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Freakin’ with DeaconBaltimore synth-sation Dan Deacon
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The electronic music of Baltimore’s Dan Deacon could never be mistaken for small. The numbers on his breakthrough 2007 album, Spiderman of the Rings, had a quality of maintaining an almost constant crescendo state, swollen globs of giddy, glorious synth-tone mass suited to the sweaty cluster-jams his live shows soon became, comparable in squeeziness to those of his compadre Gregg “Girl Talk” Gillis. With his new album, Bromst, Deacon’s managed to go even bigger. A graduate of the Conservatory of Music at New York’s Purchase College (and the odd ska or grindcore act to boot), Deacon found himself revisiting traditional instruments alongside heaps of synths and percussion, and painstaking orchestral arrangements as well, tapping the collectivist spirit and extended membership of the Wham City art tribe he helped found in Baltimore. “As shows got larger,” says Deacon from an accordingly packed tour bus, “the artist’s fees got better, and as the artist’s fees got better, I realized I could support not just myself but other musicians too, and have it be more of a show and less of a party. It was never really my intention to be a solo artist, it was just what was most practical at the time.” Fiscal concerns aside, going big-band still had its challenges but, Deacon notes, “most artists want to be challenged, to expand on what they do. Once you stop doing that, it becomes a product rather than art. I’d rather lose a lot of money and realize a dream than not.” Deacon points out that Bromst has more players, more instruments—and more substance. “I wanted to make a record that still had the same sense of euphoria and optimism, but Spiderman of the Rings was absolute music, there was no program attached to it, no meaning to be discerned, whereas with Bromst, there is. There’s an emotional content, something that’s supposed to be evoked through the music. That was the major shift for me. There are narratives throughout that aren’t really apparent, but they exist. There are a musical and a lyrical narrative and topics that I liked to work with, like cycles, density and vast open space, the idea of parallel existences and stuff like that.” WITH FUTURE ISLANDS AND TEETH |
