Live electronic music. To many, the phrase remains an oxymoron, inevitably linked to the image of producers hunkered over laptops, eyes soaking in software rather than audience members. To counter that perception, I give you Dan Deacon.

The Baltimore-based performer is more Guitar Hero than laptop intelligentsia — though you’ll find neither among his customized set-up of sweat-soaked instruments and effects. Working with analog keyboards, a tone generator, vocoder, mixer, pedals and an assortment of buttons, knobs and lights, the classically trained composer with a background in electro-acoustic composition is renowned as a captivating performer, whether serving up sine-wave manipulations or quirky, party-friendly pop.
Deacon has released eight albums — including last year’s critically acclaimed Spiderman of the Rings — and toured extensively over the past four years, playing a wide assortment of galleries, clubs and festivals to audiences that have grown from dozens to hundreds, sometimes even thousands. These days, he’s blowing minds with Ultimate Reality, a seriously psychedelic music-and-video project co-created with friend and fellow member of the Wham City arts collective Jimmy Joe Roche.

“We actually made Ultimate Reality two years ago,” says Deacon, speaking through static while being driven between California tour dates. “I didn’t initially have the idea of it being music for a larger piece. I just wanted to write a very fast drone piece, a piece where the pulse of the beat would, over time, create a drone.

“I was working with two drummers — Jeremy Hyman from Ponytail and Kevin O’Meara from Video Hippos — and we were rehearsing at Wham City. Jimmy came along and said ‘What the hell is this piece? I’d like to make visuals for it.’ Later he said it would be clips from a bunch of Schwarzenegger films collaged together, which I thought was awesome.”

 “I went from childhood to adulthood with Schwarzenegger films; he’s like a symbol that spans my whole life,” explains Roche of the project’s visual focus. “I think that the films, and Schwarzenegger himself, reflect a lot of the best and worst things about American culture as a culture of extremes. He crosses over between the huge fantasies we have all around us, like the giant movies we consume, to the more serious stuff like religion and politics.”

Created as a video in three parts, the Ultimate Reality DVD is fantastically fun and intense brain candy, with oodles of Schwarzenegger clips layered, looped, extended and distended over acid-soaked splashes of bright colour while Deacon’s compositions provide the soundtrack. When brought to a live audience, the Ultimate Reality experience consists of the video projected onto a 30-foot screen while the two drummers pound out their parts in time to the recorded score. Deacon himself follows with a live set of primarily unrecorded new music.

 “When it really works, people seem to have this desire to touch the light,” comments Roche. “It’s weird, but with the music and the intensity and the brightness and colour, people get to a point where they seem to almost want to fuse with it. They stick their hands in there and play with the image in such a different way than you’d ever have at a film festival or in a movie theatre.”

This active participation may also be due, in part, to Deacon’s reputation for having an uncanny connection to, and control over, his audiences. Many show attendees have written blog reports detailing Deacon’s ability to coax crowds into performing physical movements en masse — forming human tunnels and moving around a room, for example.

 “Most of the time I just set up a situation that is very reliant upon how the audience reacts to it,” Deacon says, downplaying his involvement. “If the audience is hesitant, it’s going to be a failure.
“As long as you can create an environment that’s fun and relaxing and doesn’t make people feel like what they’re doing is stupid, then they’re a lot more willing to let loose and indulge in doing stuff that they might normally feel uncomfortable doing, like dancing in the middle of a cleared circle in a 400-person room with every single light on and everyone staring at them.”
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FOR A TASTE OF THE ULTIMATE REALITY EXPERIENCE, CHECK ROCHE’S TOUR BLOGS AT YOUTUBE.COM/ULTIMATEREALITYTOUR.

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