Credit: Found On Internet

Deerhoof are three months into a world tour but the Californian trio seem bright and cheerful backstage at the Printemps de Bourges festival. Music Towers pulls up a chair with Deerhoof guitarist John Dieterich to reflect on the events of the last twelve months. They have been pretty momentous ones for Deerhoof, featuring towering peaks and troughs the size of the Grand Canyon.  John remembers a few of them: “This last year has been pretty complicated. Chris left and two weeks later we had our first live show as a trio. We had played in a trio before Chris joined but it felt totally new. We had to regroup, to figure out what we were doing. For me it was really intense. It felt like we were completely reinventing who we are.

“In the first practice as a trio, we all noticed it sounded incredibly empty. We were like, ‘Wow, this is really really different’ and ‘I’m not sure how I feel about it’.  But it was exhilarating; the kind of interaction that was possible just in terms of mathematics- the speed of ideas being exchanged. Like when you improvise, the larger the group, the more difficult it is to maintain the integrity to the ‘listening’, it just becomes a wash. All of a sudden there was less mass, so we could hear more detail. It was scary but also fun.”

While Deerhoof were learning to cope with this fundamental change, they embraced new challenges by working in film. “We got asked to perform alongside a movie at the SF International Film Festival,” recalls John animatedly. “They suggested some silent movies but I’d seen a Harry Smith movie not long before and I was like, ‘I wonder if there’s any Harry Smith movies lying around?’ He’s this ‘60s cultural figure, the guy who did The Anthology of American Folk Music.  On the side, Smith made all these experimental films. So they sent us some perfect matches. One was a 60 minute black and white; he’d turn over in his grave if he heard this, but it’s kind of the culmination of his film work. It’s called ‘Heaven And Earth Magic’, an amazing piece of work. So we performed alongside that and some of his shorts. It was a big project.