Dan Deacon seems to subscribe to the thought that, it is not where you take things from but where you take them to that matters. The electronic producer has a musical style that brings to mind hearing all the auditory sensations you have been missing out on, all at once. You hear machine-made sounds and organic samples, blanketed layers of consonance and dissonance, all of which contribute towards this larger, more grand symphonic soundscape dripping with soul and euphoria. The son of Baltimore is renown for elaborate spontaneous audience participation during his live shows, strange but intricate narrative lyrics, and constantly scheming of new ways to explore art. I would be proud if Dan Deacon were my spirit animal. It is a rare and refreshing to find an artist who of his calibur who is humble in his art and so voracious in its practice. I spoke with Dan shortly before his headlining set on the second night of Decibel Festival in Seattle.
F4L: How does it feel to return to Seattle? I know that the song “Rail” from your past album America was inspired in part by Seattle being your destination by train.
Dan Deacon: I love coming here. My last show in…whichever year…was at Neumos at it was one of my favorite shows of the tour. Great night. There was this one magical moment where my computer crashed and I had to just talk with the crowd. And it just takes one heckler to make that moment rough. But I brought one of the security guards up on stage for an audience participation thing where the audience was going to sing exactly what the security guard was singing. But I asked him to face the back wall so they couldn’t see him and he just made one tiny, little sound…ummh…and the whole audience erupted into these little singing pockets. It is hard to explain. We have video of it and I am hoping it will make it into the concert film we are cutting together from that tour. That moment from that tour really sticks out in my mind so I am really excited to be back.
I have had the pleasure of seeing you give a few seminars on electronic production before and in the past, you have done film scores, classical compositions, made an app to accompany your shows, done multiple performances during festivals…do you feel a sort of obligation to give more as a musician?
I don’t know…it is 2015 and there is a lot of art that exists. I don’t make pop music but I don’t make experimental music and I exist somewhere in the middle. The middle can be a weird place. I am not unknown, but I am not known. Sometimes I feel like you do have to hustle to say, “I’m doin’ it! I’m still doin’ it!” But I also like challenging myself and if people ask me my opinion, I’ll tell you. In terms of obligation, sometimes I look at a band and they just write albums, they tour, and that’s it. They figured it out. I just feel like I am jumping from project to project. I like doing that. I am trying to get better at focusing…allot a specific time for specific projects that I like working on. I kind of feel like we are raised in the education system to be working on five or six thing at once. I remember in college, I started my masters while I was still in my undergraduate so I could accumulate credits because it was so much cheaper to do that. And I feel like I haven’t lost that.
You do seem to enjoy what you are doing.
I do! I do. But there are two large projects that I have been wanting to do for a while and I just don’t have the time to devote to them.
May I ask what those are?
Just…just…you know. I don’t know if I can really get into it or if I should say…Well, okay. They are two elaborate murders [laughs]. Just basic scoring work. Sometimes I feel like when an opportunity does come to me, I am too busy to devote time to it. I would like to free that up. And I know that at some point the opportunities will stop so I am trying to take as many of them that are coming to me and take them to their fullest. So it is hard to be like, “I don’t know if I am going to do this because that might come up.”
You mentioned that you do not feel that what you do is experimental. Given how much you involve the audience in your music, I wonder if you feel it is the role of the artist or the audience to push experimental music forward?
I think that the performance has the element of experimental performance art. The main reason that it is experimental is because it can fail. It isn’t an experiment if it can’t fail. That is the problem I have with that term. I realize that “experimental music” has come to just mean ‘weird.’
It doesn’t have to be.
No, definitely not. I have been reading this book, Experimental Music[: Cage and Beyond] by Michael Nyman and it really, clearly defined the difference between avant-garde and experimental where avant-garde is more rooted in academia and in the post-serialist boulettes sort of scene. I feel like you can follow that path to certain musics of today and experimental is more rooted in philosophy and gridded fluxism and shit like that. Cause that is what performances could affect. And I like that. I like being a part of a performance that can either go great or terribly and you aren’t the only reason why it can go great or terribly. You can go to a show and the band is killing it on stage but the audience is lackluster. You can go to a show where the band is phoning it in but the audience is bringing it and the show is great. So I think a lot about what the audience brings to a show and how they are the focus. A crowd of people doesn’t think of themselves as one group. They are individuals making a group. It is not like sports game where ‘we won’ or ‘we lost’ or ‘our defense sucks’ or religion where ‘we believe this’ which are all crowd-based performances (no dis to religion or spirituality, obviously). But with music, it is a honest sort of, ‘I went to the show’ or even a ‘we’ is your group of friends. So I like creating a situation where the audience starts thinking about themselves as one group, to change a group of “I’s” to “we’s” to “they” to “us” to “them,” back to “I” and the ongoing switch where you fit in the room and your relationship to the people around you. Because music is the most social of the arts and it’s also a sort of intersection of performance. Dance music culture is rooted in not watching the performance, but dancing, interacting, socializing, meeting people. That is what disco did, even going back to blues and jazz clubs. You hear the music and the music was a big part of it, but so was the audience and dancing and socializing. Rock music culture is more like theater where you are sitting there or standing there and watching someone perform. So I like switching it back and forth, because I am not a DJ and I am also not a rock band. So I like taking the focus from the stage to the audience and back and forth. It just changes the mindset of where the performance can go and what that is going to do to the psychology of the audience.
