Greg Saunier

With Deerhoof, as a busy collaborator, and on his own, Greg Saunier is one of the most inventive and prolific forces in underground music. The classically trained multi-instrumentalist/composer/producer first came to prominence as Deerhoof's drummer, and the maximalist sound he got from his minimalist kit provided the pounding heart of the band's vibrantly experimental rock on albums ranging from 1997's The Man, The King, The Girl to 2023's Miracle-Level. As Deerhoof's acclaim grew, so did Saunier's projects. He played in groups including Nervous Cop (with Joanna Newsom), Big Walnuts Yonder (with Mike Watt), and Mystical Weapons (with Sean Lennon); produced albums for Xiu Xiu and Marc Ribot; and worked with composer Marcos Balter and contemporary classical music group Ensemble Dal Niente. Saunier united all of these elements on his debut solo album, 2024's We Sang, Therefore We Were. Born in Valdivia, Chile, to parents who were Peace Corps volunteers, Saunier and his family eventually settled in Columbia, Maryland. He started playing drums in the third grade with his school band, and his passion for music led him to study composition at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. His foundation in classical music led Saunier to experiment with tempo and strip his kit down to a kick drum, snare, and cymbal in his later projects. After graduating from the conservatory, Saunier moved to San Francisco and joined the group Nitre Pit, which also included bassist Rob Fisk, in 1992. Following the departure of the band's guitarists, Saunier and Fisk continued as a duo to play Nitre Pit's previously scheduled gigs. That duo became Deerhoof and signed to Kill Rock Stars in early 1995, with the 7" "Return of the Woods M'Lady" arriving that March. Early releases such as this and For Those of Us on Foot had a harsher, more no wave-inspired sound than Deerhoof's later efforts, though they also hinted at the playfulness that would soon surface in their music. In mid-1995, Fisk and Saunier were joined by vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Satomi Matsuzaki, and this lineup of the band recorded October 1997's debut album, The Man, The King, The Girl. By the time of June 2002's kaleidoscopic Reveille, Deerhoof were a critically acclaimed act known for their wide-ranging sounds and engaging melodies. In 2003, the same year the band issued Apple O', Saunier collaborated with Hella's Zach Hill and Joanna Newsom as Nervous Cop and released their self-titled debut album in November. For the rest of the decade, he juggled his work with Deerhoof and outside projects. In 2006, a year after the group released The Runners Four, Saunier produced Xiu Xiu's The Air Force. Following Deerhoof's 2008 album Offend Maggie, in 2010 he scored Martha Colburn's short film Dolls vs. Dictators and appeared on Hill's album Face Tat. In the 2011s, Saunier's creative horizons continued to widen. In 2012, he produced Xiu Xiu's Always and Sholi's self-titled album, then performed on Marc Ribot's Ceramic Dog's Your Turn and issued the self-titled debut from Mystical Weapons, his duo with Sean Lennon, in 2013. That year also saw the premiere of Deerhoof Chamber Variations, a set of the band's songs as interpreted by contemporary classical music group Ensemble Dal Niente. Along with playing on People Get Ready's Physiques in 2014, Saunier teamed up with Lightning Bolt drummer Brian Chippendale for the audiovisual project Brian Chippendale & Greg Saunier. Following 2016's Balter/Saunier, a collaboration between Deerhoof, composer Marcos Balter, and Ensemble Dal Niente that included Deerhoof Chamber Variations among its pieces, the supergroup Big Walnuts Yonder -- which featured Nels Cline, Mike Watt, and Tera Melos' Nick Reinhart alongside Saunier -- released their self-titled debut album in 2017. Two years later, he joined forces with s t a r g a z e for Instruments, a track-for-track recomposition of Fugazi's In on the Killtaker. In the early 2020s, Deerhoof entered a prolific era that started with May 2020's Future Teenage Cave Artists, a dark -- but still hopeful -- meditation on the political crises of the day and extended to that September's Love-Lore and October 2021's cheerfully subversive Actually, You Can, but Saunier still found time for other projects. In 2021, he produced jess joy's album PATREEARCHY and joined a group of musicians that included violinists Pauline Kim Harris and Conrad Harris on composer Eric Lyon's Giga Concerto. The following year, Saunier appeared on Yonatan Gat's reinterpretation of Antonín Dvořák's American Quartet, and during some downtime after the release of Deerhoof's 2023 album Miracle-Level, recorded his first solo album. Appearing in April 2024, We Sang, Therefore We Were was also inspired by the state of the world as well as Captain Beefheart, the sarcasm of Nirvana, and the octatonic scale favored by Igor Stravinsky.
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