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The
Books - Lost and Safe (Tomlab) |
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The Lemon
of Pink was one of the oddest and most memorable releases of 2003: a follow-on
to the previous year’s odd-but-so-so Thoughts For Food, this was
a completely un-self-conscious, fabulously hybrid creature - like a yodelling
griffin, or a falsetto phoenix in a pink boa - consisting of two parts sound-collage,
two parts nonsense, and one part quirky instrumentals. Few knew how to even
begin to talk about it. It was just utterly delightful.
Lost and Safe is even better.
Sometime around 1900, some long-forgotten inmate of a lunatic asylum in either
Germany, Switzerland, Italy, or France began tearing up scraps of paper and
fabric and gluing them at random onto a canvas supplied by the establishment
to keep its charges occupied. This 'object' was acquired, together with a
hundred or so other examples of madmen's doodlings, by a psychiatrist called
Hans Prinzhorn, resident at the Heidelberg Psychiatric Institute, who, beneath
his other hat as an art historian, recognised that there might be something
more to these formless, rootless, hallucinatory daubings than mere diagnostic
auxiliaries. When the group of radical artists who were to become known as
the Cubists were searching for an authenticity in art that would support their
reaction to its current Academic domination, they first turned to 'primitive'
art and childrens' drawings for inspiration, then they discovered the ‘psychotic
art’ of the Prinzhorn
Collection, and its effect was immediate and world-shaking. In 1912 in
Paris, one Pablo Picasso pasted a patch of oilcloth with a chair-caning design
to a canvas and called it 'Still Life with Chair Caning' ('Nature Morte à
la chaise cannée') and the history of art was transformed: 'collage'
was born.
Whereas a number of Modernist artists - notably the Dadaists and Surrealists
- experimented with collage ideas in sound and live performance, it wasn't
until the invention of magnetic tape as a recording device that the fundamental
principles of cutting and pasting could properly be begun to be experimented
with. Iannis Xenakis, working in the early 1960's, is recognised as being
one of the first composers to work with sound-collage, then people like John
Cage, Brion Gysin, and William S Burroughs picked up the torch and ran with
it in their own distinctive directions.
In popular music, sound-collage made its first appearance, as so much else,
with the Beatles: Being For the Benefit of Mr Kite on Sgt Pepper's
Lonely Hearts Club Band, and Revolution No. 9 on The Beatles
were the prototypes for a long and distinguished line of artists who have
subsequently incorporated sampling into their work as a dominant, if not the
defining aspect of their music: Girl Talk, Kid 606, People Like Us, DJ Shadow,
Negativland, Set Fire to Flames ... etc
A recent rash of petulant and silly lawsuits on the grounds of theft of intellectual
copyright has rather queered the pitch for such artists lately (it'll all
blow over by Christmas) but as The Books' sources seem mostly to be archival
radio and TV tapes (a lot from the BBC), I can't see that being a problem.
Not unless the estate of the late great Raymond Baxter, for starters, begins
clamouring for royalties. RB was a Battle of Britain hero, one of The Few,
a Spitfire pilot-turned-rally-driver-turned-radio commentator who subsequently
established himself as one of the first TV popularists of science and new
technology. In June 1962 he was present at the BBC’s huge parabolic dish
at Goonhilly Down on the Lizard edge of Cornwall to witness the very first
live transatlantic transmission of a TV image bounced from Andover in Maine
via the Telstar satellite. His ‘Here we are...Here we are...We are antici...There
it is! There it is!… It's a man! There it is!...’ provides the opening
sample to Be Good To Them Always, and, whereas you don't need to know that,
it does inform the rest of the song in a very typically Bookian manner.
It's at the heart of the collage technique that, whereas the whole is composed
of snippets from here there and everywhere, it's implied that those snippets
carry their own resonance into the reassembly whether they're recognised or
not. At the heart of the nonsense poem, that other significant component in
The Books technical armoury, is the reverse notion: that, regardless of the
apparent lack of sense in the superficial reading of the poem, or lyrics,
meaning coheres nevertheless to the experience as an inevitable consequence
of the human need to make sense of one's situation regardless of any and all
disorientating distractions.
Originating (in the English tradition) with the tenth-century Anglo-Saxon
Riddles and the Exeter Book, writers such as Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Ogden
Nash, and Spike Milligan have become synonymous with the notion of ‘nonsense’,
with, yet again, John Lennon himself deserving at least an honourable mention.
