Celebrating the New York duo’s sample-heavy work from 2002 through 2010.

Twenty-five years ago, two struggling musicians living in the same New York apartment building, Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, connected through a mutual friend. They immediately hit it off, Zammuto told NPR in 2010.

“[Paul] had this stack of minidiscs against the wall and I asked, ‘What is that?’ And he said, ‘Oh, that’s my reference materials,'” Zammuto said. At the time, De Jong boasted that his sound library had 35,000 named samples — “and it’s growing at a staggering rate,” he added.

Describing “hundreds and hundreds of uncut hours of sound” that remained undocumented, De Jong — an academy-trained cellist — worked daily to sort and catalog sound and video recordings of guided meditations, self-help tapes, private conversations and instructional videos. Zammuto began tapping them for musical ideas, and The Books were born.

“It really is irrelevant who the originator is of these recordings,” de Jong explained. “What is relevant is that there is a universal humanity.” It’s true. Take, for example, the samples and video for the track “I Didn’t Know That.” The title references the main found-sound-snippet in the song, of a kid, and then and adult, saying “I didn’t know that.” Musically, the skittering, acoustic-guitar-driven melody is a powerful force, especially when tapped to create the above frenetically-edited music video.

The Books’ early clip for “Take Time,” below, offers an example of said “universal humanity,” revealing the shared joy of video participants lost in moments, whether a motivational speaker high-fiving his way through a crowd or three woman laughing about a man’s impotence. Produced when processing power first allowed digital editing technology to flourish on home computers, the video revels in quick-cut repetition.

The video for “Take Time” is one of 17 found-footage clips that The Books produced for Playall, an hour-long “DVD of Videos” that the pair released in 2007. Featuring previously unreleased songs and videos, the release’s credits state, “All music and video composed, assembled, produced and mastered by The Books at home in Vermont. 2005 – 2007.”

Songs and Timestamps:

That Right Ain’t Shit – 00:00:00
Be Good To Them Always – 00:02:43
Smells Like Content – 00:07:34
Take Time – 00:11:17
Meditation – 00:14:52
It Never Changes To Stop – 00:15:55
Tokyo – 00:19:57
All A’s – 00:23:55
If Not Now, When – 00:27:33
Classy Penguin – 00:31:56
8 Frame – 00:36:29
An Owl With Knees – 00:42:17
Twelve Fold Chain – 00:46:59
Aquarium of the Pacific – 00:51:42
Handfart Man – 00:53:40
Sculptures – 00:55:15
And I Will Go To Bed At Noon – 01:00:12

Live, the band worked with video samples, and YouTube has plenty of clips featuring the Books in action. This 20-minute performance from 2007 at the First Unitarian Church in Philadelphia shows what the group was capable of.

Zammuto and De Jong made four records between 2002-2010 as The Books, and all of them are worth checking out. In 2010, they released The Way Out, a gem that sounds as good today as when it came out. Zammuto explained the genesis of the album title by describing their tour-supported VHS shopping sprees at thrift stores, where videotapes were cheap because they were a dying medium. “We’re interested in working with media that is, literally, on the way out,” he said.

After The Books disbanded, both members have pursued solo projects. Zammuto formed the group Zammuto and has released a half-dozen solo albums, and de Jong has released four solo albums that continue to feature his cello work and experimental compositions.