Paul de Jong was busy digitizing “Doug Wead Narrates the Promises,” a 1981 reading of Bible scriptures on cassette. It was a drizzly November afternoon, and he was deep into the Book of Job. Outside his studio in North Adams, Mass., the darkening Berkshire Mountains loomed.
“Thou shalt be hid from the scourge of the tongue,” Wead intoned in his somniferous voice. De Jong adjusted the volume, peering through his octagonal-framed glasses. He wore a cap with the word “people” embroidered on it. The “scourge of the tongue” is exactly what he was searching for.
De Jong, 60, is a Dutch American artist best known as a member of the collage-pop duo the Books, alongside Nick Zammuto. The band broke up in 2012, but de Jong continues to make collage music under his own name, and the raw material fills the main room of his high-ceilinged studio. The walls are lined with towering shelves crammed with vinyl, cassettes and VHS tapes that make up, as de Jong puts it “the fringes of the world of media.”
“Brake Repair for Ford Tractors,” “America’s Best Model Trains” and “Institutional Investor Ranked Analysts Top Stock Picks for 2000” can be found on VHS. “Simplified Russian Grammar,” “A Field Guide to Bird Songs of Eastern and Central North America” and “Tuning Your Autoharp” live in the vinyl section. He calls the obscurities he collects the Mall of Found: a library of low-budget, homespun and dated pieces of spoken-word media that de Jong samples, pairing the clips with live studio instruments that are bowed, strummed, plucked and percussed.
“What fascinates me is the gaping difference between how people seem to feel about themselves and how they actually end up looking to others,” de Jong said of his collection. He doesn’t own a Ford tractor, nor does he have any plans to brush up on his Russian grammar. It’s the unconscious humanity revealed by the voices on these outmoded relics — their timbre, their hesitations and their pauses — that is magnetic to him. “Their vulnerabilities,” he explained, the “pure human elements.”
The Books’ very first song, “Enjoy Your Worries, You May Never Have Them Again” released in 2002, is a case study in found sound, distilling samples from a golf tournament, an instructional Dutch language LP, a Japan Airlines promotional recording and more. The fragmented voices cut through an ostinato guitar pattern, layered with sputtering percussion created by de Jong’s own extended-technique cello playing, with delicate harmonics and spindly guitar from Zammuto, all spliced up and jig-sawed together in the mixing process.
The more obscure, the better for de Jong, who has made two albums since the Books broke up, and has a third in the works. “I don’t think that there is much of anything in my archives that can be found on YouTube,” he said. He hunts for these media mementos in the bargain bins at Goodwill and the Salvation Army, and rifles through the dustiest crates of record stores in out-of-the-way towns across the country. He saves them from the landfill, snatching them up at strangers’ garage sales.
“It could be anywhere from Virginia to Texas to South Dakota,” de Jong said, trying to recall where he picked up the Doug Wead tape.
His collection started when he was 5 years old, growing up in Rotterdam. His father, a doctor, gave him a record player and motley selection of 45s. Among the Beatles, Czech folk music and Bach’s St. Matthew’s Passion was a medical 45 on how to recognize heart murmurs. De Jong found the tremulous heartbeats fascinating, especially when he discovered he could slow the record down to 16 rpm, warping the sounds into something unrecognizable.
Medical media remains an important part of his archive. He pulled off a shelf a vinyl record titled “Auscultation of the Heart,” a 1966 heart murmur record made for medical students. Next to it was “The Early Phases of Diabetes Mellitus,” a postgraduate seminar lecture series with cover art that looked like a long lost Joy Division record. Nearby were language instruction LPs. The exaggerated enunciation on these records can make for interesting samples, as heard on his song “Baxter@73,” a cascading track with busy percussion and gelatinous wah-wah sounds, contrasting the teacherly voices.
Sometimes de Jong will buy used answering machines just for the long-forgotten tape inside, eavesdropping on the past conversations of complete strangers. Shoving one at random into his cassette player, the voice of a woman named Grace emerged through the lo-fi fuzz. It was a simple call-me-back message to her friend Diane. Others contain sales pitches. Some are confessional monologues between lovers. The Books’ song “Thirty Incoming” contains a heart-melting message to someone named Mary by her lover. De Jong’s “Number Man” blends sales call voice mail messages.
The Books’ most streamed song, “A Cold Freezin’ Night,” was composed with the tape found in a Talkboy, a children’s toy that was originally created as a prop for the movie “Home Alone 2.” In his work, de Jong has used the familiar beeps of answering machines for bass notes, pitched down, as on “If Not Now, Whenever.” For the Books’ splintered, string-forward track “There Is No There,” he extracted single notes from a viola da gamba via a medieval instrument demonstration LP.
When the Books were active, Zammuto, a disarming vocalist who maintains a found sound collection of his own, added his own keen sense for sampling, multi-instrumentalism, mixing and mastering. “Recontextualizing is the way that music works,” he said in a phone interview. While several degrees of separation moved from their original state, sounds and voices have a sense of familiarity. “It feels like an old friend, kind of instantly.”
Matthew Gold, an artist in residence in percussion and contemporary music performance at Williams College and a longtime collaborator of de Jong, likens the experience of the archive to listening to late-night talk radio in the car. “It’s this ephemeral thing, this ethereal thing,” he said. “It represents this vast swath of humanity and their voices that he’s able to connect with.”
Artists using pre-existing sound as raw material have worked in many genres over the decades. The electro producer DJ Shadow’s 1996 album “Endtroducing” and the hip-hop producer J Dilla’s 2006 album “Donuts” were both constructed out of samples; Moby’s 1999 album “Play” drew on Alan Lomax’s field recordings of Delta blues musicians, while Brian Eno and David Byrne’s 1981 album “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts” interspersed voices from radio talk shows, an exorcism, readings from the Quran and more. More recently, the contemporary classical organization Bang on a Can commissioned composers to seek out found sound and compose around it. De Jong is among those who’ve fallen in love with found sound, and while he’s not the first to work with it, his collection might be the most obscure.
The Mall of Found also extends beyond sound. Many of de Jong’s songs have accompanying videos, such as the Books’ “Take Time,” made with found footage from rapturous church services, a Wisconsin Dells theme park, a children’s watermelon-eating contest at a Christian summer camp and more, all capturing moments of unbridled joy. The song builds into a bittersweet ecstasy itself, with Zammuto’s dulcet singing incanting the song’s title. Grisly images from decades-old medical textbooks were animated into happy-go-lucky harmlessness in the video for de Jong’s sprightly song “Hollywald.”
Even de Jong’s album artwork is found. The cover of his 2014 LP, “If,” is a copy of a Sharpie scribble he found on the back of a nondescript sound effects record. “It’s unintended art,” he said. The keen observer will also notice that the album’s creased brown paper sleeve is not creased at all: The wrinkles are printed on it, copied from the sleeve of the sound effects record.
De Jong has digitized about two-thirds of the Mall of Found. Once finished, he plans to make it public, whether online or as a physical museum, encouraging others to deploy it in their artmaking.
Maybe someone will detect the pure human element in the “The World’s Greatest Train Ride Videos” or “Successful Christian Parenting” VHS tapes. It could be hiding in the “Touch Typing Made Simple” LP from 1966. Maybe it’s later on in the Book of Job, in 5:27 of the New Living Translation, perhaps lurking in the archive, in a passage that sums up de Jong’s vision for an accessible Mall of Found: “We have studied life and found all this to be true. Listen to my counsel, and apply it to yourself.”
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