Pre-NXNE with Deerhoof

Deerhoof, a band I never really knew how to describe, is playing Toronto’s NXNE this summer. The experimental, attention deficit band has quite the loyal following and an extensive list of musical collaborations including Xiu Xiu, Congotronix, Kasia Allstars, Busdriver, Woom, and more. They will play the Phoenix on June 16th with Dodos. The show is sold out, but don’t let it discourage you from the treasure you may encounter if you’re lucky enough to find tickets on Craigslist.

I finally had a moment to call Greg Saunier in New York City, drummer extraordinaire of Deerhoof, to talk about collaborations, international film and music, and iPod shuffles, as Greg filled the conversation with an enthusiastic festoon of laughter and giggles. After all of our scheduling conflicts, I was extremely happy to talk to such a nice, open musician with a whirlwind of experience.

Where are you right now?

I am in my apartment in New York City where I am currently subletting. I moved here in October but I still don’t have a real place. Because we’re on tour so much, it doesn’t really make sense to be renting here. So I keep subletting for the weeks that I come back, usually like a month.

How do you feel about Toronto?

I’ve always loved it. I think it’s one of my favourite cities – not only to play in, but to be in. Even from the very first time that we played there, I had no expectations whatsoever. It was the first Canadian city we played in. We thought, nobody there is going to know who we are, but I was wrong. We were already playing Lee’s Palace by our third show. I’ve always found Toronto to be a pleasant surprise. I love how cosmopolitan it is – and most cities are – but they tend to be spread out or separated into different villages. I don’t know Toronto that well (laughs) but I get the feeling that it is more mixed, you know, in terms of types of people and where people are from, where their families are from, all sorts of different walks of life. It feels extremely integrated which makes it very exciting. I like eating there.

I just listened to the new Fucked Up album. What are you listening to these days?

Oh, right! We played with them once. We had a terrible show. It was an outdoor college show in a grassy field in upstate New York. We played right after their set but it was like the entire stage was lined with security guards that were rented out for the evening. Their job was to keep the rabid college kids from jumping on the stage, causing any trouble for us “professional musicians”. That was not the case! Instead, all of the security guards were facing the stage watching out for [Damien Abraham, frontman]. The security guards succeeded in creating a negative mood; they were expecting the worst, all ramped up in tension, and expected the same from Deerhoof. But we were cheerfully singing about pandas and such. What am I listening to these days? There was a band we played with in Denmark called Thulebasen. They were incredible. We traded records.

Oh, nice! I lived there for 6 months. I love Copenhagen.

Did ya! Tak [thanks] for calling.

Tell me about the new split with Woom.

We’re doing a series of splits. We put out a 7” for each song on our latest record, and we have a different singer create new vocals on top of our instrumental tracks. We removed the vocals that we did and invited artists to do what they want over the music. Woom wanted to do a spoken word track. We have [a song] with Jeff Tweedy where he sings the exact same things that Satomi sings on the original, but in his voice. We have other songs where people create new melodies and lyrics, like Xiu Xiu and Physical Forms. This all actually started by mistake! I originally wanted to do collaboration with Busdriver – the singer of Physical Forms – but I accidentally sent him the wrong backing track! I accidentally sent him instrumental track from album I was working on one year ago. Before I realized my mistake, he had already written and recorded vocals. I just didn’t have the heart to tell him I sent the wrong track. I have to give credit to our record label Polyvinyl; they were the ones who heard me telling them over the phone of my error. Immediately, they were really positive, like, “We could do more! We could have every song on the record!” With Woom, Sara is telling this crazy story over this mysterious and quieter song on our record. The other side of the 7” is a remix I did from a song on their album.

I notice that Deerhoof has a strong relationship with vinyl where the band still releases LPs, 12”s and 7”s on vinyl. Why? What is the importance of vinyl to Deerhoof?

No, but we don’t! We release 7″s because somebody has to do a 7”. This 7” series started because of the reason I just told you. I never cared about format. I always loved listening to music. It never made a difference how it got into my ears. There are times where it is fun. I mean, how often does this really happen? – You sit down in front of actually good speakers and a good stereo system. You turn off the telephones and shut the traffic out to listen to a record in its purest form. How many people do that? How many people have the time and the money? Typically, I’m listening to music on headphones or on a computer. When I was a kid I always made tapes. I always took my favourite songs from records. I always got tired of the albums being in order. My dream was to be able to shuffle songs. I predict in the future that people’s iPods will be preserved and shuffled almost in this art collector way. We were in Rome at the Borghese Museum, and it’s unlike the white bland wall where artwork is put in chronological order and artists are grouped. This was a private collection. It was all jammed in there just on [Borghese’s] whim. He spent his life perfecting his own personal museum for himself. There was something about seeing art not being presented in an art class, but that was loved by somebody. Somehow, the Borghese Museum made me think of the equivalent of a shuffled iPod. In 20-40 years it’s going to be like, when somebody dies and someone leaves their perfected iPod they’ve been working on, it will be a representation of themselves in a shuffle-able digital version. Everything is edited down – every moment is something to believe in.

