THE BOOKS

With their signature blend of acoustic and electronic experimentation, The Books are back in town to surprise and inspire you. We chat with one half of the New York duo, Paul de Jong.

How did you and Nick Zammuto meet?

We happened to live in the same apartment building in New York City, more than a decade ago; we were introduced by a mutual friend and realised pretty quickly that we both had this weird attraction to old material. We both had our own sample collections going so wanted to see what would happen if we put them together.

How would you describe what The Books do?

I think the best word is collage. We pull from a lot of different sources: out dated audio and video cassettes, LPs and things like that and then use our own instruments to pull things together into songs. So it’s sort of sample based, although it doesn’t have much to do with hip hop, it’s more folk-oriented.

Your video clips are also very sample-based in a visual way, is that a big part of your live show?

It is, yeah. We think of video as kind of the front man of our band in a lot of ways. We like to just sit quietly and play our instruments on stage, while the video kind of goes crazy. A lot of bands use video in a kind of ambient way, but we choreograph our video in a very rhythmic way.

Feb 18, The Seymour Centre, cnr City Rd & Cleveland St, Chippendale, $40+bf, sydney.edu.au/seymour/boxoffice