Dan Deacon

Dan Deacon is renowned for his interactive, crowd participatory shows breaking down the barrier between the musician and the audience whilst performing his glitchy electronic pop on the floor amongst the crowd. This will be one of the gigs where he will show off his Dan Deacon app which turns your phone into an instrument, a light and a strobe, fancy.

Dan Deacon is an American composer and electronic musician based out of Baltimore, Maryland. Since 2003, Deacon has released eight albums under several different labels. Deacon is renowned for his live shows, where large-scale audience participation and interaction is often a major element of the performance.

His first two albums as a solo artist, Meetle Mice and Silly Hat vs Egale Hat were released on CD-R on Standard Oil Records in 2003 while he was a student at SUNY Purchase. The albums are collections of both computer music and live recordings of ensemble pieces. They are markedly different from his first popular record, 2007's Spiderman of the Rings, in that they contain almost no tracks where Deacon sings or uses vocal manipulation. Most of the pieces are instrumentals or sound collages. He followed those two albums with a set of records made up of sine wave compositions. "Green Cobra is Awesome Vs The Sun" is a 42-minute piece consisting of of six slowly drifting sine waves. "Goose On The Loose" is a 60-minute piece featuring a Wavetek 180 signal generator being processed through a DigiTech Whammy and a Line 6 DL4.

His next two releases were the EPs Twacky Cats on Comfort Stand Recordings and Acorn Master on Psych-o-path Records.Spiderman of the Rings was Deacon's first commercially distributed full-length album, released by Carpark Records in May 2007. The album was well received and was included in the Best New Music section of Pitchforkmedia.com. The album was also ranked as number 24 on the website's "Top 50 Albums of 2007".

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Ultimate Reality was released as a DVD in November 2007 and marked a return to composing music for others to perform. The pieces for percussion and electronics were performed by Jeremy Hyman of Ponytail and Kevin Omeara of Videohippos. The pieces were set to collaged and heavily altered video created by Deacon's long time friend and collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche.

Deacon's next album entitled Bromst was released on March 24, 2009. It was produced by Chester Gwazda at Snow Ghost Studios in Whitefish, Montana and features live instruments including player piano and a variety of percussion instruments. The album was well received; Pitchfork gave it an 8.5/10, and it placed it into the "best new music" section. Bromst also ranked #46 in Pitchfork's Best Albums of 2009.

His latest album, the 9-song America, was released on August 28th, 2012, on Domino Records in the US. Deacon has described the album as representing his conflicted feelings toward the country and world he calls home: "The inspiration for the music was my love of cross-country travel, seeing the landscapes of the United States, going from east to west and back again over the course of seasons. The lyrics are inspired by my frustration, fear and anger towards the country and world I live in and am a part of. As I came closer to finishing the album these themes began to show themselves more frequently and greater clarity. There seemed no better world to encapsulate both inspirations than the simple beauty found in the word America."