There’s a fitting irony in the title No Timing. This collaboration between multi-instrumentalist Yea Big (Stefen Robinson) and Deerhoof drummer Greg Saunier doesn’t march to a clock. It smashes the clock and then throws it out the window.
Built as a meditation and response to Jim O’Rourke’s Bad Timing (1997), the record is a philosophical argument in sound: what even is meditation when the mind won’t stay still?
Robinson, a Soto Zen Buddhist and longtime zazen practitioner, begins with reverence. He takes a snippet of melody from O’Rourke’s original and patiently expands it into a tapestry of gamelan, guitar, bass clarinet, and double bass.
His arrangements are lush but never ornamental, pulsing with the measured discipline of someone who knows the art of returning, again and again, to the breath.
Enter Saunier, the fidgety counterpart who admits to trying and failing at meditation many times throughout his life. A rock drummer with Tourette’s, he confesses he’s never been able to sit still, and his contributions gleefully prove it.
For much of the record, Saunier hovers around Robinson’s sound world with restless piano motifs like stray thoughts that refuse to be banished. Call it the “monkey mind.” When he finally switches to drums, the release is explosive, a reminder that even in meditation, the body eventually demands movement.
The interplay between the two is playful and, at times, quite harsh. Robinson builds the altar and lights the incense; Saunier kicks it over. Robinson offers stillness; Saunier interrupts with intrusive thoughts.
Yet neither cancels the other out. Instead, No Timing becomes a messy dialogue on the impossibility of total silence, and the beauty of letting noise in. It’s like they listened to John Cage’s 4′33″ and said, “Shove it up your ass, John!”
Robinson’s work has long spanned hip-hop, electro-acoustic experiment, and free improvisation, all underpinned by a commitment to art as spiritual and political practice. Saunier is Deerhoof’s endlessly inventive drummer, whose side projects and production credits (Xiu Xiu, Joanna Newsom, Marc Ribot) confirm his appetite for risk.
Together, they rip apart Bad Timing and rebuild it as something equally reverent and restless. This is meditation not as a blissed-out escape but as a wrestling match with the mind, where stillness and chaos fight to a draw.
Isn’t that what enlightenment is supposed to be, anyway?
No Timing will be available September 26th on 12” LP and digital download via Personal Archives.
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