Sine of the times

>> The sublime and the ridiculous collide in
the work of Baltimore musician Dan Deacon

SHINING, SHOCKING, SHIFTING, ROCKING: Dan Deacon

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Baltimore, MD’s Dan Deacon not only bridges the sublime and the ridiculous, but in fact activates both simultaneously. The ridiculous isn’t that hard to achieve, not with a table full of outdated electronic noisemakers (sine wave generator, Casiotone, vocoder etc.), vocals pitch-shifted to hilarity and the sort of graceful dance moves you’d expect from a balding, bespectacled, exercise-averse sound geek—never to mention low-end cultural references galore (his recent album’s called Spiderman of the Rings and opens on a Woody Woodpecker loop) and sweat-drenched mobs going bananas at his live shows.

But evoking the genuinely sublime, now that takes serious intellectual and artistic chops, which could be attributed to Deacon’s background in classical composition.

“While studying,” says Deacon, “I really fell in love with the [’60s avant-garde multimedia] Fluxus movement, and the performative aspects of combination that era generated. But it sort of seems to have died out when minimalism hit the scene again. I just really liked the connective relationship between Fluxus works and the audience, and I’ve always been a big fan of performance, like stand-up comedy, someone like Andy Kaufman—taking something that, on the surface, seems to be stupid. The very nature of the clown is to appear to be dumb, but at the same time, you’re very aware of what you’re doing, it’s very methodical and thought out.

“I wouldn’t consider myself a clown, know what I mean? I think a lot of people miss that, but the people that get it and are in tune, they enjoy it the most, whereas a lot of people hear the pitch-shifted vocals and see the way that I act, and write it off. With anything, when there’s sincerity involved, it shines through to the people who have the ability to see a shining thing.”

Dizzying the biz

Deacon’s shining much brighter than the music industry’s old guard might be able to perceive. His Wikipedia entry defines Deacon as “absurdist,” which isn’t an absurd characterization, but also as part of something called the “future shock” genre. It’s a counterintuitive tag, given that some of the audio-visual technology he and fellow future-shockers like Videohippos and Ponytail use is quite archaic. But Deacon stands by it, explaining that it’s not really a matter of gear.

“It’s more in regards to how the information and music we make gets heard. It has more to do with the time in which this music is being made, experimental music in this genre, and how it’s future-shocking the music business. An act like myself or [tourmate] Girl Talk doesn’t sell tons of albums in stores. Our Soundscan reports, which is the main way people judge success in music, aren’t very high. I’ve probably sold 7,000 records, but it’s been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times, off of various bit-torrent sites or leaked off my Web page. It got downloaded 100,000 times in like a month. Girl Talk’s probably the same way, even a Canadian band like AIDS Wolf—their album has been downloaded so fucking much.

“Bands are getting known in a way that completely skirts the music industry in a new and growing and fascinating way. Now, with the tools of blogs and the Internet and bit torrents and stuff like that, someone can make something and become huge overnight. It’s not future-shocking to the audience or the performer, but to the music industry.”

Conan the Aquarian

Speaking of huge, one of Deacon’s recent projects is Ultimate Reality, a large-scale sound-and-vision overload that features he and two drummers (drawn from the aforementioned Ponytail and Video Hippos) generating big noise while clips from assorted Arnold Schwarzenegger movies are stirred into a psychedelic bouillabaisse by Deacon’s frequent collaborator, video artist Jimmy Joe Roche. The result is viscerally powerful, transcendentally beautiful and fucking hilarious.

There’s a good chance an Ultimate Reality performance will occur in Montreal in January, and it’s already roared to life in art galleries and museum down south, unusual settings for Deacon.

“It’s a very different-natured piece,” he points out. “That’s one thing that sucks when you enter into the pop world, that everyone assumes that everything you do will be somewhat predictable. I do always play on the floor, and play raucous party shows with this set, but in a future set, I probably won’t. I’d like to play a sit-down show, a very calm show with a different body of material, and this is an example of that work. It’s still loud, blasting and energetic, but it’s a very different experience. I’d say it’s a comparable experience, you can tell the same artists made it, but I don’t think people should go into it thinking it’ll be a Dan Deacon show. It’s certainly its own beast.”

With Girl Talk, White Williams and Numbers
at la Tulipe tonight, Thursday, Sept. 13, 9 p.m., $18