Deerhoof at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music

Greg Saunier

Deerhoof began as an improvisational and experimental noise band in 1994 in San Francisco, California. Drummer Greg Saunier was an original member, vocalist/bassist Satomi Matsuzaki joined a year later (although she had no previous experience performing music), and with a cast of changing musicians, Deerhoof began recording a very eclectic series of albums; one of the band's signature moves is to change sound abruptly between albums. Since 1997, Deerhoof has been prolific, releasing 14 albums, with six between 2001 and 2005 alone. The most recent album in 2017's Mountain Moves. Since 2008, Deerhoof has consisted of Saunier, Matsuzaki, and guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez. The band currently is based in Brooklyn, New York.

Deerhoof was among the headliners at this year's TIME:SPANS music festival, an annual series introducing avant garde music, at the DiMenna Center for Classical Music. Rather than perform music from the Deerhoof catalogue, the quartet performed a program entitled "In All Languages: Deerhoof Plays Hits of the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, and 90s." The performance consisted of eight pieces, each of which was a mash-up of abstracted excerpts of songs by Ornette Coleman, Voivod, the Beach Boys, Kraftwerk, the Police, Sun Ra, Parliament, Ennio Morricone, the B-52's, Dionne Warwick, John Cage and the Velvet Underground, among many other sources. The music carried a melody, then crashed, realigned with whimsical music patterns, then erupted, and somehow all along found the meeting point between the ambient and the clamorous. The program was bizarre yet heady enough for the listener to be blown away by the pure invention.