Sunday Music: Dan Deacon

Dan Deacon's equipment setup
Photo by Milo Winningham

Apparently, I am the last person in America to see "Drinking out of Cups," Dan Deacon and Liam Lynch's hilarious CGI animation. In it, a sarcastic lizard with a Long Island accent spends most of the cartoon crudely dismissing random bizarre imagery.

I find Dan Deacon incredibly annoying, seeing how he was born a couple months after I graduated from college, yet has already accomplished enough for several lifetimes. After completing a Master's degree in "Electro-acoustic composition," he moved to Baltimore and founded Wham City, an art and music collective. Wham City helped to revitalize the arts scene in Baltimore, and created a much-needed creative gravitational pull away from Brooklyn.

Deacon's multimedia performances are big fun, with lots of audience participation and dancing, all driven by delirious/demented electro-pop played using vintage electronics and instruments. As a matter of fact, his music is so demented that I'm unsure as to whether it will stand the test of time. I doubt Deacon cares all that much; he's said one of his major influences were the Looney Tunes cartoons, and that he hoped his music would be like that produced by some "really cool six-year-olds." Here he is on local Georgia television, channeling a combination of Alvin & the Chipmunks, The Talking Heads and Mork from Ork.





Dan Deacon: Interview. From The Tape is not Sticky [Link]