This week, Deerhoof’s John Dieterich and Neutral Milk Hotel’s Jeremy Barnes are dropping a collaboration as Dieterich & Barnes. Titled The Coral Casino, the 11-track album finds the two vets exploring their respective aesthetics through highly exploratory, wildly colorful sound blasts. It might be experimental in nature — several of the tracks derive from an idiosyncratic improvisational process — but there’s a charm and effortlessness in their delivery, with rhythmic chunkiness and squiggly, slightly-off harmonics tempering the more structurally bold and outwardly defiant.
To find out more about The Coral Casino, we asked Jeremy Barnes and John Dieterich to interview each other. What we got instead was a video of Barnes and Dieterich hunched together over a piano, improvising on the keys while exchanging a series of mundane questions that had nothing (everything?) to do with The Coral Casino. The interview, like the album, is disconnected yet grounded, provocative yet playful, all awkward ellipses and moving hands. The violin swells come courtesy of Heather Trost, who is in A Hawk And A Hacksaw with Barnes.
Check out the bizarre six-minute interview video below, followed by a couple tracks off The Coral Casino. You can grab the album Friday, May 6, on Living Music Duplication.
More about: A Hawk And A Hacksaw, Deerhoof, Dieterich & Barnes, Jeremy Barnes, John Dieterich, Neutral Milk Hotel
