queen9play Old Voice Mails? Instructional VHS Tapes? They’re Music to His Ears.
Updated:2025-01-12 03:42 Views:196
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.”
Such a scenario would represent a notable degree of ticket-splitting, perpetuating a trend captured by surveys throughout this election cycle. Democratic Senate candidates in a number of swing states, including Arizona and Nevada, have consistently polled ahead of the top of the ticket, especially when President Biden was the party’s standard-bearer. As Ms. Harris’s nomination has made the election more competitive, the gap between her and those down-ballot Democrats has narrowed — but the trend persists in most races in swing states.
“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.
Image“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.”
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