Sergeant Pepper was Monty Python’s uncle, of course. Not many people
know that. The Books own contributions to the form are distinctive not so
much for their content (prolix streams of consciousness operating just this
side of tediousness) but for the astonishingly inventive ways in which they
manage to shoe-horn the music to accompany them:
‘most of all the world is a place where
parts of wholes are described
within an overarching paradigm of clarity’
is perfectly typical.
A plummy archive reading of part of Lewis Carroll's 'Jabberwocky' comprises
the lyrical superstructure for most of Vogt Dig for Kloppervok which,
unsurprisingly, translates as 'Beware the Jabberwock' in Danish. Here, something
else typically Bookian: the re-constituting of a sound-collage assembly into
a standalone sung 'chorus' - a kind of sonic equivalent of copying a visual
collage as a separate picture. This is so post-post-Modern it's bleeding edge,
but the marvellous thing about it is that it's not even remotely earnest in
that dreadful, hermetic, knowing way that some artists adopt: it's just great
fun. It's inclusive. It makes you smile. Rare gift.
The aforementioned quirky instrumentals - the third leg in The Books tripod
- have evolved considerably since The Lemon of Pink. Now, not only
do we have Nick Zammuto's guitar and Paul de Jong's cello - the fundamental
basis of The Books sound pallette - but also much more of frequent collaborator
Anne Doerner's perky banjo, and the inclusion of a whole battery of new, found,
and altered instruments, including, notably, a vintage Hohner clavinet, a
set of tuned plastic drainpipes, and a cheap metal filing cabinet with subwoofers
installed inside: add these sounds to things like inside-out cello and slow-motion
ringtones and you begin to get the picture. Quirky.
But never whimsical, unlike the only two other groups who I can think of to
compare The Books with – Lemon Jelly and British Sea Power - who, for
all that they're both marvellously distinctive and hugely enjoyable in their
own, different ways, both succumb, occasionally, to what I think of as the
Morris Dancing syndrome, when substance is subsumed to nostalgia, and the
jingling and the hankies and the tambourines .... *shudder*
There's such an embarassment of riches in Lost and Safe.There's a piece
of virtuoso filing-cabinet drumming on An Animated Description of Mr Maps
that moves from a kind of Burundi masterclass to incorporating something I've
only ever heard before in Steve Reich's Different Trains - when the
percussion exactly matches the rhythm of the spoken word, which in this case
is an animated description (just as it says on the label) of a strangely colourful-sounding
police fugitive as read over some local radio network. And in It Never
Changes To Stop Doerner's double-tracked banjo is joined by de Jong's
double-tracked cello and finally by Zammuto's double-tracked guitar in an
elegaic Rachels-like sextet that turns out to be the introduction to a very
disturbing little outburst from a deeply stressed Southern state junior school
teacher hectoring his cowed class into silence before prayers.
Lost and Safe is also the most song-based of The Books three albums
so far: Nick actually sings – quite a lot – and really quite nicely
– outstandingly in An Owl With Knees, an achingly beautiful, enigmatic
song whose rolling instrumental break - just those three, unaltered, instruments,
this time – emerges out of a fast-chopping pizzicato sequence that sounds
for all the world as if Apocalypse Now’s ubiquitous slowed-down helicopter
sounds had been grafted onto a Bach chorale that ascends to quite inspirationally
sublime heights before, literally, and most cruelly, just petering out at
four-and-a-half minutes. More, they yelled, more.
There is, of course, another way of looking at all this. Having listened to
this album a lot since acquiring it, I’ve begun to nurse the inkling
of a suspicion that there might be something else at work here – that
its paradoxical title might, in fact, be a clue, and that its eleven (!) tracks
are code-cribs to the deciphering (come closer whilst I whisper this –
and swear that you won’t tell another soul) of the infamous Lost Books
of the Illuminati.
‘The books suggest we set our hearts on doing nothing’ (A Little
Longing Goes Away)
‘When finally we opened the box.
we couldn’t find any rules’ (Smells Like Content)
‘He saw red, but he thought five’ (An Animated Description of
Mr Maps)
‘I can’t find the books, they must be in La Jolla’ (If Not
Now, Whenever)
‘It told itself it needed names
and in so doing it became’ (Twelve Fold Chain)
Such apparent gobbledegook might well be nothing more nor less than a brilliant
cryptic concealment, purposely disguising its portent beneath a double-bluff
of nonsense.
It’s happened before.
Me, I’m off to La Jolla. Or maybe Heidelberg.
June 2005
