On Nov. 12 justArts spoke with Nick Zammuto, guitarist and vocalist for the band The Books, which also includes cellist Paul de Jong. The Books' music resists easy categorization, but the best description is probably "collage music." Intricate, layered and ambitious, the band combines acoustic instrumentation and digitally sampled found sounds. The band is currently based in North Adams, Mass. and will come to the Rose Art Museum on Thursday at 8:30 p.m. to kick off its winter tour. The show is sponsored by the Punk, Rock n' Roll Club and tickets are free; entrance requires a Brandeis ID.JustArts: As I understand it, you're starting your tour next week at the Rose Art Museum, right?

Nick Zammuto: Right, and I'm really looking forward to the show. It's going to be like coming home. Brandeis is where my parents actually met. Both my parents grew up in Waltham, and their parents went there for years before as well. I've been to the Rose Art Museum on several occasions, and I know about the controversy and am curious to know and get a firsthand account of that right now.

JA: What are your plans for the tour? Will you play a lot of new material?

NZ: Yes, we have a lot of new material already incorporated into the show and then a lot of new material again in the spring; we're going to have a new show for that, as well.

JA: I've read in some past interviews that you're not the biggest fan of touring and it's more of a financial necessity for you. Has that changed at all?

NZ: Yeah, I am. The only problem now is that I have two young boys and I have to leave them behind when I travel, and that's always hard on the family when I leave. I do enjoy it quite a bit more than I used to. Before, I was just quite freaked out by the idea of being out in front of people. I'm kind of over that hump, and now I really enjoy meeting people and getting a chance to directly interact.

JA: Do you think of yourself as more of a performer now? I mean, would you call yourself that?

NZ: I guess reluctantly. Basically, I just get up there, and I play and I sing, and we both sit down when we're on stage, so it's not like we're jumping around and really performing in an outward kind of way, but it is a performance. But we think of the video as the real performer.

JA: So that's the big part of your tour then, the video?

NZ: The video is kind of our lead singer, in a lot of ways; you know, always shifting temperament and intensity, and it sucks up a lot of attention, which has always been the goal. But the video, especially with the new pieces, is very integrated with the music, so it's very rhythmically oriented stuff.

JA: How do you sort through everything, all that lost material?

NZ: Slowly but surely, and we kind of follow our noses. We have a pretty good sense and a lot of experience collecting stuff. ... We try to go straight for the good stuff whenever we can. . It's like gambling; you never know where a piece is going. And we just have thousands of tapes. Most of them we haven't gone through, but our library has grown hugely since our last record; it's been a while since we released a new record.

JA: It sounds like you're sort of saving all this lost material, rescuing it.

NZ: I think it has this instant effect on people when they see it's from the '80s and '90s, and that's when most of us grew up. ... It's not 100-percent nostalgia, but just seeing the way videotape degrades kind of reminds us of our home movies in a way that just cuts straight to the heart. It's really fun to work with that stuff.

JA: Do you think that lifting these objects out of obscurity makes it more profound in a way because you're decontexualizing it?

NZ: Yeah, you know, profound is one of those kind of dangerous words. ... We're always trying to find meaning in ordinary, everyday things. And I think that if you look to the mainstream all the time for meaning, you're simply not going to find it. It's all kind of prepackaged too much if you're looking for something a little more raw and less self-conscious. So yeah, if you're able to change your perspective on things and recontextualize things, and then ordinary things become profound again, and that's always a wonderful moment. That's the great thing about having kids; you get to live in that moment all the time because they're experiencing everything for the first time.

JA: Where do you start when you start to compose a song?

NZ: It could be anything, but again, it's intuition. If you feel like there's something there, you start to play around with it and push it and pull on it and see what happens. ... Usually we have the visual in mind from the beginning, and we're going for that kind of chicken-and-egg feeling where when you're watching the show, you have no idea whether the sound or the image came first.

JA: Do you like performing in museums, then? Is that kind of space a new experience for you?

NZ: I really want to try it all, how the music plays in different environment. So far, so good; the music seems to be received well. ... You know, the thing that I don't really like is a lot of drunk people [because] I just think people miss important things when they're not completely there. ... If it gets out there on one of those big hipster sites, people just show up because it's the place to be. But right now we're kind of lucky because we've been able to fly under the radar for a while.

JA: Actually, I know this show in particular will be Brandeis students only.

NA: Yeah, and I think it's early, so they won't be drunk yet.