On the eve of the 21st Century, Paul De Jong and Nick Zammuto met in New York City. They started hanging out and quickly realized they both shared a unique approach to music. Thankfully for the children of the future, they had the good sense to start collaborating and get to work on what would become Thought For Food. This album was the first peek into their highly unusual style.

Any critical review of The Books is probably going to say the same thing: They are distinct. They are peerless. They are brilliant. But what makes them so? Reduced to its simplest terms, the formula sounds almost banal... They play atmospheric passages on cello, guitar, mandolin, add a cyclical drum beat, then accompany those passages with found sounds and obscure vocal samples from a massive collection of thrifted home movies. But the reality is far richer than that description implies. These compositions are timeless, mysterious, and disarming in their emotional depth. Each moment has been so intricately cared for; so meticulously crafted, it's difficult to discern where any particular movement starts or ends.

Paul de Jong once described what they were doing as "the new folk music...[w]e make our own instruments, use our own libraries of sound bites while trying to create something universally human." An apt description... The Books' body of work reads like a patchwork quilt that documents all of modern human settlement. Each disembodied voice is completely removed from its context and thus helps create an entirely new one. What they accomplish with this stunning array of reassembled diaspora is the audio equivalent of a colorful sculpture made of news clippings, family photos, love letters, and broken artifacts of daily life.

By extracting these thousands of tiny moments from their own seemingly separate universes and conjoining them, we arrive at the warm conclusion that they were never separate to begin with, and that we're all here, sharing the cosmos together.