SONIC REDUCER "I can't find the Books / They must be in La Jolla" is the snippet that juts out of the miasma of sampled dialogue and sounds in "If Not Now, Whenever," off last year's Books album, Lost and Safe (Tomlab). And it turned out to be a prescient steal on Nick Zammuto and Paul de Jong's part — because, after making that LP, their third, the pair finally went on the road with a full band.

"I came to music really late in my life. But I've been forced to become a musician," says Zammuto, 30, from his Massachusetts home. He studied visual arts and chemistry there, at Williams College, before he started making music with de Jong, who has played the cello since age five. "Originally I was more interested in firing rubber bands at my guitar than I was in actually playing it."

During the Books' library-quiet but industrious five-year existence — with 2002's Thought for Food and 2003's The Lemon of Pink (both Tomlab) in their stacks — their rise has been a heady, and surprising, one.

Even a die-hard analog recording guru such as John Vanderslice was won over by their music. "The first time I heard 'Tokyo' from The Lemon of Pink, it made me want to record on a computer. They had completely fulfilled the promise of digital recording," he e-mails from Portland, Ore.

Zammuto was first snared by sound as a student, when he began capturing the sounds coming off his sculptures with a DAT recorder. "It was a real epiphany for me when I made my first stereo recording," he recalls. He received the recorder in the mail and then took it for a walk downtown through a street fair. "I walked through the crowd, just kind of aimlessly meandering. And I went home, laid in bed with all the lights off, listening to that recording, and I could remember every single footstep of that walk, based on that sound.

After meeting each other as neighbors in the same New York City apartment building, Zammuto and de Jong decided to bring together their two different but complementary audio collections — the former gathering field recordings and interviews; the latter, old vinyl and film. The Books' pieces are still composed utilizing Zammuto's experiments with sound: He often attaches cheap computer gaming subwoofers to objects, sends different sounds through them, rerecords the results, and then uses those recordings as the basis for a musical composition. The latest full-length's "Vogt Dig for Kloppervok," for instance, was constructed of the sounds of twigs and pinecones being stepped on, whereas "An Animated Description of Mr. Maps." was made by mounting a subwoofer within a filing cabinet and sending various subsonic rumbles through ...