Austinist Interviews The Books

Are you selling these DVDs during your tour?

Yeah, they’re supposed to be out by the time we get to Austin. We’re only selling them on tour and tour web site.

Are you working on a new album? When is it coming out?

We haven’t really planned a release date or anything like that. We’ve made three albums; we’ve toured a lot. We basically have a really large, just a big, file of new material lying around. There are enormous amounts of raw video and raw audio that still needs to be cut. This summer we are going to work on creating new material, with new raw material, and new libraries, and practice new instruments.

Don’t you just use 10 percent of material you collect in your music and videos?

On the last tour we accumulated almost 2000 video tapes, and almost all those videos are being bit by bit digitized - all the new material. We end up with literally thousands of gigabytes of raw material. And when we go into that and cut that down, we look at that and immediately know what we’re going to use.There are video tapes of two and a half hours and you yield 10 seconds…Also, it’s far less that 10 percent. Maybe it’s one percent…

The selection process is part of the production process, and the selection process is just consuming.

What’s happened since your last tour? Why did you guys move to Vermont? Do you think the move has influenced any changes in your music?

We work together in a different way. We only live an hour apart. I moved out of New York because I got married. We met last summer right after the tour. We got married in December. I didn’t have that much reason to stay in New York anymore. I lived in New York for 15 years. It’s really hard to record effectively in New York. At this time in my life it’s better to be in a quiet place, plugging away. It’s not about getting inspired. I’m trying to cut down on my ideas. It’s the work that really just needs to be done. Nick and I work in a way where we don’t really see each other very often but it’s reasonably handy if we’re close by. We see each other once every week.

The way we make music now – I think it becomes more and more focused. We have a better handle on the concept of experimentation, too. It’s not the move out of New York, but the coming of age. After six years we have a certain handle of things that opens new ways. For instance, working with video and audio the same way; we can take on more complicated things.

Wasn’t Nick living in North Adams, Massachusetts?

Actually, we were both living in North Adams and Nick bought some land in Southern Vermont, only 25 minutes from North Adams. And I lived in North Adams, but since I got married we moved to Southern Vermont. I’m living in a converted barn.

How is that?

Very rustic.

Have you guys created any new instruments? What instruments do you currently play?

On tour, I’m just playing cello and bass and Nick is playing tour and bass, and our voices with that. But, I got one instrument that I bought about a year and a half ago. I really haven’t had time to learn it. It’s called an Arpeggione. It’s a hybrid between a cello and a Spanish guitar... It’s an instrument that was invented in Vienna in early 19th century. It enjoyed a very short period of popularity and vanished from the scene. I found the instrument, it was a copy made in Holland, in my native city of Rotterdam. And I never could afford it. And after 17 years he (the dealer) gave me a really good deal. I’m really basically learning to play guitar on it and the same time I’m bowing it as well. It has a really Baroque sound and the same time it sounds like a harp. I’m hoping to make many more recording with it at the end of the tour.

What’s your process when you’re looking for stuff at junk shops? Tell us about the finding and sending back part? What are you looking for?

It’s definitely the obscure, the bizarre, the completely idiosyncratic stuff. I kind of automatically block out all the mainstream. I’ve been going to flee markets and thrifts shops since I was five years old. And I’ve always been drawn to the bizarre and the obscure… It’s a real fast scanning. You automatically block out the fifty Aerosmiths.

My eye lingers on, of course, music that I like personally. That will be for our personal collection. But for our work, my eye stops when I see instructional stuff, religious stuff; especially videos. It gives a bizarre social map of America in the past 25 years or so. The thing is the field is just so unbelievably vast. We’re barely stretching the surface.

What are some of your favorite finds?

There is stuff we cut out of tapes that we want to keep, but watching and watching them all over again because so compelling. What comes to mind is there’s this one tape I found of - what are they? (pause) Born-again Christians. It’s a real big surface with all them speaking in tongues – 1,500 to 2000 people. I just cut out the most compelling moment. It’s cut down to six or seven minutes. It’s just the more you watch it the more you see how it’s designed. By now I know everybody’s face. And who looks at who and when. It’s just bizarre and you wonder if it’s a different planet. Unfortunately, it’s not. It’s just so bizarre how human behavior looks.

Then there is a medical tape that is all about this extrapyramidal syndrome. It’s like a kind of Parkinson’s disease where you are really restless. The patients cannot sit still in any way. They have to keep moving around. And it’s so completely involuntary, you can’t stop it. The woman is sitting in a chair and she’s being asked questions, and while she’s answering them she absolutely goes through hundreds of different positions while sitting on the chair. It’s so personal. It’s the ultimate video of discomfort, but it’s like a choreography – a choreography that you can’t ever make up.

There’s a lot of stuff we don’t use. You have to be really discreet, and you have to have great integrity to work in the public domain.

[The Books Official]

Photos by The Windish Agency and Clarisa