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New York-based band The Books bring their distinctive cut-and-paste approach to music to a pair o

Most books are formatted and printed in much the same way. The Books, on the other hand, have a more unorthodox approach.

This week, The Books will bring their eccentric three-month, North American tour to two consecutive concerts in the Harold M. Williams Auditorium at the J. Paul Getty Museum on March 17 and 18. The event, titled “Laughtears and Livewires,” will also feature the band Califone.

With performances scheduled everywhere from The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh to The Ladies Literary Club in Grand Rapids, The Books have been entertaining themselves across the country by playing shows, listening to cassettes, shopping at thrift stores, and taking what band member Paul de Jong refers to as “crazy monster drives.”

The New York-based band is comprised of de Jong, a 41-year-old Dutch classical cellist, and 30-year-old music-sample mastermind and guitarist Nick Zammuto. The duo, who met in 1999 over a shared apartment building and a Shoobie Taylor record, quickly discovered their mutual interest in collecting samples and discovering what the band refers to as “found sound.”

In 2000, de Jong and Zammuto officially formed The Books and started synthesizing samples with instrumentation and vocals to create their own distinctive sound: an amalgamation of acoustic compositions, sampled beats, sound clips and overheard conversations. Afterward, de Jong and Zammuto released their debut album “Thought For Food” in 2002 and “The Lemon of Pink” in 2003, both of which received critical acclaim. After half a decade of production and a few sprinkled performances, their latest album, “Lost and Safe,” has launched their first official national tour, with over 40 scheduled tour dates.

Because their two previous albums focused more on collaborating previous sounds, rather than emphasizing their own performances, “Lost and Safe” directs more attention to de Jong and Zammuto’s instrumentation, creating an overall sound more conducive to live performance. After previously running into problems with trying to retune every song from “Thought For Food” in order to play efficiently, “Lost and Safe” features tighter and more continuous instrumental sections, making it easier to orchestrate.

“A lot of our previous music is not really effective for performance and, when played (live), there are things that we take out and things that we stick in instead, making them recognizable but with a character of (their) own. The majority of our set list for this current tour is from ‘Lost and Safe,’” de Jong said.

Due to the unique style of their music, in which several layers of detailed and nuanced sound clips and samples transition into one cohesive sound, the band has had considerable difficulty adjusting and restructuring its music to be suitable for live performances.

“It took us so long to even play live at all,” de Jong said. “It was very difficult to translate our studio music to the stage without making it just about going on stage and pushing a button or two. We had to learn to play our own music and really instrumentalize and re-orchestrate a big part of our compositions in order to make songs that are actually interesting to listen to and to play.”

With just de Jong and Zammuto sharing the stage, de Jong plays the cello, Zammuto plays guitar, and the two have access to a mixing board center stage and a DVD player that projects an accompanying video onto a screen backdrop, creating a multimedia performance.

“The videos are very similar to what we do in the music,” de Jong said. “They are a mixture of original and found material – photography, texts, home videos and about 25 years’ worth of VHS. With that and what we find, there are endless possibilities.”

With music that strays far from the ordinary and a video montage that is integral to the performance, the tour perpetuates the idiosyncratic and artistic facet of the music by intentionally refusing popular venues and large music clubs in exchange for art museums and poetry lounges.

“We were hoping for unconventional spaces because we don’t really think that our music really has anything to do with the culture of hanging around and drinking alcohol,” de Jong said. “This way, we are able to get a really particular audience that we enjoy.

“It’s not that we don’t particularly enjoy playing in those venues, but it’s just that it doesn’t always do that much justice to our audience or to our show,” he added.

Beyond The Books’ albums, their first tour will enable them to showcase different material not necessarily limited to their usual repertoire.

De Jong promises a couple of new pieces, particularly the band’s soundtrack for a friend’s documentary about the Biosphere II experiment of the early 1990s.

“Our friend went out and made a film about this giant greenhouse in Arizona where a bunch of scientists tried to subsist for about two years, and we decided to make a few songs for that,” de Jong said.

One final benefit of the tour is that they can apply their style to the works of other artists.

“We’re going to be playing a song that, for once, is not necessarily our own,” de Jong said. “I’m not going to tell you what it is but you should be pleasantly surprised!”