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The Books: A Dot in Time

The Books met over Shooby Taylor. "e;It was pretty random,"e; co-founder Nick Zammuto told Pitchfork in an interview in 2003. "e;I met this girl Julie up in Williamstown, and we were both working the field of art conservation. She ended up getting a job with the Guggenheim and I followed her down to New York where she got this apartment with her sister. Her sister was friends with Paul [de Jong, cellist and co-founder], and so we ended up living in the same building together. I remember the first time I went over to his apartment. He pulled out this Shooby Taylor record."e;

Taylor was a musical oddity known for his energetic, one-of-a-kind scat singing. He was profiled in Irwin Chusid's Songs in the Key of Z: The Curious Universe of Outsider Music. And the fact that his music was in the room when Zammuto first met cellist and fellow sound collector Paul de Jong makes perfect sense. Taylor's music was something that was lost, found, re-discovered, and shared. It was weird and it had an uncertain context and the people who passed those records around created new ones. Such odd gems are rescued from obscurity and passed around by people like de Jong and Zammuto. And that drive provided the initial inspiration for the Books.

That was the beginning of the last decade, and now the Books are no more. After four albums, an EP, stray tracks, and some videos, the Books called it quits this year. Nick Zammuto was somewhat evasive as to why, but it doesn't really matter. It feels right for the Books to wind things up. They had a brilliant idea, they created a sound around it, they bent and shaped and explored that sound as best they could. And then eventually it came time to put that sound away. You couldn't ask for a better send-off than A Dot in Time, a lovingly compiled and gorgeous box set that collects all of their released music on vinyl and mp3 along with a DVD of their videos.

The Books had a distinctive sound that was like nothing else when it arrived on the scene in 2002. It sounded so bizarre and alluring in part because it was the perfect music for a very specific time and place. If it'd have arrived five years later, it wouldn't have made nearly as much sense. In 2002, Google was firmly in control of the web search game, but information in general still seemed overwhelming, random, unknowable. There were fewer ways to focus attention on a single nugget of culture. And the Books were founded in part as a way to take a stream of artifacts and re-assemble them into something new. Which is another way of saying that the Books made less sense in the post-YouTube world; once everyone became an archivist and the fragments of culture were available to all, someone coming to the Books for the first time did so without the same sense of wonder.

But all that was a few years away. First, we had Thought for Food, one of the most startling and original debut albums of the 00s. With this project, you didn't know where one element started and another began. What was sampled? What was played? Where did these sounds come from? Was the young child being told, "e;You have no mother and father,"e; and being asked not to touch his father in the song "e;Motherless Bastard"e; "e;real"e; or was this from a movie or was it staged? It was hard to know, and this lingering sense of strangeness and unknowability suited the music perfectly. Without access to the details of authorship, you could only let the sound wash over you, and it was a beauty. Subtle guitar and banjo, bits of cello, some voices. We were just coming out of the peak era of Chicago post-rock, and the Books' approach to sound bore some relationship to the thoughtful, understated, cerebral, but still deeply felt expression of Jim O'Rourke, one of the lynchpins of that scene. A decade on, Thought for Food still works its peculiar magic.

The Lemon of Pink is that odd follow-up album that finds a band refining and honing its sound but losing the element of surprise. The technique is almost identical, but Zammuto and de Jong had a better understanding of how to wield their instruments and samples for maximum impact. As is sometimes the case, for the Books, each of their first three albums has an almost equal number of fans who think it's the best. And in these cases, a lot depends on which you heard first. The Lemon of Pink showed them growing slowly into the more song-oriented direction they would develop later, but the samples are as fresh as ever, words and syllables plucked from who-knows-where and allowed to settle in your brain and grow into a new kind of meaning.

Lost and Safe was the breakthrough, the album that moved the Books out of the realm of small cult act. They'd become an enjoyable live band, and they found a sort of community in the world of bookish coffee shops and NPR. Many fans like Lost and Safe best, and in retrospect I feel I underrated it upon its initial release. It was one of those cases in which what I wanted from the band was different from what they were interested in doing. The Books were heading further in the direction of proper songs. Since Zammuto's voice is limited, his muted sing-speak-whisper integrated very well into the clips from instructional records and ancient news broadcasts. Coming as it did after the 2004 presidential elections, a difficult time for progressives in the United States, Lost and Safe had a political undercurrent that further bound the Books to this community. "e;I can feel a collective rumbling in America,"e; went a line in "e;Be Good to Them Always"e;, the album highlight and arguably the greatest single track the Books ever made. It's a song that contained so much: surface beauty, intricate construction, subtle commentary. And if the album as a whole didn't quite deliver on that promise, it was the third winner in a row from a group that didn't necessarily seem like they could sustain things that long.

Between Lost and Safe and their final album, 2010's The Way Out, the books released a collection of scraps called Music for a French Elevator. That EP has been greatly expanded with 32 additional tracks, and the set as a whole is unexpectedly satisfying and offers a different angle on the Books' world. Without the careful editing and thematic unity of their albums, French Elevator mostly shows how musical they were, and how adept they were at making simple guitar and cello patterns pack an emotional punch. Some of these extra tracks are just instrumentals played by Zammuto and de Jong and some are just samples, but they do illustrate the consistency of their aesthetic, how they were able to shape different textures so that they fit with with their overriding sound.

And then came The Way Out, a more playful and free-wheeling album. In retrospect, The Way Out is easily the least satisfying of the four, though it still has its charms. Experimenting with steadier beats and grooves while going heavier on the jokes, The Way Out ultimately feels like a dry run for Zammuto's solo work than a wrap-up to the Books proper. But heard here, in the context of their career as a whole, it's as good an epitaph as any. Something feels right about this box set, from the beautiful design to the fact that it feels a bit like a tombstone. As markers of the dead go, it's a beautiful one. May it live and decay and be covered with weeds and, eventually, be unearthed and dusted off by some young creative person still finding their way. And may that person pass it on to someone else and find a way to share something new with the world.