design.

This picture is taken from the living room looking towards the kitchen/dining room. I installed this woodstove during our second year in the house, to replace the gas/pellet stoves that were cluttering our living space. The new stove is on an insulated slate pad with a railing I soldered together from copper plumbing parts. It stays surprisingly cool when the fire is going.

Here’s a ‘before’ picture taken from roughly the same spot, before we moved in, There was all kinds of messed up flow so it took us a while to figure out how to reorganize the space. Originally there was a ladder up to the loft on the second floor, so the first big job was to tear out the pantry and part of the ceiling to put in this staircase:

I designed the stairs to ‘float’ by using the ballisters to suspend the weight from the floor joists above. The routered shelves behind the stairs helped replace the storage lost from removing the pantry. That’s my boy Asa on the stairs.

The stairs lead to the loft area, where the ladder used to be. We use the area under the cathedral ceiling to dry our clothes. Between the heat of the woodstove and the breeze of the ceiling fan (which I replaced with a high efficiency industrial type) the clothes dry in a couple hours. It also helps keep the humidity up in the winter. The long indoor rise of the chimney radiates a lot of heat which increases it’s efficiency.

Here’s a picture of Molly taken from the loft. Apart from Molly and the boys, and the Books, our woodstove is my pride and joy. It’s a Hearthstone stove, and it is our homes sole heating source on most days. It’s made of soapstone which stores and re-radiates heat in a very gentle way, so it doesn’t overheat the area right around it, and stays warm for several hours after the fire dies so I can get a full night’s sleep without having to stoke it in the middle of the night. We burn 3-4 cords per year, which I harvest from our land or fallen trees along the dirt roads around our town.

Here’s another view of the kitchen. There’s enough wood storage to the left of the stove for 4-5 days of fires. The open plan of the house lets us cook while we keep an eye on the boys.

Here’s a view of the living room from the kitchen.

There’s a nice view of the mountains to the east. Sunrise is beautiful, which we rarely miss, since the boys are both early birds.

Tomorrow I’ll show you the upstairs…

until then,

Nick


Building Our House 

Hey All,

Nick here. I originally wrote this for Impose Magazine, as part of their friends with benefits section. It’s the condensed story of how my wife, Molly, and I built our home in Vermont… I’d like to write about it more, since it was one of the big projects I tackled during the break between The Way Out and Lost and Safe. And I have a lot to say about the relationship between music and architecture. Here’s an introduction:

In early 2006, when my wife was pregnant with our first son, she experienced an irrepressible nesting instinct. We were living in a rented house in North Adams, Massachusetts, and I was touring heavily with the Books. Molly, being the tenacious woman that she is, set out to find the perfect spot to raise our family. I was on our first European tour, somewhere around Bristol, UK, I think, when I got an email from Molly with this picture attached:

Winter 2005

My first impression was that it looked like an uninsulated shack in a giant field of slush. I worried that the pregnancy had affected her judgment. I raised my concerns as gently as possible…

“Don’t worry” she said, “I dug through the slush and found good things, the land is good.”

“It looks like it needs a ‘bit’ of work,” I said.

“Well, We have a couple of months before the baby comes.”

“I better buy a chop-saw as soon as I get home.”

I had never used a chop-saw, but I sort of knew that I needed one. Like most young couples we had fantasized about building our dream house from scratch. Leave it to my wife to actually force it upon me. Actually I was psyched, our mortgage payment on sixteen acres of beautiful high meadows (plus a semi-livable shack) was quite a bit less than the rent on Molly’s semi-livable studio apartment in Brooklyn. And I love building stuff, at least with legos, which at the time was the extent of my handiness. By the time Sepp was born, we had added a staircase, skylights, and renovated the attic into a bedroom complete with a salvaged claw-foot tub and sink. I have the image of Molly working the chop-saw when she was 8 months pregnant etched into my mind… it’s probably part of the reason one of Sepp’s first words was ‘excavator’.

Winter 2006

When Molly was pregnant with our second son, it was clear that we needed a lot more space. I started learning about residential construction through the internet and books like Scot Simpson’s classic The Complete Book of Framing. The feng shui of the shack was all messed up, so we started thinking of designs that would reorient the house better with respect to the land. It was around then that I discovered Christopher Alexander’s “A Pattern Language” which is one of my favorite books. It lists some 250 patterns that compose the elements of a livable design from the smallest scale (doorknobs) to the largest scale (cities). Eventually we settled on a partitioned passive solar design, that would allow us to conserve fuel and give Molly a place to start seeds to extend our growing season. We heat entirely with firewood wood that we harvest from our land, which I store next to my studio, that I built from the shell of an old tractor garage.

Summer 2010 from southwest

Summer 2010 from southeast

The large greenhouse windows face south, so that the room heats up to around 90° F even during the middle of winter, which keeps the bedroom above it warm through the night. Molly’s studio is on the north side with machine/tool storage below. Most of the wood and windows I hauled from a salvage yard in Brattleboro VT called ReNew, and a liquidation sale from a Home Depot that was forced to close after being out-competed by the locally owned hardware store across the street. Even on a musician’s salary, we haven’t needed to borrow anything for the additions.

Summer 2010 from northeast

We have a ‘No Contractor’ rule. If we can’t do it ourselves than we don’t do it. This keeps things cheap and practical, and extraordinarily satisfying. Our second son, Asa, was actually born at home in the new bedroom.

“Tractor” Studio, where The Way Out was made. Summer 2010.

Molly’s instincts have proven to be very sharp. I’m good for the tasks that require stupid brute force, but she’s got a green thumb that is almost eerie; today she pulled a 15 pound watermelon out of the garden and we’re at 2,000 feet elevation in Vermont. We got 7 gallons of wild blueberries out of the meadow this year, and we’ve scarcely bought a vegetable since May. My next task is to build a root cellar so that we can store all of the potatoes, beets and carrots that she’s about to harvest.

Veggie garden and chicken house. Summer 2010.

Watermelon 2010

Recently I’ve been dreaming about building a full production studio on the site of the original farmhouse which burned down several decades ago… Someday.

Thanks for reading!

If you all are interested, i’ll write about the design of the interior next.

Nick


Zach Miskin – For Your Safety 

Hey All,

Our friend Zach Miskin just released a cello record today:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0040GCSW8?ie=UTF8&parent=B0040GW0X0

Both Paul and I made tracks for the record, as well as Todd Reynolds and Padma Newsom/Bryce Desner, our good friends from Clogs/The National, and others.

Check it out if you love the Cello! We do. Incidentally, Zach was the fellow who introduced us to Gene, our new multi-instrumentalist who you will see on tour with us this fall. They were good friends in college, and Zach brought Gene up to record the tracks for this record in my studio here in Readsboro, where I met Gene for the first time. And, Zach made us an amazing dinner when we were in Paris during the spring; so nice to have a home cooked meal on tour.

best,

Nick


All Things Considered 

Hey All,

A couple months back Jacob Ganz from NPR came up to talk to us. He stopped by at both of our home studios to see how we work, and sat down for a family dinner at our place where Sepp (now 4) treated us to his scatalogical a capella version of the All Things Considered themesong.

It was a pleasure to talk to Jacob. He had good questions and insight into the music and I’m looking forward to hearing it on the radio this weekend. It will be archived on npr.org and you can check local schedules here if you want to catch it live.

Off to ATP in Monticello, NY in a few hours. Can’t wait, maybe we’ll see you there.

best,

Nick


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