Do you ever run up against any misconceptions people have about your music?
Oh, constantly. I think one misconception, and it is more a semantics argument, is “and then he forced the audience to…” and I don’t think I am forcing anybody to do anything. The one thing that I am doing is making people choose to participate or not. That is the only confrontation. Because choosing to not participate is just as much of a choice as choosing to participate, and I think that people don’t always like that. Some people don’t always like one person getting a large group of people to do something together. So sometimes I think that is misconstrued. But the best part of life is that people see the same experience rather differently. So if someone interprets it that way, I try to think about why they see it like that and I try to be very specific with my language. When I pick someone out of the audience never use gendered pronouns because that may make them feel uncomfortable right off the bat addressing who they are or what they identify with. I try to make sure that we are on the same page. I think at this stage in my career, people go to the show expecting the audience participation. I look at that and try to think of a way to keep the “what?! What is happening?” sort of mindset. I don’t really read a lot of reviews. I try to stay away from them. It is like Ozzy Osborne said, ‘the best reviews aren’t good enough and the worst will wreck you.’
Where do you think in music there is the greatest progress or change happening at present? You can take that in terms of genre, geographical region, subculture, whatever.
I don’t know. I have just always been interested in hearing sounds that I have never heard before. One of my favorite current bands, Horse Lords, they are predominantly a rock band but they sand down their fret boards on their guitars and basses and play with adjusted intonation to explore polyrhythms. They have this really cathartic, crazy transcendental performance even though it is a four piece band – drummer, guitar, bass player, and another drummer that goes between drums and saxophone – and sometimes they put in computer music as well. It is really a mind-blowing band. There is another band called Wume that is, for all intents and purposes, a synth and drums prog-rock duo, but they are not all….proggy? You can still dance to them but their time signatures are constantly changing and the beat is always different. There is a lot of amazing chamber music being made right now. A lot of people are tired of computers. Or at least, the newness of them is gone, the newness of computers. Kids are growing up not remembering the first time using a computer because they have been using them as long as they have been alive. I don’t know how that will change as another chapter in the book of what music will become turns, or whether that will come ten years from now. I am hoping there will be a rebellion against this large movement where information is to be ephemeral and for it to disappear. I wonder when someone is going to document this music and getting mp3s will be like getting a photograph of a shadow of a building rather than seeing the building or going inside of the building. There is a great deal of innovation within electronic music and hip-hop, but I don’t know whether there is any less innovation in other art forms.
Do you think everybody should make art?
I think everybody who feels compelled to should make art. I think anyone who feels that they have a hard time expressing themselves should make art. I know that for me, writing music is a form of self-expression that I can’t articulate with words. I don’t know if everyone should make art. I don’t know if everyone is an artist. There are definitely people out there who aren’t creative artistically. I don’t think they identify that way and I’m not trying to say that in a negative capacity. Simply like not everyone is athletic, but everyone should probably use their bodies and get sweaty every once in a while. Whenever I see someone who is an amazing dancer or an amazing athlete, it just reminds me how everyone is different. It is almost like super powers. When you see someone do a long jump or crazy contortion in dancing, it is mind-bending. Even just jumping high blows my mind. I could practice jumping high every day for the rest of my life and I couldn’t jump any higher than I can right now. Or watching a virtuostic violin player or someone who can take a slab or marble and turn it into something you can’t even imagine. Or someone who can take code and manipulate that and turn it into something that changes the way you think about sheet metal or something weird like that. I think that everyone has the capacity to create something that is outside themselves but I don’t know whether that is necessarily confined to the arts.
Do you think the experience you have making and performing music is the same that your audience experiences upon hearing it? Is that a sort of one-to-one relationship?
God, I hope not. I hope they have a much better time than I do. I have the best time making music but on tour, it is much easier for me to get lost in the moment, to just zone out and be there. But when we are doing one-offs or flying out, stuff gets lost or I am using rented equipment that I don’t really know, so it is hard to not always be thinking, “am I going to make this turn?” It is hard to describe. I definitely love performance. It is my favorite time of day when I get to be on stage. But I would want the audience to have a better time than I am having. Like I am putting something out there and they are multiplying it. I have never thought about it that way. When I am writing music, that is when I have the most fun and I do hope that people have as much fun or take away as much enjoyment in the listening process as I do in the creation process. But performances are different. I try to leave myself as much as possible and whatever comes out of my mouth is coming out of my mouth, like when I do my banter stuff and I like to improve there, sometimes the show turns into a stand-up routine or maybe I am forever a psychopath. Now that I am playing with Jeremy Hyman on the drums, it is really easy to get lost in the performance and the solos, so I can know that no matter what, I have this virtuostic beast next to me that can hold down the show. So that is really nice. But sometimes it is hard to get lost in the moment when speakers are cutting out or a cable is bad or one of the buttons on the effects stops working and it sucks you back into reality and you think, “fuck, what am I going to do?” Hopefully no one else in the audience is having this moment of thinking, “fuck, what am I going to do?” I don’t want them thinking, “fuck, I didn’t email this person. God, I’ve got to do that the moment this show is done.” I kind of feel like that is the way everyone is these days. That is the way I am constantly. We are trained to multitask and I don’t think we should be. It is hard to escape since we exist in so many places.
