It's be raining in Houston for the past few days and it started Thursday, a night I'd been looking forward to for some time. Dan Deacon was coming to the Orange Show. The coolest venue in Houston, if not the contiguous United States (and I've been to a great many). The rain subsided, however, for the few hours Dan Deacon performed- as if the rain gods looked down on us and said "Alright. I don't give you too much in the way of beauty and while 95% of your city has no soul, I'll allow you few dedicated hipsters to rock your socks off for a night."
Dan Deacon is a hyper-intelligent (dare I say nerdy) electronic musician. Hailing from Baltimore, he was a classically trained in composition at SUNY Purchase. While his first album, Spiderman of the Rings (2006) is traditionally thought of as a "party" album (tribalistic electronic pop), his latest effort Bromst (March 2009) its a much larger (in scope and content), compositional project he has been working on for 3 years. The sounds are less hard-pounding, wasted-jumping and more like a small avant-garde symphony. To quote Pitchfork, "If Spiderman was for dancing on sticky floors, Bromst feels better suited to sleeping, or contemplating the sublime, or anything else that happens mostly between your ears."
A strict vegan, Deacon converted his school bus/tour bus to run on vegetable oil and he hopes to abstain from supporting the economy of hotels by finding places for his 20 person "orchestra" to crash. He even released an announcement telling fans if you brought 5 gallons of veggie oil the his show, you would be granted free entry. Unconventional to say the least.
Deacon has an uncanny ability to turn his shows into spectaculars, like blogger Michael Byrne said in his XLR8R piece, "Dan Deacon is very, very good at making people do shit." Without so much as a suggestion he got 75% of the Orange Show attendees to leave the venue (myself included). Literally everyone snake-chained out of the place and formed a tunnel only to be standing on a residential street. (In the 3rd Ward. And for those readers who are unfamiliar with Houston, that shit is the straight up GHETTO.) As Deacon himself explains it, the audience is “something that can be composed for and improvised with, manipulated in the most positive sense into doing something they wouldn’t normally do.”
And for those of you who hate on Houston (and believe me, up until a few months ago I was one of you too), even Dan Deacon seemed impressed. "Holy shit, Houston, I wasn't expecting much, but this place and you guys are AWESOME!" (I might be paraphrasing, I was a lil drunkers.)
Case in point being: Go See Dan Deacon Live. A++
this is kind of shitty quality uploaded to blogger but you'll get the idea.
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