Dan Deacon is a Baltimore-based avant-garde electronic composer, who was making a rare excursion to these shores to promote his latest album, Bromst. On the album the nerdy Deacon has deviated from the Casio-party-punk of old towards a broader, denser sound. So it was out with the laptop and in with live instrumentation.
In order to recreate these frenetic, complex soundscapes live, Deacon has drafted in an entourage of musicians, mainly culled from the Wham City Collective, an arty, left-field ensemble of like-minded musicians and artists, including a mini-army of percussionists and synth players. Huddled over their instruments, clad in white overalls and beholden to Deacon’s every whim, they whipped up a phenomenal sound collage and spattered DayGlo melodies over bonkers breakbeats, like a multilimbed Jackson Pollock armed with pots of luminous paint. The Dan Deacon live experience was akin to being abducted by a cult: this was a live show like no other.
The set was drawn largely from Bromst — a euphoric collection of nu-rave epics. Despite the change of musical direction, Deacon was still the party-starting funster of old. He was big on audience participation: a demented, bespectacled circus ringmaster, pitched somewhere between Brian Wilson and Timmy Mallet — part genius psychedelic shaman, part wacky irritant. Everyone was encouraged to enter the sweaty throng and get involved. Three songs in — the stunning Of the Mountain, which pulsed with pounding tribal rhythms and twinkling melodies — Deacon coerced the audience into forming a circle in order to follow a group interpretive dance, led by a bold audience member to a musical backdrop of shamanistic chanting that wouldn’t have sounded out of place on The Lion King soundtrack.
This was a life-affirming techno Hari Krishna session: we were the brainwashed followers of Dan Deacon and were soon divided, without protest, into two opposing sides for an old school dance-off. By this time, the audience was fully in Deacon’s palm, and the encore, Silence Like the Wind Overtakes Me, was a blistering techno Kumbaya, a mantric singalong that sent us off into the night wondering how we would ever be able to attend a “normal” gig again.