Deerhoof, Body Meat, iiisa

Pioneer Works is excited to bring Deerhoof to our Main Hall on June 28, 2025 as they embark on their "31 Flavours Tour" to celebrate their 31st year. The evening will also include opening performances from locals, Body Meat & iiisa.

About the artists...

Since forming in 1994, the San Francisco band Deerhoof has cemented their place as one of indie music's most influential bands with their unruly and anarchic creative impulse. The mercurial rockers—consisting of founding drummer Greg Saunier, bassist and singer Satomi Matsuzaki, and guitarists John Dieterich and Ed Rodriguez—come to Pioneer Works fresh off the release of their 2023 album Miracle-Level, sung entirely in Satomi Matsuzaki’s native Japanese.

For a band that seems to thrive on collapse, it’s simply amazing that this American-Japanese quartet is now celebrating their 31st year. Though Deerhoof long ago established itself as one of the greatest rock groups ever to stride the earth—and if you think that’s hyperbole, you haven’t seen them live—the furiously inventive quartet releases new albums on the schedule of a young band still hungry for its first break. Each one discovers some previously unknown combination of candy-coated hard-rock riffs and free-jazz percussive freakouts, sideways J-pop hooks and fearsome dissonance, trenchant social commentary and surrealist humor. Fronting it all is Satomi Matsuzaki’s inimitable alto, whose plainspoken calm can seem strangely outside of the band’s maelstrom. This music is joyful and foreboding, cybernetic and deeply human, carrying an implicit note of defiant optimism in their refusal to bow to convention or received wisdom. Deerhoof is defined by such paradoxes.

Body Meat embarks on a multi-dimensional world-building endeavor, partly influenced by hours spent playing games like ‘Elden Ring’ and ‘Nier Automata,’ drawing inspiration from their expansive storytelling and gameplay. Taylor imagines each song as its own distinct ‘level,’ and himself as the avatar moving through an immersive storyline.

iiisa is the solo project of NYC-based vocalist and improviser-composer, isabel crespo pardo. Their intimate songs emerge from warm sonic landscapes filled with familial chatter and field recordings from their home in Costa Rica. With “a gloriously improvised heart,” they transform opaque memories into powerful ephemera in hopes of offering solace.

Pioneer Works music programming is made possible in-part by New Belgium Brewing Company.