Directed hysteria

“I started playing in the middle of the crowd to better communicate with the audience,” says Dan Deacon.

Communication is key in Deacon’s famed live shows. He shuns the stage and instead sets up his array of computers, keyboards and electronics in the middle of the venues where he plays. He then gives directions to his audience, ensuring that each of his shows can be a giant dance party, a series of games or a set of bizarre tasks, depending on his mood.

Deacon might ask the audience to form a circle and have people take turns dancing in the middle. Or ask the audience to stare and point at a stranger while performing a choreographed routine prescribed by his spoken-word accompaniment. He sometimes has audience members form gauntlets—making tunnels with their arms and having people run underneath.

The unpredictability and spontaneity of Deacon’s shows mean that each is a unique experience. His shows helped him build a cult following beyond his initial artistic circles at college in upstate New York, and later in Baltimore.

“Baltimore was a major influence and inspiration,” Deacon says.

After moving to Baltimore in 2004, Deacon founded the Wham City art collective and the annual Whartscape festival, which has evolved into a major independent music event. He also curated the Baltimore Round Robin festival last year, a massive 30-band tour.

Baltimore has an abundance of warehouses. Some of these have been taken over by young artists who congregate there in search of cheap studios and rent. They provide a breeding ground for musical and performance projects.

“The atmosphere in some of those places is just perfect,” Deacon says.

Deacon cut his teeth on live shows in these Baltimore warehouses. There he’s regarded as something of a hero. A local-paper review on his MySpace page suggests a sort of mythology around the electronic wizard and presents Deacon as a sort of a vanguard against gentrification. The suggestion is that Deacon manages to harness his positive energy to turn throngs of hipsters into people who can surrender themselves to music and truly love it.

While the notion that Deacon can singlehandedly combat commercial developers is somewhat ludicrous, his shows do sometimes approach transcendence. It’s fitting that his last tour was dubbed “Ultimate Reality,” given the spiritual undertones of that phrase. Although “Ultimate Reality” was merely a title for video performance art by another Wham City member (psychedelic visuals were designed to work with Deacon’s music), Deacon’s shows can become an all-consuming out-of-body experience, which is perhaps the pinnacle that one can derive from music.

Famed noise band Lightning Bolt is probably the biggest influence on Deacon’s music, performance style and artistic creed, but Deacon departs from their tradition of only playing unorthodox venues. Instead, Deacon turns venues like Holocene and the Wonder Ballroom into cavernous artists’ warehouses by forcing his audience into a different type of concert going experience.

This is Deacon’s first tour with a live band, which should make his already powerful live sound even more expansive. Deacon gets people moving, and is destined to get them moving at a level deeper than the dancing that happens at parties. Through his concerts and music, Dan Deacon is creating a directed hysteria, one concert at a time.