Deerhoof divulges secrets to its success

BY MELISSA BOBBITT

For the Daily Titan

Northern California is known for a lot of things: the Silicon Valley, the Golden Gate Bridge and hippies. It’s also home to the high-octane, head-scratching sound of Deerhoof.

The quartet is a lot like the month of March; it comes in like a lamb and out like a lion (or vice versa, depending on the season—or in their case, the song). Wispy trilingual female vocals, drums that clobber the concept of time signatures and jarring guitars morph together to form a skittish, Picasso-like aural canvas.

Singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki brings a perky, pristine quality to the group as drummer Greg Saunier, multi-instrumentalist Chris Cohen and guitarist John Dieterich pummel their instruments to create divine cacophony that could metaphorically castrate the casual listener.

Deerhoof’s frenetic vibe has found a cozy home with the Kill Rock Stars label, the Olympia-based company that took noisepop provocateurs Witchypoo and Mecca Normal under its wings. Dieterich said via e-mail that being signed to KRS is “all perk, all challenge, all the time.”

Always the riddler, Dieterich keeps his band’s infl uences and the origins of its moniker’s a secret.

But he did say that the experimental, left of the dial sound of Deerhoof wasn’t the musicians’ initial m.o.

“We aren’t intending to make anything sound obscure or non-commercial,” he said. (Although, Saunier told NewMusicBox in May 2004, “I have to admit, on the one hand, there is a part of me that does want to deliberately play with boundaries between genres and maybe wants to subvert the idea that there are distinctions where this style means only this.”)

Dieterich continued, “We’re trying to make music that we think will make the world sparkle.”

And sparkle it does. Listening to Matsuzaki chirp in her native Japanese, meekly adorable English or even en espanol on the jazzy, mellow drone of “Desaparecere” is a treat.

Their latest release, 2004’s Milk Man, solidifi es their pertinence in the ever-assimilating realm of indie rock.

Like a puzzling but endearing Frank Zappa or heck, even a Devo album, you won’t get it upon fi rst taste. But once you have that “eureka!” moment, you’ve found a delightful nugget of musical mayhem you will have to turn your friends on to.

Dieterich said you’d be surprised to see what goes down at its gigs.

“One of the things that I fi nd really puzzling is when people come up to us aftershows and talk about how they had no idea we were anything like this, that the live show was so different from the albums and so on,” he said. “Recordings can only show one take on a song, and we try to present the songs in different ways at our live shows. And it’s also a lot louder, unfortunately.”

blueghostpublicity The San Francisco four-piece Deerhof includes singer/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki, drummer Greg Saunier, instrumentalist Chris Cohen and guitarist John Dieterich.