Dan Deacon Live

What happens when you can’t fixate on the composer? When you can’t peer over a sea of shoulders to judge? When you aren’t distracted by your own analysis of the music’s maker? When all you can see on stage is another audience looking back at you? When your only focal point is a lonely microphone stand wearing an eerie fluorescent green skull? You’re so consumed by the music and the shared enthusiasm over it you may as well close your eyes. Dan Deacon never performs on stage. He doesn’t wish to be watched. He wouldn’t want to deter your attention from the music or the way the music—a force all its own—has so completely changed the nature of the room. And by removing himself, by burying himself within the crowd, we audience members are left to imagine what we will, to soak up what we want, to dance amongst ourselves, to recognize with bright clarity one of the most important aspects of live music: that we the crowd are as crucial to the success of the performance, as the musician. In fact, we the crowd, depending on how well we’re feeling and interacting, are not only as significant but perhaps more significant to the power of the live music—and Deacon knows this well. Deacon, who shared his music and videos Saturday night at Portland’s Holocene, knows how to command an audience, inject it with adrenaline and leave it wondering just how Deacon, or his crushing dance music, or the communal energy convinced it to do all those things. It’s not easy to persuade a large group of individuals, most of whom carry their defenses naturally, to loosen their guards, to accept what’s being offered and let it carry them somewhere without first knowing just where. It’s not easy to relinquish control, trust a new guide and welcome the unknown. But somehow Deacon makes it feels as if it were. And so Deacon begins by breaking barriers—barriers between performer and audience, between what’s being performed and who’s listening, between one crowd member and another, between every person in the room and the energy the room bursts forth. Before the music can play—before the shared energy of the music can be created and absorbed—Deacon must first prepare the crowd; first he must strip away the guards, or at least attempt to. “O.K., so here we all are,” Deacon says from somewhere hidden deep inside the crowd. “It’s crowded so I want you to get comfortable with your space and neighbor. You’re probably going to be bumping into each other soon so let’s just be O.K. with that now. Good, O.K., now I want everyone to raise their left arm, raise it high, stretch it as high as you can get it. Now ball your left hand into a fist. Good. O.K., now drop to your right knee as if you’re being knighted. Now I want you to find a stranger in the room, someone you’ve never seen in your life, now look at them, look right into their eyes and point your arm toward them and make your fingers say: ‘Come here’ and at the same time make them go: ‘No, no, no.’ Now put your hand over your mouth—yep, that’s hand skin touching lip skin. Feel that? Good.” Except for a handful of people crossing their arms and leaning against walls, the room laughed and obliged. There’s something striking in our pack mentality, in our want for shared behavior, in our instinct for adapting to our surroundings and in our ineffable desire for the closeness of others. Deacon instigates community and draws from us the wants and the needs that are already there and have always been there and that only sometimes, in such a fragmented modern world, need a little coaxing. More simply put: Deacon can charm the snake from its spiraled basket. Deacon is a clever composer of noisy dance music (and beyond). But he is an even cleverer performer. He commands a crowd, he crumbles their defenses, he draws out their desires and he reminds them, as if to reinitiate them, how a room, a crowd and a sound can come together to feel unspeakably alive with love for life. Deacon’s live music transports you and has you asking yourself to savor this moment because surely it is amongst life’s highlights. Feel that? Good.