That was really profound! Does Deerhoof want to do any more movie soundtracks?

I love doing soundtracks! When you asked what I was listening to, I was looking at interviews with John Williams, because he’s one of my favourite musicians, particularly for the Star Wars soundtracks and also Close Encounters. It’s not even so much that I love one particular melody or one piece, it’s that he’s so chameleon-like and able to somehow find within him what’s needed for one particular job. It kind of blows my mind that someone is able to stretch out that much. Catch Me If You Can is my favourite soundtrack, it’s just incredible. I recently did my first John Williams imitation. Martha Colburn, a stop-motion animation artist created Dolls vs. Dictator, an incredible film she made. It was American pop culture dolls, like paper cut-out of Charlie Chaplin, Suzanne Somers, and C3P0 were fighting against world dictators like Qaddafi, the leader of Sudan, and the leader of Eritrea in totally far-out, sci-fi ballet battle scenes. After months of pestering, I convinced her for me to make the soundtrack – it was phony, orchestral. I didn’t have any real orchestra but between cheesy Casio’s and cutting out samples of single violin notes from CDs, I edited some stuff together. The film has no dialogue. It is eleven minutes long with continuous music. I was really proud of it and I was just thinking last night, while procrastinating writing Deerhoof songs, there was something about the pressure of time and the need to feel someone else’s job order that I liked. I wasn’t doing the project to express myself. I was trying to make the movie come alive to make a visual and emotional impact. It’s so challenging. It’s one of the hardest things I have ever done.

What was it like collaborating with musicians from the Congo?

This was one of the most challenging things, I wouldn’t know how to being to describe it. There are nineteen people in the group from everywhere like Argentina, Sweden, Congo, America, Belgium. Of the group from the Congo – I believe there were ten of them– none could speak a word of English. Though in one week my French definitely improved, I had my computer open to Google Translate at all times. Honestly, the experience just turned out to be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We started playing one new Deerhoof song live, and it was so incredible to me how much better it sounded and to realize that somehow it found a home with this nineteen person group. I found that my band mates in this large group actually loved the song and connected to it immediately. We had it down in 10-15 minutes, it totally clicked like magic. I’m sitting there playing, and members of Kasai Allstars suddenly burst into song with a new melody over the music I had written, sung in harmony, spontaneously, and they had never heard the song before. Within minutes they composed their own part to go with it. It was extremely moving.

Favourite band you’ve played with/collaborated with?

(Laughs) I don’t know how to begin to answer. Everything I’ve done is collaboration. My own band is collaboration. Collaborations have created my career; they have made me able to have this phone conversation with you. Deerhoof very slowly became successful enough that we got invited to play festivals like NXNE. All of the collaborations have been different. The way Deerhoof works every single night is a complete panic attack! We don’t know, after all these years, what we are doing. We are still struggling to find out how we play together. We don’t have any rules on how our type of music is to be played and it’s never been that way. We always have a tough time at the border (laughs). At customs and immigration when we are asked, “What style of music you play?” we have no idea what to say. My head was completely wrapped up with the obsession of how to make Deerhoof shows work. Suddenly we’re in Belgium [collaborating with musicians from the Congo], and everything I’d learned about playing the drums, became instantly irrelevant. It was like playing drums on this track for Congotronix. I had to be precise, very repetitive, and dependable. I couldn’t be too loud or too quiet, I had to hold everything together. Whereas in Deerhoof I am playing the opposite! I am wilder, speeding up, slowing down, out of rhythm, in rhythm, or not playing at all. Such a challenge! So much fun! In a week I had taught myself a whole new instrument. After that, I went to Rome and played in a group improvising Martha Colburn’s videos. Suddenly everything I did was too loud during rehearsal. It was like starting over again (laughs). It was the third time in two weeks that I had to go back to the drawing board, like I was in third grade learning how to play drums again.

What can we expect for NXNE? Any surprises for us?

Uhh, (laughs) very possibly. In July, we’re supposed to play a big show in London with the Flaming Lips and Dinosaur Jr. where all three of us are playing our albums straight through. We’ve never done this before. We’ve been ask to play this one album of ours. We are shy to do this, but the chance to play with Flaming Lips was so exciting there was no way we could say no. It isn’t a surprise if I tell you, is it? Basically, our only chance to attempt to do those songs before those shows is going to be at NXNE. It is possible that we may play a bunch of songs from one of albums. Or maybe not. Maybe we’ll play all our new songs!

Thanks for your time, Greg.

Thanks.