Interview | MUSIC
SHINE LIKE A DEACON Claire Sawers speaks to Baltimore experimental pop maker, Dan Deacon, soon to play Glasgow, about his frantic, high-energy sounds and legendary live shows
‘I ’m so sorry, I have this really weird thing in my throat,’ Dan Deacon says, interrupting himself mid-flow to cough. ‘My voice is suddenly all . . . [does cartoon growly voice],’ he laughs. It’s still early I point out, calculating it’s not quite 11am in Baltimore, where he is. Maybe he needs a coffee?
‘Oh, I don’t drink coffee,’ he says, matter of factly. Actually, that makes perfect sense. Dan Deacon is probably the last person who should ever drink coffee. The music he makes is frantic, saturated, high-energy, kaleidoscope pop, a head rush of fast-forward percussion, sped-up beeps, helium vocals and driving drums. Surely the last thing he needs is any more stimulation. ‘Ha, yeah that’s probably totally true,’ he snorts loudly. ‘I guess you could say my stuff is pretty uptempo.’ Uptempo is a wild understatement. It’s like musical poppers, a blast of euphoria, with xylophones and pianos pummelled faster than human hands could ever play, layered with sighing vocals, and tempered with enough spaces and slow builds to prove this is very cleverly crafted stuff, not the ‘zany’ thing it might seem on first frenzied listen. ‘Music is kind of like a mix between a puzzle, and cooking,’ he explains. ‘It’s like with food – you want to add a lot of complementary ingredients. You don’t want to over season it, but you don’t want it to taste of nothing either –
either way it would taste like shit.’
He says his music has a similar style to fellow Baltimoreans, Animal Collective, who he’ll be touring North America with this Spring. ‘We both make real weird pop music. Either it’s really mainstream experimental stuff, or else it’s really weird pop stuff – does that make sense?’
It does. Deacon’s maximalist pop songs know when to go bananas, and when to rein themselves sharply back in. The yin to his electronic yang, his albums sit computer-made music alongside swooning, ambient, ensemble compositions. ‘I’m obsessed with a density of sound,’ he says. Besides his solo work, he’s also currently composing for a 24-piece steel drum band at NYU, and a marching band in Providence, RI. ‘I’ve never done that before, it’s changing how I think about music, it’s awesome. All of that gets me psyched to work on other stuff too.’
His recorded music is only half the picture – he’s been making music for over a decade, releasing eight albums since 2003, graduating to America last year, his first release on Domino. Translating the studio-made stuff into a live setting is another project altogether. His live shows are legendary for their audience participation. Deacon likes to get in the crowd and start a ‘dance party’, ordering them to kneel
down, have choreography contests, and now, he’s designed an audience smartphone app.
‘I want my shows to have the energy of a live rock band. I mean, you see a guitarist move his arm, and hear the noise it makes, but there’s not always that human element with electronic music. I try and add physicality to the sound.’ ‘I don’t know what it was like in the UK back in 2001, 2002. You guys’ll have been deep in the electronic game for years. But here, I’d go to shows, and there was no performance. At all. It was a dude behind a computer. It repulsed me – I hated it.’
He’s excited to play Stereo’s small basement, and hopes it’ll involve less red-tape than his last visit – playing Optimo’s New Year’s Eve party in 2007. ‘It was an awesome night. My main memory is I had to pay some electrician to inspect all my gear – back then I was making a lot of my instruments, so it was all this janky, falling apart, self-made shit. He came and put stickers on it, then a guy from the Fire Department checked it too. I guess they knew my gear back then was super unsafe,’ he laughs. ‘I managed not to electrocute anyone that night.’
See list.co.uk for a longer version of this interview. Dan Deacon plays Stereo, Glasgow, Mon 11 Feb, dandeacon.com
‘Either it’s really mainstream experimental stuff or really weird pop’ 24 Jan–21 Feb 2013 THE LIST 73