Dan Deacon
By Mistletone in Dan Deacon, Artists | 1 comment
MP3: Get Older (from Bromst)
MP3: Wham City (from Spiderman of the Rings)
Video: Okie Dokie
Video: Dan Deacon documentary on pitchfork tv
The art made by Dan Deacon is about community, and how to organise and inspire community. From founding a now well-known art collective (Wham City), to organising an annually sold-out DIY music festival and curating a massive 60 person/30 band tour (Baltimore Round Robin Tour), it’s clear to see that community and bringing people together is the major theme of Dan’s work.
For the last three years Dan Deacon has been working on Bromst. Fusing together the growing intensity of his live performances with his background in electro-acoustic composition, the outcome is a collection of pieces that are intense and epic and at the same time down to earth and welcoming. Bromst embodies the same energy and excitement as Spiderman of the Rings, however the craftsmanship and composition on Bromst have a wider scope and richer palette.
Unlike the completely electronic Spiderman of the Rings, the instrumentation on Bromst is a mixture of acoustic instruments, mechanical instruments, samples and electronics. The player piano, marimba, glockenspiel, vibraphone, live drums, winds and brass give Bromst a much richer tone than his previous work. The intricate and complex parts, skillfully executed by the performers, are woven together into a rich, dense, noisy dance pop that has become Dan Deacon’s signature sound.
The Weekend Australian feature review:
Drum Media review:
A new Dan Deacon album is a sure sign to rejoice. Bromst lives up to the standard of his gloriously obnoxious 2007 release, Spiderman of the Rings. But wait!
Critics of Dan’s abrasive tendencies will be happy to hear, he’s turned down the dial on this outing; lowering his chipmunk-vocals in the mix and cutting back on the sharp, abrasive blasts of yore.
Fans of the assault-like aspects of Spiderman won’t be disappointed; Bromst is still a glorious train wreck of disparate low-fi cartoon, video game, and techno sounds; it’s just a more palatable, less in-your-face meal, with more quiet chill-out area moments. A more mature Dan Deacon?
There’s a warm, positive exuberance to Deacon’s songwriting that’s unique. Some may not care about what he’s preaching, but for those who do, it’s goosebump-inducing. Swinging from slowly swelling walls of sound to hyperactive kiddie pop, Bromst is further proof - Dan Deacon is the shit, man. Hallelujah.
Beat review (Album of the Week):
This conundrum aside, track eight called Woof Woof is a very strong track and the closest thing to conventional rock’n’roll Deacon has contributed to this album. The 3/4 drumming and effected bass as well as the slightly chipmunk-esque vocals spin the song very close to New York’s Battles – who are second only to Deacon in the global DIY experimental scene. I can only wait with baited breathe to see how Deacon will interpret this album live, what with him mentioning in recent interviews that he will be touring it with a live band, as opposed to just him and his effects trolley – Deacon’s future of reality awaits us.
DAN WATT
Inpress review:
Far from being the singalong songfest that most communally minded albums are, Deacon works a whole ‘nother angle. Bonding happy dancers with DIY-style electronica (as happens effortlessly every time he plays) fleshed out with live drums, percussion and the odd horn section create a noisy and exuberant blast of an album, like a giant friendly hyper-intelligent car alarm, you can’t ignore it.
It’s been said before but Deacon’s greatest qualities, his openness and strident joviality, are rendered brilliantly incarnate on Bromst (the title referring to the tent you can see above, a miniature one comes free with the CD for miniature communal fun). Buzzing keys, frantic rhythms, pitch-shifted vocals, and percussion quantised beyond playability; it’s as exciting as it is dense. At first the lack of unfettered organic sounds or discernable lyrics is off-putting and makes you wonder why Dan gets all the props while our own Talkshow Boy languishes at the bottom of house-party bills, but then the scope and mission Deacon is on becomes apparent.
The cover and song titles evoke nature while the sounds are bursting with life and irrepressible movement despite sounding as if it could have been made in a basement on an iBook. As an effort to focus his manic energy and turn it into shared frivolity, Bronst is a blast, literally. Deacon uses tones like laser beams shooting you in the arse and making you get up get into it and get involved, and you can’t argue with that.
