Deerhoof interview by Luke Telford

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Deerhoof is one of those bands that really polarises people — you either love them or hate them. It’s understandable why some might have trouble with them. Singer Satomi Matsuzaki’ voice is confronting in its chirpiness, and the band’ music folds so many different genres — skiffle, noise, psych, classic rock — and is played with such proficiency and reckless abandon that it can be difficult to process, even at its simplest. It’s not the neo-schizophrenic nature of Deerhoof’ oeuvre that makes them a compelling proposition, though. Whether its dense and cerebral, or clipped and chipper, their music always has a curiously stubborn pragmatism underlying it, as though the members had gone through great personal turmoil to bypass their musical chops and whittle enormous ideas down into their simplest components, with comfort and linearity being the primary casualties.

Greg Saunier started the group in 1994 with friend and bassist Rob Fisk. The lineup has changed a number of times since then, but has settled on a more-or-less stable crew of John Dietrich and Ed Rodriguez on guitars, and the inimitable Satomi Matsuzaki on vocals and assorted instrumental duties, usually bass. Saunier is an enormously warm presence at the end of the phone line, answering questions at length with an affable and enthusiastic candor. He scoffs good-naturedly whenever the interviewer makes mildly apocryphal assertions about his music.

Cyclic Defrost: Deerhoof has been compared to bands like Captain Beefheart and The Who. Your live sets are a little reminiscent of the latter, in particular – bold ideas, bombastic execution. Deerhoof’ music may be more highly structured and complex, but there’ a similarly exhilarating chaos underlying much of it. Is that something you try to create, or does it just happen?

Greg Saunier: It’s something we try not to create. I think a lot of times it’s like holding back. There’s a lot of tension when we’re playing. I’ll put it this way Satomi has been in the band for 16 years. Pretty much every single show that we’ve ever played, either before, during or after, and sometimes all three, she’s come up to me and said “Greg, you’re playing too much,” or “You’re playing too loud,” or “You’re playing too fast. It’s too crazy, I can’t follow it.”

It’s funny how the attempt to make it simple also adds a chaos to it. It might sound strange. The chaos is not necessarily because of fast playing or because of busy playing — that’s definitely what it was in a lot of cases with The Who. I actually think The Who sounds less chaotic than we do. Although they were very busy players, I think that they were also more together than we are. They sounded more comfortable. It’s like it was an engine that was really working, you know? It didn’t sound like it was stuttering or faltering or whatever, whereas we often have that sound and it’s not intentional. It’s the tension of not knowing where you are, not knowing exactly how far you can go before you get on somebody else’s nerves. Not being sure what you can get away with in terms of pushing and pulling and taking risks playing something out of rhythm or removing something altogether, or the difficulty of playing something in a simple way when you’ve gotten really used to playing it in some kind of overwrought way. It’s constantly fluctuating, and that’s part of the reason that I think it sounds [chaotic].

CD: It sounds like your records have become less chaotic and more melodic since you started. Was this an intended progression, or did it arise as a result of what you were trying to create with each work?

GS: (scoffs) I’m not sure if I agree with you. To me, our first two albums, The Man, The King, The Girl and Holdypaws, are both just wall-to-wall melodies.

I do maybe think that it’s very gradually improving. To me it’s not really a progression. I do feel that the first album and the second album are really very different to each other, and almost like two extremes. The second one has no noise on it whatsoever. There’s no improvisation at all. I think it’s the most constrained sounding album that we’ve ever made. Everything is played super-stiff and really strict.

It’s the sound of us forcing ourselves to not decorate anything. That caused a strange tension that makes it sound almost unfeeling, sort of brutal and unsympathetic. I feel like the songwriting itself is kind of poignant sounding, and the melodies are very pretty, but then we play it in a way that’s almost robotic and really harsh, where every note on the guitar is clashed at the maximum volume, but with no improvisation and no subtlety — just pummelled.

CD: Why did you start Deerhoof? Has the purpose changed since your first recordings?

GS: *Laughs* That’s a great question, because the purpose of the band has been to find the purpose of the band. I think that may be true for a lot of bands. It keeps changing, or our theory keeps changing. Each album is almost like a test to see one possible reason to play music, and a lot of the times, when it’s done, it can start to feel like we’ve failed, basically. Each one is a kind of failure.

I almost have the feeling that I’m only now starting to understand what the purpose of music is — not Deerhoof, but music in general — and the role it can play. At least for me, how sensitive I am to music, and how much it can kind of guide me or inspire me, not in a musical way, not as a musician, but just as a person. I get so close to music, and feeling notes and rhythms and harmonies, that it was easy for me to be blinded to the simple fact that music can really encourage a person to act a certain way, to feel a certain way, to think a certain way. When I feel something lacking in myself, I can often turn to music in my small music collection that will sort of point me in another direction. Even if I’m not listening to the music, I can listen to it in my mind. I can be repeating a song in my head for hours, just in an effort to point me in a certain kind of mental or emotional direction. When we first started, it was more like maybe we wanted to make some kind of musical point, but I think less and less it’s that. Personally, I’m almost completely non-interested in that anymore. I’m only interested in the human point that the music might make, and I’ve really lost all interest in the point it might make to other musicians, or how it fits into music history, or how it compares to other bands, or something like that.

CD: Which albums or bands do that for you in particular?

GS: The one that pops into my mind first is maybe Perez Prado. He had a long career, but most of the music I’m thinking of is from the 50s. Mambo music. I just find that when I listen to it — I’ve listened to it so many times at this point — I can almost just call up a lot of those songs in my mind, even if I’m nowhere near a stereo. It changes my posture. It changes the way I walk. If I’m writing an email to somebody, it changes what I have to say to them. If I’m talking to a person in a conversation, it makes me smile at them, and it makes me want to look them in the eye. It makes me want to joke with them rather than be serious. Maybe for the first time, that I can ever remember, 2011 has been a year when it’s started to feel like making music does have a point. For many years I really doubted it. What do I do? I play drums in a rock band. I always found it really hard to defend it to myself. Why am I bothering to do this, and who cares? For the first time I’m starting to actually feel. And it’s great having this band going so long, I feel like we are building something, and I never used to feel that.

Read the full interview in the print edition of Cyclic Defrost Issue 30, due out early February.

Deerhoof plays Sugar Mountain Festival on January 14 at The Forum Theatre, Melbourne.

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