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Rating:
For the second time, I am going back to highlight this group, The Books, formed by the American-Dutch duo Nick Zammuto Willscher and Paul De Jong, who have been fairly ignored by most (likely due to simple ignorance rather than anything else). They have made electro-noise-ambient fused with delicate and rarefied lo-fi folk their strength (someone coined the genre "folktronica" at their debut). Even with this "Lost and Safe," they return to mixing samples of sounds, effects, phrases (in the track "Venice," you hear an Italian "così, più in là, via le teste" said by an anonymous gondolier) taken from all facets of human knowledge; decontextualized fragments that, assembled in this almost three-quarters-of-an-hour puzzle of splendid music by the New York group in their third endeavor, find new vigor and a new expressive guise.
An enchanting album that literally sends you into a trance with every listen and captures the most visceral depths of each person, skillfully combining the iciness of electronics used in the rhythms, in the "cut and wrap" experiments, in the sounds that are always between the refined and lo-fi, with the warmth of more typically acoustic instruments (violins, acoustic guitars, banjos are skillfully used in various tracks) and the fragile vocals often hanging by a thread (of voice) by the various members (often interchangeable) of one of the most fragmented musical ensembles in recent years. A fascinating metronome full of allusions and happily dissonant moments that infiltrate between subcutaneous folds and penetrate the heart's rhythms until it beats in unison with the 11 tracks of this splendid electro-acoustic work.
Beautiful and intriguing yet difficult to digest in a single session for most, due to the richness of passages, breaks, and continuous inventions, which by keeping "destabilizing" the listener, at the same time deprive them of the pleasure of completely immersing themselves and savoring more than just scraps of atmospheres continuously fragmented and disorienting. An album that once again marks a small step forward for the duo, the important thing will be to clarify "towards where," because the risk of collapsing on oneself is frighteningly just around the corner unless there are future decided changes in direction. Little is given to us to know from the rare liner notes (rather insignificant and somewhat misleading, in my humble opinion) which, apart from the lyrics, at least have the decency to refer everything to the official website.
Tracklist Lyrics Samples and Videos
02 Be Good to Them Always (04:51)
That's the picture.
You s-you see it for yourself.
There it is. It's a man.
There it is, with uhhh...
Be good to them always.
You know, I simply
cannot understand people.
Oh, how sadly we mortals are deceived
by our own imagination.
This is not real life; this is, for us,
aleatoric television,
a mixed consort of soft instruments.
I can hear a collective rumbling in America.
I've lost my house, you've lost your house.
I don't suppose it matters which way we go.
This great society is going smash.
Oh, he's in the middle of putting things
together and organizing himself.
You do not need to stand on one foot.
The modern town hardly knows
silence.
You are something that the whole world
is doing.
You know, I simply cannot understand
people.
Oh, how sadly we mortals are decieved
by our own imagination.
This is not real life; this is, for us,
aleatoric television,
a mixed consort of soft instruments.
A culture is no better than its woods:
a felling of being connected with the past.
Look at it this way: you may fall
and break your leg,
and so, one leg is shorter than the other.
Can nothing more be done?
04 Smells Like Content (03:41)
Balance, repetition,
composition, mirrors.
most of all the world is a place
where parts of wholes are described
within an overarching paradigm of clarity,
and accuracy,
the context of which makes possible
an underlying sense of the way it all fits together
despite our collective tendency not to conceive of it as such.
but then again, the world without end
is a place where souls are combined,
but with an overbearing feeling of disparity,
disorderliness,
to ignore it is impossible
without getting oneself
into all kinds of trouble
despite one's best intentions
not to get entangled
with it so much.
and meanwhile the statues are bleeding green,
and others are saying things
much better than we ever could,
as the quiet become suddenly verbose.
and the hail is heralding the size of nickels,
and the street corners are gnashing together
like the gears inside the head
of some omniscient engineer,
and downward flows the garnered wisdom
that has never died.
when finally we opened the box
we couldn't find any rules.
our heads were reeling with a glut of possibilities,
contingencies,
but with ever increasing faith
we decided to go ahead and just ignore them
despite tremendous pressure
to capitulate and fade.
so instead we went ahead
to fabricate a catalog
of unstable elements, and modicums,
and particles
with non-zero total strangeness
for brief moments which amount
to nothing more than tiny fragments
of a finger snap.
and meanwhile we're furiously sleeping green,
and the map has started tearing along its
creases due to overuse,
when, in reality, it's never needed folds.
and the air's withholding the sound
of a twelve-string,
and our heads are approaching a density
reminiscent of the infinite connectivity
of the center of the sun,
and therein lies the garnered wisdom
that has never died.
Expectation leads to disappointment.
If you don't expect something big,
huge and exciting,
usually uh, I don't know,
it's just not as, yeah.
05 It Never Changes to Stop (04:01)
Sit up straight and be quiet,
Sit down, son.
Sit up straight in your seat,
And I do not want any more talking,
any more moving about, at all.
Absolutely still, absolutely quiet.
Look up here. Look up here!
Let me have your undivided attention.
Nobody talking, nobody moving,
Absolutely (snap) nobody looking around.
Alright put your hands down,
eyes (snap) closed.
Close your eyes, eyes closed.
Come on, right now, come on.
Nobody moving, nobody talking.
Absolutely still, every eye closed.
And, uh, he thought he could, um, uh,
he could stop when he wanted to,
That he can stop, you know,
when he wants to stop.
And, uh, I don't think that he ever
really believed that he couldn't stop.
I really believe that I think that he really felt
that he could stop whenever he wanted to.
(No chorus)
10 An Owl With Knees (04:41)
Eat rye straw
Leave, withdraw
Drink ink tea
Stay with me
Fame stay shy
By way of why
Wait, lie low
Old ones' odd odes
Read. Read on
Read, read on
Breathe, be calm
You're gone, gone on
it's strange to see how time agrees to slow
down for owls with knees.
Read. Read on
Read, read on
Breathe, be calm
You're gone, gone on
11 Twelve Fold Chain (04:44)
at last it started in the milk?
beginning as it all begins
it forsook? the source of things
and that which floated ???
and made the choice to form a standing wave
and leaning out against the end
unfolding in a place calling some
and it
it gently drapes six senses over
this heart has cause a setted
and opened round the roots of touch
and let them
incredible sensations
it was the insatiable feeling of a feeling of insatiable desire
and all that it could do was hold time to that that it was not
and joined itself it needed names
and in so doing it became
this is the birth that everyone is always talking about
the one assumed but not remembered
but death does not forget
the end will remind it to cure it of itself
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