There are a number of atmospheric shifts though; Surprise Stefani and Run For Your Life sound the most fun minimalism has ever had, Snookered begins like a tinkly ballad from Vespertine before turning into a Kraftwerk album played on 45rpm, while Wet Wings sees an ancient vocal round looped and delayed and morph into a celestial cacophony. There is a recurring feel of The Wicker Man on amphetamines about this record, if the islanders were toasting marshmallows instead of incinerating a virginal policeman, which is no bad thing. Overall, it’s his blistering call to get out of your chair and start loving each other that drives Bromst, as it does his live shows. Tracks like the ridiculous, turbo-charged indiscernible rap of Woof Woof and the manic arpeggios of…pretty much everything else, are as likely to appeal to 5 year olds as much as to the discerning fan of the rest of Mistletone’s roster.
by ANDY HAZEL
From Time Off: GET YOURSELF CONNECTED
DAN DEACON, THE SOLO ARTIST, IS DEAD. AT LEAST FOR NOW. HE TELLS PAUL DONOUGHUE ABOUT REGAINING THE INTIMATE LIVE EXPERIENCE BY HIRING AN ENSEMBLE.
At a recent show in a New York City warehouse, Baltimore solo artist Dan Deacon had a crisis of faith. He had taken up his usual post on the venue’s floor, embedding his table of colourful noisemaking gadgets – samplers, keyboards, an iPod stuck to a plastic banana – inside the 2000-strong crowd. But for Deacon something was not right; a connection was broken. He says that, for the first time, his electronic arsenal seemed a little blunted.
“I didn’t really enjoy it,” he admits. “There were so many people that it just lost its original meaning and context. It didn’t work in that setting.”
It was a stunning revelation for Deacon. Since the release of the album Spiderman Of The Rings in 2007 – the first exploration into his technicolour world of cascading and intertwining samples to prick ears outside of the States – Deacon has built a reputation as an essential live experience. Performance would be the wrong word; his shows resemble more an all-in gang brawl or a gold rush gone wrong than anything so organized and traditional. Deacon and his table of toys form the nucleus of what is essentially one enormous pulsating beast of a party.
Now at home in Baltimore prior to his second Australian tour next week, Deacon finds himself a little sideswiped by this unfortunate paradox: as he gains more and more popularity, his intensely sticky and personal performances become less and less intimate.
“I really don’t want to get any bigger than I am because I don’t think it will be sustainable. I’d played large crowds before [this show] – when I played Coachella I played to 5000 people and I really liked that, but that was a different feeling. This was like a regular show, on a Friday night, at a warehouse,” he says. “If you look at it like a plot of land that you’re farming on, I don’t want to expand. A crowd a quarter of the size would have been already a huge crowd for me. I’d rather there be less people there that are super into it, than so many people that it’s hard to even feel like you’re a part of something.”
It might sound a little hypocritical for a professional musician – “I think some person reading this might be like ‘You spoiled fucking brat! What the fuck are you complaining about?’.” – but for Deacon, his shows should be a unanimously intense experience.
“It’s really important for me for the audience to feel like they are connected to the performance. When it gets that large, I’m just so unfamiliar with it that it gets hard for me to relate to it. I feel like when I play a show to 200 or 300 people it’s easier to make those people feel connected.”
Fearing that loss of connection, Deacon is in the process of altering the live experience. He recently hired a troop of budding interns to transcribe his compositions – sheet music is a “dying language” Deacon aims to keep alive – for the purpose of expansion, and this Australian tour will mark his last solo tour for the foreseeable future. The new Dan Deacon live experience – a far grander affair with ten-plus extra pairs of hands on deck – has already been tested at a few recent shows in the United States. The chirpy synths and the helium-affected vocals will remain; the blips and beats built upon, with extra bodies pummeling multiple sets of acoustic percussion that litter the stage. Once the nutty professor with his one-man band, Deacon now morphs into chief conductor of an experimental orchestra.
“I think it will be fun to take a large production on tour, setting it up and breaking it down every night. I like the idea of a traveling group of musicians,” he says.
For Deacon, the new direction may be a logistical nightmare – not just touring but practicing and recording become infinitely more difficult – but the reinvention is important for avoiding complacency. This is Deacon’s job, after all, and nobody wants to do the same thing every day.
“I don’t ever like the idea of what I’m doing becoming routine,” he says. “I’ve gotten very comfortable with my current set-up so it will be nice to mix it up.”
Deacon says that, post-Spiderman Of The Rings, he finds inspiration in his tertiary education in computer music composition (completed at Purchase in New York where he focused on electronic composition) moreso than the blossoming Baltimore DIY scene of which he was an integral part. Writing for others, in this case an ensemble, is where he is studied, and might be where he is most comfortable.
“I never intended to be a solo artist, that sort of came about as a necessity,” he admits. “[But] just being a composer it’s difficult to find anyone else to perform your music. Rather than relying on other people to play my music, I should play my music until people approach me to play it. That’s sort of what happened; I had to build up a reputation as a composer/performer before I could just focus on being a composer.”
