Ovary Action Vs Deerhoof, Oslo, Garage. August 11th 200

The OvaryAction crew climbs down the stairs of Garage with sweaty hands and a poudering heart. Indeed, Julia (booker at Garage) told them a minute ago that Deerhoof, the sublime inventors AND reinventors of pop, the rainbow storm from 5 Rue Christine, the masters of cutting edge weirdness, the ultimate actors of extreme musical freedom, agreed to have an interview. "We're going to have soundcheck now, but you are welcome to stay... or leave if you find out that really hate us" said Greg. We stayed. Around 3 tables, in a corner of Garage, the 4 Deerhoof and 3 OvaryActors talked about the Pacific Northwest, 5RC, KillRockStars, music, music and... the San Francisco earthquake.

BiB/OA: Let's start with a little presentation of the band, can you say your names and what you play?
John: My name is John and I play guitar
Chris: Guitar, keyboad, bass, drum, percussion, piano
Satomi: Vocal, bass, drum
Greg: drums. Everybody plays any instrument, I am sure you guys do too, I mean everybody plays something sometimes... it's fun!

BiB/OA: Were you all musicians before you started in Deerhoof, or did you pick up a lot experimenting and playing all together?
Greg: Everybody has a different story. Satomi, for example, never played any music before she joined the band, but we have probably been playing a long time before we met each other.

BiB/OA: And who stabbed the milk man?
Greg: That's a mystery because maybe he stabbed himself... it's not for me to decide, it's for your readers to decide, it's part of the ovary action... it's about this action they have to actually do.... It's an unfinished album that needs to be finished by the listeners.




BiB/OA: How did you write the songs? By jamming? Everybody is describing some kind of extremely complex result of music deconstruction... so do you write a song and explode its strucutre, or..what happens, really, in the Deerhoof lab?
Chris: I think we just construct it. Ther was never anything we decide not to do.
Greg: "Deconstruction", you would not know about it because you are from France, but there's this guy, you know Derrida, Foucault...isn't that deconstruction? I don't know too much about it, really. Every song has a different story. I guess that's probably true for most bands. You never really know when a song is going to happen, or how. Sometimes you're sitting down at the guitar, trying to make a song and you sit there for hours, and you come up with nothing and then 3 hours later, suddenly, you get an idea. On other times... you know, on Milkman, some parts were written by Satomi. We were walking down the street and she saw these dogs sitting there and then just suddenly started singing this song "dog on the side walk", you know. She just sang the song, right at that moment. We were just like "oh, let's use that." That song was fun because that became the vocal part, but then the rest of the sounds on it was something that John had done totally seperately and we figured out a way to try and put it together. We don't really jam, I guess, it would be fun, though.


BiB/OA: We're working a in a more cut and paste way, then?
Greg: Sometimes, yes, "Dogs On the Sidewalk" has cut and paste in the electronic sounds, but I would say usually, what we do is somebody sits down and composes a song and then we kind of learn it in the band. All four of us do that, I'd say. Maybe I wrote down a song on a casio and then we figure out a way to play the guitar, drums, bass, and everything.... I don't know, we should learn to jam sometimes... (laughs)

BiB/OA: And it's been like that from the start? Because the line-up is slightly different now from the first days, so I guess it does influence your composition and playing....
Greg: I must say I have had no capability to jam throughout the entire history of the band... 10 years (laughs)
Chris: Actually the first time we ever played together, we had a jam
Greg: But we were trying to keep that a secret, now the world knows.
Chris: It didn't really lead anywhere.
John: Because that wasn't Deerhoof yet
Chris: Yeah, that was before I joined the band, so it isn't official... it was just an amateur jam.

Bib/OA: How did you guys cope with the change in the line-up? Do you still feel a basic identity, or does it evolve under the same name into something completely different?
Greg: That is just a trick, it's a joke. There is no idea of what you can expect is going to happen later, it's like what's your dream gonna be tongiht? How do you know? There is no way to predict what song you're going to make tomorrow or what we might sound like . Just to call it Deerhoof...it doesn't mean that it is always the same thing. That's why it's fun. If we had ever thought that we could expect some specific direction, or evolution, then it would just feel like some weird consulting business, an office job or something.

BiB/OA: That's also about the freedom you can have on a record label like 5 rue Christine.
Greg: Yeah, you're probably right. It's actually the same with the label, because we never know what band Slim's gonna decide to release next year. We always make suggestions to him, like "you should hear this band" and when you see what other music he likes, I always feel like I know what he's gonna like, so I just say "Slim, you gotta hear this band, ok, these guys are great..." and he'd listen to it just go like "hum" and then he'd suddenly like something that is completely different from what anything he's released before. But I agree with you, that's one of the reasons why I consider this label to be so cool. Kill Rock Stars too, it's the same people running both label.

BiB/OA: How do they choose whether a badn is gonna be on KillRock Stars or on 5 Rue Christine?
John: A secret committee, noone knows.
Satomi: It's maybe more guys on 5 rue Christine.
All together: It's actually true, there's more guys on 5RC

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