The seeds of The Books’ Brighton Festival booking were sown back in 2006 when Brian Eno showed up at a show at London’s Luminaire club to catch the duo’s UK debut.

Guitarist and vocalist Nick Zammuto and cellist Paul knew he was a fan, he’d even mentioned them in an article in the Irish Times, but little did they know they’d have to shelter him backstage.

“That show was completely unmemorable save for that,” says Paul de Jong, his cultivated Dutch American hybrid leading our conference call. “The ceilings were low and nobody could see,” adds New Yorker Nick, speaking from his new home in Vermont. “But he stayed the whole show. He was sick and didn’t think he’d be able to last, but we sneaked him around back and he watched from the side.”

The things they admire in Eno – creative spirit, deep intelligence and open mindedness – are the same things The Books’ fans tend to cite about them.

And the critics concur. 2005’s Lost And Safe, their most accessible album to date, was awarded Album Of The Year by leftfield aficionado manual Wire magazine. 2002 debut Thought For Food, an album so free of reference points it confused even the most articulate music writers, was awarded 9/10 by Pitchfork. The following year’s The Lemon Of Pink led the same influential website to declare The Books “remain more or less a genre of one”.

The genre Pitchfork observed is dubbed “collage music” by Nick, and reflects their creative process. They put together audio samples lifted from cassettes, VHS video tapes, vinyl and audio tapes bought in thrift stores, then added to an obsessively stocked and extensive library, to form sonically harmonious powerful narratives.

After a three-year hiatus since Music For A French Elevator – a commission from the Ministry Of Culture to soundtrack its new building’s lifts that saw the duo “trawling through our libraries looking for the French samples under the general theme of ascending and descending” – The Way Out is their latest work. It has advanced the band’s already high level of detail as well as their collection of samples.

“Over the past five years our library has grown hugely, which has allowed us to do much more coherent work, and that’s meant each track can become its own universe in a way,” says Nick “We thought of it like a country full of cities. Each track is a city, it has its own character, its own life, but it’s still connected by this wide expanse of emptiness.

“The level of production is greater; the range of styles is wider. Having come back we didn’t want to rehash what we did before. We’ve moved on. It’s immediately recognisable as The Books, but it is a departure.”

Departing is an apposite term. As with everything they concoct it can be interpreted on many levels, but the album’s title suggests an exit, the idea of escape, perhaps concerning their beloved cassettes’ trajectory to landfill.

To which, of course, Paul says it might also mean they become more in touch with things. He refers to the self-help therapists sampled on the album’s bookends.

“The era of the audio cassette produced a lot of that stuff because it was cheap to make in high volumes. It was a way for small- time therapists to go national and distribute their philosophy. They are all different but they seem to have a lot in common with each other.

“It’s very much in line the way we work. We find these elements that might or might not have anything to do with each other but we just see connections and present it.”

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