The compositions explored by the Dan Deacon ensemble will feature on his new record, Bromst, due out in March. Though it seems a dramatic new direction – or perhaps revisionist, a return to his earlier explorations in sine waves – Deacon says that Spiderman Of The Rings and Bromst were developed concurrently, though angled purposely towards different styles of performance.
“When I started writing Spiderman Of The Rings, at that time I was playing places that were mainly houses or basements or a gallery; I didn’t really have a PA so I couldn’t really play the dense, loud music that I wanted to be playing,” he says. “So I started working on two bodies of work – one was Spiderman Of The Rings and the other was Bromst. Spiderman Of The Rings was the work that could be performed in a less desirable PA setting. If I just turned it up all the way and it distorted, that would be fine. But with Bromst I wanted it to be just as loud but much more delicate [and] much more precise in pitch and timbre; a more refined sound.”
Deacon might have an educated ear, but he also creates music with strong visual awareness. He sees Bromst as an attempt to darken the palette used on Spiderman Of The Rings.
“I feel like the last album was bright colours,” he says. “I’d say the brightest colours on Bromst are probably a little brighter than the ones on Spiderman Of The Rings but probably because they stand out amongst a darker shade and more muted tones. I feel like greater contrast and variety on the record helps those sections be accentuated more.”
FasterLouder pics from Dan Deacon @ The Tote, Melbourne (5 March 2009)
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Plan B cover story:
From The Age newspaper: Electro-shockwaves
Inventive Dan Deacon stays cool despite fame, writes Guy Blackman.
DAN Deacon, a 27-year-old composition graduate from New York’s liberal Purchase College, is not your average nerdy music student.
Instead of band camp and flute practice, Deacon favours beaten-up electronic gear, visually affronting fluorescent outfits and a manic, piercing sound that has come to be described as “electro-shock”.
“I like stuff that’s kind of, not exactly stupid or cartoony, but simplistic,” he says. “When I grew up I was really into comic books and superheroes.”
So the rarefied likes of Bach or Mozart are not for Deacon, who prefers eccentric composers including Cornelius Cardew and electronic pioneer Raymond Scott.
And like his heroes, Deacon takes a fiercely independent approach to music. At first, Deacon self-released his records and sold them only at his increasingly raved-about live shows, but eventually his DIY principles had to give way to practical thinking.
“I’d be going on tour with copies of my old CD-Rs and selling out real quick, and I thought ‘this is ridiculous’,” he says. “At the time I was freaking out — ‘if I don’t actually do every step myself, I’ll be selling out’. But I was just biting off more than I could chew. So I went with a small local label, and it turned out really well.”
The result is the endearingly dorky Spiderman of the Rings, released in America on Baltimore’s Carpark Records and locally on Mistletone. The gratingly catchy album of feverish electronic pop has launched Deacon into the limelight, bringing him everything from hipster blog credibility to write-ups in the stuffy New York Times.
Overall, the response has been gratifying but Deacon seems remarkably unaffected. As a member of DIY art collective Wham City, he has dedicated himself to creative unemployment and communal living, undergoing financial hardship for the sake of artistic abundance.
“Before the album came out I’d just play as many shows as I possibly could, sell CDs and not buy anything but bread and cans of beans,” he says. “Now I still need to buy a bed. I’ve been mooching off my girlfriend’s bed for the past two years and I think she’s starting to get pissed!”
After graduating, Deacon and a group of like-minded friends deserted New York for the more affordable surrounds of Baltimore, where Wham City turned a succession of rundown warehouses into combined living quarters, studios and performance spaces.
“None of us really wanted to move to New York city, ’cause it’s way too expensive and the art scene is very clique-ish,” says Deacon. “We were also very, very broke, and New York’s probably one of the most expensive places in the world. It didn’t make sense to move to a city to try to become an artist, just to become a waiter.”
Economically depressed Baltimore, with its combination of racial tension, drug problems and violent crime, seemed like the perfect destination.
“As much as there’s all that nasty shit, there’s definitely a lot more good going on,” Deacon says in the town’s defence.
“There’s a lot of pride in Baltimore. We’re like a little league team that never wins any games but has a lot of fun playing.”
Despite his recently increased profile, Deacon is still living as he always has.
“It’d be nice to own more than one pair of pants, and another pair of shoes,” he says. “It’s not amazing when you’re on tour for a month — I definitely need to wash these pants.”
Dan in The Big Issue:
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