Zammuto

In 1999, guitarist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong combined their talents and old-media sound archives as the Books. Both were AV geeks with honorary degrees in mad science, and together, they became experimental paleontologists of the audio fossil record. They took what John Oswald and Negativland had wrought and rendered it approachably musical, not to mention legal. The method was collage, the medium was other people's recordings, and the mode was high-concept farce, but the Books gently broke tradition with the fair-use activism and aggressive copyright infringement of their precursors. Instead, they were content to play slapstick games with time and space in the public domain, using acoustic instrumentation to give their mannered plunderphonics a wide and effortless appeal.

When the Books broke up earlier this year, it felt right. It's not that they had gotten bad: Their last record, 2010's The Way Out, recalled the glory days of Thought for Food and The Lemon of Pink after the unfocused Lost and Safe. It's more like the world simply caught up with them. Cheap, accessible software eradicated sound collage's barrier of entry. Mashups and remixes became commonplace marketing tools, and then Christian Marclay blew up the whole game with The Clock. Most of all, the internet made illogical connections between disparate things feel like a matter of course. By 2012, what the Books did was still pretty amazing, but it was no longer strange. That's why Nick Zammuto's self-titled debut, which jettisons the stale conceptual parts of the Books while retaining the durable technical parts, is such a breath of fresh air.

At the time of its release, The Way Out's focus on hypnotherapy samples seemed like just another rich documentary vein to explore. It's revealed as more personal in the wake of Zammuto's recent admission to Pitchfork that he suspected the title's aptness even as they were making the record. Listening again, we can hear Zammuto and de Jong poignantly trying, via self-mesmerism, to reconcile their attachment to the project with the growing conviction that it was tapped out. I saw them perform The Way Out in 2010, synched with kaleidoscopic videos. The most visibly excited Zammuto became all night was when he introduced a guitarist who was fast enough to play "Tokyo", which he'd thought impossible when he built it on a computer. After staking his career on what technology could do, he was becoming more interested in what humans could play.

That instrumentalist impulse flowers on Zammuto, though he certainly hasn't lost his taste for digital enhancement: Dexterous musicianship and catchy pop writing are upgraded to hyper-reality. Still, Zammuto's blog commentary on "The Shape of Things to Come" is telling, in what it chooses to highlight, of his mindset. The song is sweet and fizzy electro-pop in the manner of the Postal Service, mounted on a pithy time-shifting synthesizer loop, where Zammuto sings passionately about his tax forms. The fact that interests Zammuto is that drummer Sean Dixon "is playing a 6/8 clave pattern double time with his right hand and halftime with his left. It's a mind bending thing to watch." This is the rhapsody of a Latin jazz aficionado after a Guillermo Klein concert, not of a cerebral sound artist. Zammuto's focus is narrowing from what music means to how it works-- especially how it divides up time.

The record has baggy moments: "F U C-3PO" gets into bloated electro-prog territory, with heavy laser-fight sound effects and chorused, antic vocals. It's flashy and exciting but a bit hollow, and it's not hard to imagine Zammuto making a whole album of it-- there is a raging prog-rocker just below his mild-mannered façade. Happily, it's an exception to the lucid, pared-down sound profiles of most of the songs. Z**ammuto blasts us with musical particles in narrow, swarming beams; each grain rendered with hallucinatory clarity. The overriding emphasis is on energetic, complexly metered percussion; jam-bandy guitar voyages; and startlingly expressive (if heavily processed) vocals from the typically docile singer. On the joyous overture "Yay", Zammuto uses a slicer effect to turn his voice into a skittering pulsation, with tumbling blocks of percussion offsetting its stuttering skip. With guitar and organ movements creating tectonic shifts, a little melody is elaborated into a full-bore composition.

The first two-thirds of the songs are especially strong, each extrapolating something specific from the record's general style. Techno and acid house refract through "Weird Ceiling" and "Zebra Butt." The hokey but disarming "Groan Man, Don't Cry" synthesizes Afrofunk and Western disco, with vocoder vocals and guitar curlicues evocative of Fool's Gold. (It also sounds a bit like Bon Iver making fun of his own AutoTune hymns.) "Idiom Wind", which anchored a recent EP, resembles the Shins at their most archly constructed. Loosely cobbled together from down-walking bass and humidly pulsing strings, it features very striking vocal writing and inflections, with Zammuto's voice staggered against itself in a falling melody. Addressing an "educated man" whose education "isn't worth a damn," he advises, "Try getting off your ass/ Try picking up an ax/ Things are getting overgrown and it's time for ruthless cutting." This so perfectly captures his process of getting from the Books to here that he could only be talking to himself.

The sharply differentiated genre experiments become less well-defined in the home stretch, but the sound design stays immersive, with pleasant little things to listen to festooned in every niche. But while plenty of iconic Books tropes are ported over to Zammuto, such as  Rube Goldberg percussion and manipulated spoken-word samples, there's no labyrinthine concept to untangle. There's just Zammuto, singing and playing his heart out through an array of computer dressing-- except on the lovely closing track, where his high voice and guitar arpeggios stand barely adorned. Zammuto has said that he considered quitting music after The Way Out, and that this record was about finding out if it was still in him: another round of self-help, this time on his own. His joy upon discovering that he still had music to make is evident, and highly contagious. While the record may be modeled on the stages of grief, it comes off with the turbocharged giddiness of a fun rebound fling after a long, enriching, but grueling relationship that has run out its course.