Listening to Deerhoof's music is like riding on a Tilt-A-Whirl. The San Francisco art-rock trio features a Japanese-born singer who sounds like an android geisha. The group seems bent on packing a plethora of melodic ideas and noise fragments into each song, and yet, despite their ever-morphing nature, the tunes maintain a certain flow and logic.
Not exactly the kind of stuff that shows up on the Billboard 200 album chart — but there sits Deerhoof's newly minted Friend Opportunity at No. 152.
"The number of people who buy Deerhoof records is always more than we thought," says drummer/founding member Greg Saunier. "When we started, I felt excited if we [sold] 100 or 200 but then it was like 1,000 [copies]. It's much further than my expectations. The same feeling has continued every year."
Saunier is on his cell phone, enjoying a couple days of downtime at home. He started Deerhoof in 1994 with guitarist Rob Fisk, who was replaced by John Dieterich in 1999. Deerhoof's singer, Satomi Matsuzaki, joined in 1996. Saunier says he vividly recalls first hearing her otherworldly vocals, which set the band on its current path from underground obscurity to national acclaim and opening slots for their heroes Radiohead and The Flaming Lips.
"There was another guy Rob in the band back then, and we were playing as a duo and trying to sing, flailing around so much because we couldn't sing at all," Saunier remembers. "We were playing this really exaggerated style of music — super loud and then super quiet — using noise effects, trying to be as experimental as possible, and the vocals definitely suffered.
"Then a friend called and said he had someone named Satomi who had just come from Tokyo to San Francisco. He had just played her our first 7-inch and she was like 'OK.'
"I think she thought our music sounded so terrible she couldn't make it any worse," Saunier continues, laughing. "But the second Satomi started, I thought this is exactly the type of singing I always wished we had. As much as Rob and I were playing an exaggerated style with just way too much experimentation, she sang in the opposite way — in an almost totally unemotional kind of way where the emotion is hidden inside the composition or just in the quality of her natural voice. It made the perfect balance for us, and 12 years later it still holds true."
Deerhoof has made a career — eight full-lengths since 1997 — out of crafting songs that refuse to stay put. Each track on Friend Opportunity breaks into to three or four distinct sections. Conventional rock guitar riffs might give the tune a headlong charge, but they don't hang around long (although they're apt to pop up again). The licks give way to computer bleeps or spasms of synth dissonance or sometimes a pregnant pause. The band records at home, on computer. The process is like digital patchwork, with band members submitting sonic snippets they created on their own.
"Some songs are more organized into sections than others — we get really lucky when someone has an idea that's long enough to go for a minute without a seam or a break," Sauniers explains. "Sometimes we're not that lucky and ideas are really short, and it becomes a matter of seeing what ideas fit with what other ideas."
The song "Plus 81" on Friend Opportunity starts out with a robust rock thrust. Dieterich's guitar and Saunier's drums nail down an irrepressible rhythm. But strangeness hijacks the tune, as if the musicians are purposely putting the kibosh on a good time. One has to wonder if Saunier is ever tempted to just stay in the pocket and ride the groove?
"No, I've never been tempted to do that," he says. "I'm not saying it's a bad idea; it just never occurred to me. Basically, I know that song seems like it's broken into a lot of little pieces. But we keep fiddling with those pieces until we find something that seems to make sense. Maybe it doesn't make sense to anyone else, but that was the form that finally sounded right to us.
"We're kind of working without any plan or formula," Saunier continues. "Another way of putting it," he adds with a laugh, "is we don't have any idea about what we're doing. We keep trying until we find something we think is bright. It's not like we know how to write a normal song and then deliberately break it part. We're just scrambling desperately to put something together or barely just succeeding."
Actually, Deerhoof is doing much more than barely succeeding. The band's 2005 CD The Runners Four reached No. 50 on Billboard's Independent album chart, while Friend Opportunity crossed over to the pop album survey. The last time Deerhoof's label — the iconoclastic, Seattle-based Kill Rock Stars — enjoyed this level of commercial success was with The Decemberists, whose 2005 release Picaresque reached No. 128 on the Billboard 200. The band then left KRS for Capitol and witnessed its 2006 outing The Crane Wife break into the Top 40. Could a switch to a major be in the cards for Deerhoof?
"Capitol Record never invited us," Saunier quips. "It hasn't really come up for us [except for] major label interest from the U.K. So far, we haven't had to broach that subject.
"First, KRS has been incredibly good to us," Saunier continues. "We would be very sad to leave them; they've been our closest allies and friends. The very first Deerhoof 7-inch Satomi heard was on KRS. They were the first people to ever get interested. Our first seven years on KRS we lost them money; everything we did was in the red, but not once did they say 'Think about another label or change your music.'"
This article appears in Feb 14-20, 2007.