That’s what’s interesting about music: An interview with John Dieterich of Deerhoof

Deerhoof

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Deerhoof is a dynamic band — always one step ahead, knocking down musical boundaries and conventions with muscle, fervor and style gleaned from the world of music outside America. On their latest record, Deerhoof Vs. Evil, every sound is a strange surprise or an experiment, and it almost always turns out well for the listener.

And though the band is sometimes reduced to some version of indie rock’s lovable musical weirdoes with ADD, Deerhoof’s music is never obscure or quirky or drawn from a void — it is grounded in a deep respect for all music, channeling such a varied swell of influences that it is often misunderstood as the sounds of idiot savants. The band battles against this by making the exact music it wants to make, and hopefully the world as a whole will one day wise up and want to hear.

I got to talk a bit with guitarist John Dieterich about the album and about Deerhoof’s future in the good fight.

Mike Herr: I heard you guys moved out of San Francisco.

John Dieterich: That’s correct, yeah.

Where are you guys at now?

Well, we’re kind of in 4 different places. I moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and Ed lives in Portland, Oregon, and Greg lives in New York City. And Satomi is sort of in between places at the moment. She’s not sure where she’s gonna end up yet, but we’ll see.

You guys just a couple months back released that record [Deerhoof vs. Evil] — are you just kind of like taking some time off now?

Well, actually we just finished a tour like two days ago. We did a full U. S. tour. We have a couple of shows in New York in March, and then basically in the middle of April, we’re gonna start a European tour.

Where are you playing in Europe? Do you have like a bunch of shows lined up?

Yeah, it’s gonna be a busy one. Then at the end of that, we have a project we’re going to be doing where we’re going to be collaborating — have you ever heard of this group called Konono No. 1?

No, I haven’t actually.

It’s a group from the Congo, and basically there’s this sort of style of music in Kinshasa in the Congo where they use amplified thumb pianos, and Konono’s the most known band in this style, but there’s a whole bunch of them. But we’re going to be doing a collaboration with Konono and another group from the Congo called Kasai Allstars. Also Juana Molina is gonna be a part of it and then this amazing group from Sweden called Wildbirds & Peacedrums. It’s gonna be this huge collaboration, so that’s gonna be taking up a lot of our summer.

Yeah, that’s sounds pretty awesome.

Yeah it’s gonna be amazing. We’re all sort of writing for the group as well, and sending things back and forth.

So you guys are gonna be doing some recordings? Or are you gonna be playing live?

Well, we’re gonna be playing live. We’ll meet for like 10 days at the beginning of all of it and rehearse, and then play around ten shows.

Anywhere in America?

Um, not yet. We’re hoping that something can get booked, but it’s a huge production, as you might imagine. It’s gonna be like 20 people onstage, and it’s a very complicated thing to put together. So, there’s this label in Belgium called Crammed Discs, and they’ve been releasing Konono’s music for a while. And basically, we did a cover version of one the artists on Crammed that’s from the Congo — this group, Kasai Allstars — and that’s kind of how this whole idea came up. In the midst of all that, we’re going to be playing Deerhoof shows. . . .

It’s kind of interesting that you’re doing all that because I feel like there’s little hints of African stuff, especially in the new record — really just many sections of the world, none of them sound especially American — and it’s just cool that you guys are joining up with some other forces.

Yeah, it’s exciting for us. You know, when we did this cover version of this song, we really studied it and tried to figure out a way of coming up with our own version that worked. And we felt like we learned something in the process, but it’s a whole other thing altogether actually playing with them. It’s an incredibly sophisticated musical tradition, and we’re just like complete newbies. It’s gonna be the craziest, probably, experience of my life, musically. I can’t even predict how it’s going to work yet. [They’re] real musical masters, you know. I’m looking forward to it a lot.


I just had a couple questions about Deerhoof Vs. Evil. I understand you guys recorded it and mixed it all yourselves. How does that contribute to the overall sound in the end? Because a lot of the songs move similar to other Deerhoof songs, but they sound so different.

I guess it contributes in the sense that — the nice thing about being in charge of your own recording is that you can really directly apply things that you’ve learned in the past year as far as recording techniques and just ideas or ways of thinking about recordings or music or songwriting or whatever. And even though we all just recently moved to different places, we all have been very independent from each other — we all work on music on our own, we write on our own, we don’t write as a band. So, when we got together to work on the album, we just rented a practice space, a place where we could just kinda take our time, and we ended up just taking a month just trying a bunch of things. And you know, everybody has a bunch of new ideas about ways of approaching things. Maybe, somebody had a new idea of a way to record the electric guitar that we hadn’t used before.

That’s the great thing about learning how to record yourself. You can very easily apply things, and just experiment. We actually would take certain days where maybe we were having a hard time writing or something, and be like, “All right, well let’s just try and play. You know, like the beginning of that song “Must Fight Current” was sort of a result of an improvisation. We attached a contact microphone to the snare drum, and then ran that into a guitar amplifier, and then ran a sampler into the same guitar amplifier, and then Greg and I just kind of improvised for a while. And that became the beginning of that song . . . Stuff you don’t know exactly how you’re going to use it. [We’re] just trying to get into the mood of the recording or of whatever we think the album might be. Then, just kind of sort through it later.

Yeah, it definitely sounds like you guys kind of expand your bounds. Everyone’s roles kind of crash into each other — not in a bad way….

No, it’s true, and it is bad sometimes (laughs).

How much do your influences play into when you’re recording an album, but also before you start writing and stuff? Do the things that you’re spinning on your record player effect what you do everyday when you’re recording?

Yes and no. There’s plenty of things that we like — that one of us like or that all of us like — that might not be relevant to the album. Or it might just intentionally be something that we might be avoiding. Like, we might be listening to something that we all think is great, but it’s exactly opposite the direction we think we should be moving in. But yeah, sure there are cases where we are just taking in whatever we can take in, and any information that is helpful for us…. Like if we hear a production or something that we all are interested in, then we definitely pay attention to that. Or if we hear a way of thinking about music. . . .

Right, it can be extra-musical too.

Yeah, exactly. Working on the cover we did of that Kasai Allstars song, what I took away from all that was just a way of thinking . . . In a way, it wasn’t something that was contained in their music, but it was something that was contained in our version of their music because basically they have these large ensembles, you know, and we had to figure out a way with 4 people to try to make a version of this song that originally had like 15 people, and make it playable. Sometimes the drum part that Greg’s playing is like 3 different parts played but 8 different people. So we took what we learned from that, and could apply these kinds of ideas to other things that we were working on. And so that’s what’s kinda fun about that sort of thing. If you get a chance to actually synthesize the ideas that somebody else has.

They eventually become yours?

Yeah, they become yours, and then hopefully somebody else is then synthesizing those ideas with their own, and it becomes something else. And I think that’s what’s interesting about music.

Posted by | March 4, 2011 | Interviews, Music | Comment 

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