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Photos: Public Enemy: 1988-1998

Music Features

Meant to be

SQUARE FOOTAGE: Lately, de Jong (right) has been hitting small-town branches of the NYPL to comb their audio/visual collections, and Zammuto has been rearranging hair and beauty ads from the '90s.

"It's funny, because, you know, we don't think of ourselves as that," he says, to correct the record. "We don't call ourselves that."

There's only a slight flicker of frustration active in his voice, but it's enough to have me imagining de Jong gently kicking himself once a day for having included "Read, Eat, Sleep" on their 2002 debut, Thought for Food (Tomlab). As its truncated acoustic-guitar and bit-fucked music-box samples amble and stutter forward, and as little analog drafts sweep through its hidden hallways and slam what sound like screen doors shut, the song swells, vanishes, and comes clambering back carrying a sample that has served as a de facto critical cue card for most of their career: a pair of male voices repeating the word "aleatoric" as though to learn it. They even go so far as to fit it into context for us: "By digitizing thunder and traffic noises, Georgia was able to compose aleatoric music." But de Jong is right: there's something about the term that doesn't quite fit what the Books, who come to the ICA this Friday, do.

No question that their æsthetic is as culled as it is composed. For the past couple of years — in addition to starting families and, in Nick's case, ordering hens — the two have been adding to the enormous archive of sound and video fragments from which their songs are assembled. De Jong has been hitting small-town branches of the New York Public Library to comb their audio/visual collections; Zammuto has been rearranging hair and beauty infomercials from the '90s. (I offered to send him my gift copy of Facial Magic, a home-beauty regimen that promises face-lift results through a routine of pinching and pulling — but he already had it!) For close to a decade, the two have been extracting precious bits of language from their original contexts, clipping syllables into rhythmic gibberish, using fits of laughter to imply melody, butchering narratives, undoing poems, sabotaging educational speech, converting sense to nonsense and refining it back into what feels like a purer sense.