You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs and piece by piece, tell the story of how they were made.

I'm Rishikesh Herway.

This episode contains explicit language.

Before the books broke up, they released three albums that combined composed music and found sounds.

In this episode, Nick Samudo explains how he crafted the song's smells like content

off of their 2005 album Lost and Safe from unlikely sources like geometry, chance encounters and a corrugated PVC pipe.

Finally, the open box, we couldn't find any rooms.

Our heads are really with the glut of possibility, just contingencies, but with every piece in faith, we decided to go ahead and just ignore them.

Despite tremendous pressure to capitulate faith.

My name is Nick Samudo, and I was one half of the books. The other half is Paul D'Iong.

I did the writing and compositional side mostly, although the roles were loosely defined.

In the case of this track, I did everything in my little apartment in North Adams, Massachusetts.

The way I would work on books tracks was to put together a body of related sounds, without worrying so much about the composition of it until much later.

I had a pile of sounds going, which basically became the sound world of this track.

I remember I used to get records out from the public library when I was a kid, and whenever the record would end, I would just wait for that sound, because I loved it so much.

That little thump as it crossed over where the spiral turns into a circle.

Yeah, that circle at the center of a record is a loop, and so it was a major epiphany when I realized that, oh, that's a blank canvas right there.

I scratch records. I mean, actually physically scratching records with like razor blades and pens and pencils and thumbtacks and things like that.

And usually not across the music part, but across the locked groove at the center of the record.

You know, if the music part is this long spiral that carries the needle inwards, when that spiral finally ends, it ends in a circle.

You can use a protractory, you can measure out any time symmetry you want right into that groove.

You have 360 degrees in a circle, so if you take 60 degrees, that will give you six beats, which can be a 6-8 or a 3-4 or whatever.

...