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.”

WHO: Dan Deacon
WHAT: Bromst (MIstletone)
WHERE & WHEN: Summer Tones at The Zoo Friday Mar 6