Paul de Jong
	We caught with Paul de Jong of the Books on the road (not on tour, but just “the road”), and talked about touring, process, and where it all comes from. LUMEN ECLIPSE: Where did ‘Meditation’ come from? – the soundtrack and the anagrams must have come from quite different places. PAUL DE JONG: Yes, the soundtrack came first. I collect and find lots and lots of raw audio material, obscure stuff, and all kinds of different media, like often LPs, and radio, and what have you. And years ago, I think actually it was a record that I picked up in the Netherlands, in Europe, although it’s a Californian record – if I’m not mistaken, the name of the guy is Lapsang Rampa, and he was one of those 1960s (or even earlier) Indian wise men, philosophers who were offered to go to California and gather a following there. And he made these records where he speaks his wisdoms and lays out his philosophy, and obviously this record was a lot about mediation, and so I got that record and got a couple of really great other lines that we’ve never used out of it, but that often happens. I kind of habitually, when I cut these records, if something really stands out or something gets repeated, I just habitually set it aside, and in the end, you see what you have, and there it was, I don’t how many times, it was like 52 times or something that he says ‘meditation,’ with slightly different inflections, and not a single one repeated. I guess, in a way, it’s like the pride and honor of doing this stuff: you don’t go for the literal repetition. In all our records we’ve only once used a sample that we actually exactly repeated, and that was for a good reason; otherwise we don’t really do that. It’s even more beautiful if it’s actually saying the same thing, and it’s slightly different. And I think it adds to the musicality of it. Anyway, that’s how the soundtrack came about. Usually what we do once we have this random accumulation of words, then we clean it up a little bit and make it a little bit more musical, and maybe just change the order a little bit, or fiddle with the pauses in between – more like directing the recording that doing something really invasive to it. And anagrams, well when we first went on the road, we started working with video, because when we decided to go on the road and present a live show, we thought that might be the perfect opportunity to really get into our visual and video work, something that we really wanted to do as well. First of all we were looking into how to present the little pieces on our record that you can’t really do live, because there is nothing to do live, but at the same time we’d really like to show because we’re excited about them. And we needed a piece, or two, or three for our show, to kind of re-tune on stage, just little in-betweens. So, ‘Meditation’ seemed to be perfect. I think Nick [Zammuto] came up with the idea of anagrams, and we ran with it, I think we just started making anagrams at some point—oh yeah, I remember how it came about, we were working on a collection of type fonts that I found, and we were making them into useable type fonts for the computer. You’ve got a little piece of software for that: to clean them up, or change them, or whatever you want to do with it, add missing letters. And I think during working on that—we made 50 different fonts or so, and that was mainly for the website, I think, and we felt, well, we like to play with language, and we’d like to do something with fonts in our videos, and we really liked the look of those fonts, so that’s how that came about. LUMEN ECLIPSE: So, did the videos exist before you made the decision to perform live, or were they part of figuring out how to perform live? PAUL DE JONG: I started gathering video, I suppose, before we actually decided to play live. I really started gathering video and imagery really without much good reason other than—well I had already been gathering sounds from movies, just for sound samples, and I watched really a lot of movies at one point, and did that with two remote controls in my hand: one for the video player and one for my minidisk recorder. Whenever there would be a little piece of sound that I wanted to hold onto, whether it was foley or dialogue or music, I would quickly record it and then move ahead again with the movie, and at some point I really started being interested in capturing the video images for no real good reason—well of course with the idea that I would do something with them some day. And that became quite a collection, and both Nick and I wanted to do stuff with video and with film. And Nick had a camera, and he gathered original images, family stuff, and outdoors stuff, and he often would use the video camera to do sound recording in the field, because if you’re among people and you’re with the video camera, they’re not so aware of their voices and the sound being recorded, they’re more aware of—it’s a very visual thing. Psychologically, it you stick a microphone in front of somebody, they get really aware of what they say, but if you’re walking around with a video camera, they’re immediately more concerned with how they look. So, you have a chance to actually use it as a sound recorder, which is more inconspicuous. We started making videos because we really thought, well, if we’re going to have a live show—I mean, we never thought we were going to have a live show in the first place. We made two records, and we didn’t ultimately intend to play live ever. And then we got so many offers that we thought at some point, well, hell, first of all we’re really not making any money making records, well making money really wasn’t the objective of starting the Books in the first place – we really were just interested in working together, and we found it a really compelling experiment, the approach we theorized. And at some point, the music took off in a direction, in a way publicly with acclaim that we never expected, and we got lots of invitations to come and show our face, and we really didn’t know what to do with it, so we consistently said no until we figured, well, with the third record, we put the record together with at least an element in our approach that allowed for an easier translation of the music to the stage. And we didn’t feel particularly restricted by that, so it actually worked out well. So then we put together a show, and we figured, well, it’s only going to be us two on stage most of the time, and who wants to see that? So, it would be more interesting to have more interactive visuals. And our music allows for easy synchronization with video, because we play with so much pre-recorded sound—we call it glorified karaoke—and we’re often bound by a background tape. I mean, you get used to playing dynamically around a rigid tape, so I don’t think that the tape is rigid other than maybe in rhythm and tempo, other than that it’s acoustically very dynamic, and musically very dynamic, and if you do it often enough, you really know how to stretch it and bend it, so it’s still a very lively and immediate thing. And video can be synchronized so easily, because our background tapes are all on DVD, so – people are often kind of blown away, like ‘how do you guys line it all up??’ and it’s like ‘how hard can it be?’ LUMEN ECLIPSE: What you do with your shows really feels quite unusual and inspired, relative to what most bands do on stage today. How much were you thinking about innovating; who do you feel are your peers; where does it come from? PAUL DE JONG: There are so many I get inspired by that if I start out naming names then I start feeling bad because I leave out somebody. You get inspired over a long period of time, or maybe from childhood on, by things or performances or instances that are not so extraordinary, but at a certain point in your life you’re particularly impressionable to it. Then there are more recent things that are just so much to do with what I’m thinking of, that particular thing at that particular moment, that it influences me because it pushes me in a certain direction. So in a way it’s really individual, it’s really personal, what you get influenced by. It’s also really hard to say what, or why things are important, because some things might be actually rather trivial, and have great influence on how you think and what you do. But, for instance, a couple of years ago I saw this Laurie Anderson show and, I mean, I don’t really have that much of an opinion about what it was about, or the music or all that, it kind of went past me actually, but the way she performed it, and the way she put it together, was extraordinary. I mean, here she was in a big, big old theater, full of people, and it was a sold out show, and she basically took care of an hour and a half of narratives, singing, playing music, and visuals, and it was all her, and it was really put together in extraordinarily simple ways, and it was all really—it was effective, because all the elements were well-connected to each other, and so whether that influences me or whether it just kind of empowers me, I don’t know, but it’s something that’s stuck with me. There are people who just, well, playing an instrument is what they do, and they do it really, really well, and I think that it’s something that is pretty timeless. If I go to the concert hall, and I see a classical concert, and I see somebody playing, for example, Brahms’ violin concerto, performed really, really extraordinarily, and it’s just this beautiful thing that the orchestra and the conductor and the soloist do together, well, I don’t really need anything else, it’s already quite overwhelming. It’s more like knowing measure, and knowing how to balance what you’re interested in. A lot of performances of bands, for instance, in the past years especially, have video or film behind it, and I’m not even looking at it, it’s just some kind of slideshow, because I’m just basically interested in the interaction onstage, and the way they actually play music together, and of course it’s a great bonus if I like the music. It’s not something that I particularly need. I think it’s really all about how you balance the media that you present, in order to actually present a whole. And there are instrumentalists that I am completely absorbed by their performance. It seems that there are always people when you play – I mean, we’ve played the same show, or by and large the same show— LUMEN ECLIPSE: I was going to ask about that; how has your show changed since you started performing live? PAUL DE JONG: We started performing with a band of four people, that was our first tour, and there were more just musical numbers in that show. I would say about half the show had video, and about the other half was without video, just instrumentals, and even stuff without background tapes, because Ann Doerner was still in the band then, she’s been in the band off and on, she never left but she also never entered. And Nick’s younger brother Mike was in the band, and then a year and half after that, Nick and I decided to go on the road together, on this huge tour of 50 concerts in America only, and we thought it would be more effective to just do it the two of us, and so we really tightened a lot up. And also, because it was the two of us, we kind of figured out ways to really orchestrate the songs in a more creative way, because we had to, so we changed a lot of parts that were originally sampled, or different instruments: we kind of changed them into our own instruments, and then we thought, well, since it’s only the two of us we really should have like 90% video with it, it should just become this video music show. And then we played the show so often that at some point you become so familiar with every song and also how songs work together in different orders that we kind of started to move songs around, and it kind of grew into a couple of ideal sets for different spaces. For instance, if we would play in a loud club, we would automatically drop the very soft songs, and it would be a more high-speed set, and if we would play, for instance in Somerville, or in a museum like the MFA, we would do a longer program with a little bit more experimental pieces, and that worked really well, and we became really flexible. And because we were on the road so much we didn’t get much time to compose at all, and new pieces would only be added very occasionally. We did a Nick Drake song, we did a piece called ‘Eight Frame;’ maybe there were only like three or four songs that got added, and we dropped a song or two that we were basically just tired of playing or never were really happy with, and we arranged a couple of new ones from old records that we had thought we’d never be able to do, but we did. LUMEN ECLIPSE: When you’re on the road, are you always still collecting? PAUL DE JONG: Yes, I collect wherever I am. I don’t say it’s an obsession, but I take great pleasure in it. Sometimes I have my off-days, when I drive by antique shops and I just say ‘blech,’ or there are a couple of thrift stores that I just let go – I don’t have that enormous fever anymore, which I used to have, but sometimes that affliction returns, and it all has to do with the need for it. Right now, I don’t have a great need for new material, or for new sound or video material, because we gathered so much in the past two years. I haven’t even scratched the surface on digitizing everything, and actually cutting it to useable raw material. So, there are kind of different stages. I’m always collecting, and I’m always interested and always looking at stuff, but at some point the focus kind of shifts, to digitizing a large body of material that we’ve gathered. Or, it focuses to cut it down, to really go deep into it and listen to it, and pick out the usable parts, and finding the jewels in it, to cut those out and put them into usable libraries where you can actually listen to the stuff over and over again, and actually use it, and eventually the focus changes more to composing with it. So, it doesn’t cut out any of the previously mentioned activities – sometimes they recede to the background, but they’re always present, and I always, wherever I am, in new places, I always keep an eye out for thrift shops. On tour, for instance, in every city where we were, me and my assistant Matthew would go early in the morning to as many thrift shops as we possibly could, and just see what’s out there. We got really a lot of material from that. Right now I’m actually more interested in finding still material, and I have plans to make work from still material, and I’m looking very focused, so I go to slightly different stores, and I’m looking for slightly different things, so I’m focusing on that…well, and sound materials, too.