Deerhoof seeks hot beverage

Mon 26th Mar, 2007 in Features

Greg Saunier is sitting in his house feeling rushed. He is used to doing really long interviews, taking his time – letting it all out. Unfortunately, he explains that he must do another interview straight after this one (quietly excited about the name FasterLouder), “that’s why I have to talk fast, and I have to talk loud cause’ you’re so far away”, he says playfully.

Currently all the way in San Francisco, Saunier and the rest of his band Deerhoof will be making their way to Australia next month, starting in Perth.

Listening intently, I couldn’t help but think of the Spike Jonze film, Being John Malkovich. It wasn’t the whole idea of getting into someone else’s brain, wanting to be someone else for a day or anything to do with puppets, it was the fact that Saunier sounded exactly the same as the actor, John Malkovich. Gentle and noticeably eloquent. A lovely man to talk with, he explains how excited he was to be coming back to Australia, “you know, as a kid you look at it on the map, and its like, ‘yeah I guess I believe that there’s some place (laughs)”.
 
Deerhoof toured here last year for the first time ever, and he described how absolutely amazed the band was with the response. In his experience, it takes a few appearances in most other countries to gain any kind of connection with the crowd, however, “with Australia it was just instantaneous, we were really surprised, it was really fun and we’re super excited to be back.”

The three piece, once a four piece (and with many different members over the years), have just released their eighth album, Friend Opportunity, in January this year. Saunier explains that the band, including Satomi Matsuzaki (vocals) and John Dieterich (guitar/keyboards), have been as busy as can be since the release, “well we’ve (laughs) just been to tour the entire time… definitely the most concentrated, ah, schedule we’ve ever attempted.”

Just completing a tour with Experimental Dental School and Australia’s Macromantics across South-West America, he tells me how amusing it is when a tour is finally finished and everybody gets really sick, as if their bodies held out until the very end, “you kind of save it off until um, it’s okay for you to become sick, ‘I don’t need to play anymore so it’s alright for my body to collapse now’”.

It’s common for an experimental, relatively obscure band like Deerhoof to go into a recording studio for 2 or 3 days and record an entire album, saving money and pushing time. However, Saunier explains that the band often sacrifices expensive equipment and quality of space to grant themselves more time to experiment, “we’ve found that time ends up being much more important than just the, um, dollar amount of the equipment”. They recorded the most recent album in John’s bedroom.

Saunier is classically trained, educated at University in classical music, however, he believes this makes only a superficial differences to his music making. (He would rather write on staff paper than sing into a tape recorder or experiment on a guitar, when writing a song – but that’s beside the point). Suddenly, a question aimed at the angle of songwriting becomes a description of Saunier’s idea of musical influence. Interestingly, he believes that listening to music and sounds around you, is all the education you need. He explains that both John and Satomi listen to classical music as much as he does, and this therefore effects their music making at an equal level, “Its still part of their make-up too”.

Matsuzaki had never touched an instrument before she met Saunier, and a week later she was on tour with them. But this doesn’t bother either of the boys, “It turns out that she had been trained, you know, it turns out that, ah, she has as much to say about whether a song is well written as somebody who’s been in tons of bands.”

Asking him one of the hardest questions of all, does he have a favourite song from the new record? “Whether it’s really true or not, mentally I just flashed on Matchbook seeks Maniac”. He made up the chorus of the song over fourteen years ago, he tells me, even before Deerhoof were a band, “I’ve been trying to work it into something, over and over, like, every album we do”. You can just imagine the look on his face when it was complete. Finally, he’d finished it.

Deerhoof will be playing the Great Escape Festival when they visit Sydney in the next couple of weeks. The band seem most excited about that part of the tour, for two reasons: They have never played a festival in Australia (only a headlining tour) and they get to meet up with their friends from Macromantics. Saunier gets a kick out of playing to strangers and new comers, “there’s no expectations about you, you’re just having to start from nothing so that you can kind of persuade them to listen and I really love that challenge”.

Deerhoof are extremely excited about coming back to Australia, playing shows is a bonus when the hot chocolate is so good, Saunier explains. “To even have the chance to go to the continent of Australia is already such a special privilege that, ah, just to even have that come true is already, you know, we’ll pretty much get there and just say, ‘well tell me where to go, I’ll follow you’”.

To see Deerhoof tour dates click here