Creating The Sound Of Time Travel

The crossover from The Books to Zammuto was quick and sudden.

After more than ten years in existence and after releasing what was arguably their best work to date with fourth studio album The Way Out, Zammuto and fellow member Paul De Jong called it quits in 2012, less than a year after releasing that fourth record. Within months of the split, Zammuto revealed his eponymous new project, and released the band's debut record shortly later, in March 2012.

Zammuto doesn't have any regrets. “I think The Books was very much a collage-oriented project,” he begins. “We used a lot of samples from a lot of different sources to put it together. Our live shows were fun, but it had this glorified karaoke feeling about it and it started to wear on me. So with the new band, I always wanted to work with a drummer, you know, a really excellent percussionist, and that was never going to fit in with The Books, so that was my priority. I feel like the new band really is a band, whereas The Books wasn't."

Zammuto's self-titled debut record was received with praise and contained an obvious taste for digital enhancement, clearly still making a transition between bands (“The first record was crazy and full of ideas, and a breakup record in so many ways”), but this new second record, Anchor, further clarifies the identity of Zammuto as a band, now an entirely detached project from The Books. As an AV nerd, Zammuto confesses he was certainly excited to work in a more analogue sense this time around. In order to do so, however, he needed equipment. Zammuto started up an Indiegogo crowdfunding campaign, not really expecting anything, but the response was massive. “It was a real unexpected shot in the arm. It was amazing. This business is kind of crazy. After The Books, I was not expecting lightning to strike twice, it was incredibly unlikely, so to have that many people help out, it just filled me with energy... After touring that first record, the band really came together, so I really wanted to pull out the extra stuff and focus on the core connection between elements. I think I wanted to be more spacious and that involved working in a more analogue way. I really wanted to work with reverb and things like that, which I hadn't in the past, and also focus on songwriting. So the Indiegogo campaign allowed me to get some really good gear, and allowed me to make a good-sounding record.”

Part of that money went towards making some additions to his studio, and that has largely shaped the new record's sound. “There's a couple of pieces in there that really changed things. I got this amazing old stereo spring reverb; a lot of guitars have them, but they're less coloured. This sounds like time-travel, it's amazing. I really dove into that piece of gear and figured out how to make it work; mechanical reverb is delicious-sounding because it's so chaotic, and it has a lot more character than the digital algorithms that can now be so cheap online. The other unit I got was an old FX unit from the '80s and '90s, an old digital processor and it just has this amazing character. The two bits of equipment give me a '70s and '80s sound and work together to head in this new direction.

“[Anchor was] a hybrid approach this time. I expanded my studio so that I could go in either direction. Digital was endless rethinking and rehashing – sometimes you end up killing your song by overthinking it, whereas analogue allows me to just stick to a sound. There's definitely a paralysis, I think, because you just have so many tools at your disposal, and there's so much noise in this culture as well, the comforts are thinning and you don't know what to do. When I'm in that headspace I just need to sit in quiet comfort for a while and focus on one thing at a time. It's a typical survival strategy for the modern time. I wanted to make a record that was deeper and darker and less frenetic. I wanted it to be extorted and less happy. I'm tired of happy, I wanted the darkness to take over for a while. Some of my favourite records have a beautiful darkness about them.”

Zammuto heads to Australia for a bunch of shows on the east side of the country, and while Zammuto has been to the country with The Books on previous occasions, this will be his first experience with the new band. They're definitely looking to make the most of it: “We've given ourselves plenty of time. I want to go on a sound collection and spend some time generating some recording. I want to see if I can transfer it back to the studio. We're gonna drive between Sydney and the south; I've never been outside a city in Australia before, and we've never had to drive anywhere, so I'm looking forward to getting out and experiencing a bit of the country.”