The Books, with Lymbye System

The Andy Warhol Museum

Sept. 16, 8 p.m.

Tickets $15

Call… The Books, with Lymbye System

The Andy Warhol Museum

Sept. 16, 8 p.m.

Tickets $15

Call 412-237-8300 or visit www.ticketweb.com.

There isn’t too much literature involved in the music of New York band The Books, but the band’s sound is more eclectic and imaginative than the fiction section of the Carnegie Library.

The Books, composed of Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong, sits onstage during performances. Zammuto plays guitar and sings, while de Jong plays the cello.

But also onstage, The Books has an unusual element it considers somewhat of a third member — video screens synchronized to play in harmony with the band’s music.

The videos have become so integral to the music that the creation of the videos is now intertwined in the band’s songwriting process.

“More and more, the music is happening simultaneously,” de Jong said. “As we are composing music, we are thinking about visuals and finding interesting combinations early on and going for the chicken-or-egg effect where we don’t know which came first — the video or the music.”

Zammuto and de Jong formed The Books in New York City in 1999. The two said they started recording music in their apartments because they weren’t sure how the experimental hodgepodge sound of their music would translate to the stage.

The band has released three studio albums: Thought for Food in 2002, The Lemon of Pink in 2003 and Lost and Safe in 2005.

In 2006, the band composed and recorded a couple of tracks that now play in elevators at the French Ministry of Culture. Then, it released these tracks in an album named Music for a French Elevator and Other Short Format Oddities by The Books.

With the release of Lost and Safe, Zammuto and de Jong said they realized they couldn’t make a living playing their music unless they figured out a way to adapt their sound to live performance.

“When we started thinking about playing live, it opened up new ways to express ourselves,” Zammuto said. “We are not looking to create an exact replica of the music on our records. It opened us up to address our interest in film and video, and it just went from there. Video is another band member now.”

With the entrancing video screens at shows and the electronic loops of noise often found in the band’s music, listening to and seeing The Books play is a meditative experience.

“You end up listening to [the] same loop all day long, so you have to be sure when working with a loop that you can live with it that long, or else it will drive you crazy,” de Jong said. “My own tendency is towards a simple meditative kind of sound with an occasional burst of craziness.”

The eclectic and seemingly random sound of The Books stems in part from the band’s habit of finding inspiration in thrift stores.

“We’ve been talking about doing a series of cassettes we find at Salvation Army stores,” de Jong said. “On our tour, we stop at local thrift shops to look at stuff.”

The band said it’s currently excited about tapes recorded by kids with Talk Boys.

The band’s interest in sounds made by other people in other times and places came from a desire to confuse and blend the past with the present.

“It feels nice to inhabit the past,” Zammuto said. “When we start mixing our own sounds we recorded that day in the studio with disparate points in the past, time becomes beside the point. It’s a way of hearing a sound that goes in one ear and out the other. It’s a way to hold onto it in the studio, hold onto it over and over again and internalize it so it becomes part of you.”

The Books also creates the sounds for its music when a way to make the sounds it wants does not already exist.

The band made an instrument called the spoon box from Radio Shack gamer speakers mounted on plates with the amplifiers removed.

When low frequencies blow through the speakers, it creates a puff of air that vibrates attached spoons and creates the illusion of listening to musical sounds, although it is actually the sound of air on plastic.

The band is currently working on a new album that Zammuto and de Jong said is fully shaped. The band incorporates six new tracks from its upcoming album into its live performances.

You can catch The Books live tomorrow night at the Andy Warhol Museum.

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