Dan Deacon

Daniel Deacon (born August 28, 1981) is an American composer and electronic musician based in Baltimore, Maryland. Deacon is renowned for his live shows, where large-scale audience participation and interaction is often a major element of the performance. Since 2003, he has released five solo albums, including 2015's Gliss Riffer, released by Domino Records. His work as a film composer includes scoring the 2021 documentaries All Light, Everywhere and Ascension, both released as soundtrack albums by Milan Records, as well as Francis Ford Coppola's Twixt (with Osvaldo Golijov), Hustle, Venom: The Last Dance, and the HBO series Task. His fifth solo studio album, titled Mystic Familiar, was released January 31, 2020 on Domino. Daniel Deacon was born and raised in West Babylon, New York on Long Island. He graduated from Babylon High School in 1999 where he was a member of the local ska band Channel 59 alongside Tim Daniels of The Complete Guide to Everything. He later attended the Conservatory of Music at State University of New York at Purchase in Purchase, New York where, in addition to performing his solo material, he played in many bands, including tuba for Langhorne Slim and guitar in the improvisational grindcore band, Rated R, and had a small mixed chamber ensemble. He completed his graduate studies in electro-acoustic and computer music composition. He studied under composer and conductor Joel Thome and Dary John Mizelle. In 2004 he moved to Baltimore, Maryland and moved into the Copycat Building and, along with friends from SUNY Purchase, formed Wham City, an arts and music collective. His first two releases as a solo artist, Meetle Mice and Silly Hat vs Egale Hat were released on CD-R on Standard Oil Records in 2003 while he was a student at SUNY Purchase. The albums are collections of both computer music and live recordings of ensemble pieces, and are markedly different from the electronic-pop body of work that began with his first popular record, 2007's Spiderman of the Rings, in that most of the pieces are instrumentals and sound collages, and they contain almost no tracks where Deacon sings or uses vocal manipulation.[citation needed] He followed those two albums with a set of records made up of sine wave compositions, Green Cobra Is Awesome Vs The Sun and Goose on the Loose. His next two releases were the EPs Twacky Cats on Comfort Stand Recordings and Acorn Master on Psych-o-path Records. Spiderman of the Rings was Deacon's first commercially distributed full-length album, released by Carpark Records in May 2007. The album was well received and was included in the Best New Music section of Pitchfork. The album was ranked as number 24 on the website's "Top 50 Albums of 2007". Spiderman of the Rings marked the beginning of Deacon's body of recorded work as an electronic-pop musician; Deacon has stated the success of this record "completely changed my life in every possible way." The collaborative video-art piece Ultimate Reality was released as a DVD in November 2007 by Carpark Records and marked a return to composing music for others to perform. The pieces for percussion and electronics were performed by Jeremy Hyman of Ponytail and Kevin Omeara of Videohippos. The sonic pieces were set to collaged and heavily altered video created by Deacon's long time friend and collaborator Jimmy Joe Roche. Deacon's next album, entitled Bromst, was released on March 24, 2009. It was produced by Chester Gwazda at Snow Ghost Studios in Whitefish, Montana and features live instruments including player piano and a variety of percussion instruments. The album was well received; Pitchfork gave it an 8.5/10 and placed it into the "best new music" section. The album placed 46th among Pitchfork's "Top 50 Albums of 2009". His album America was released on August 28, 2012, on Domino Records in the US. Deacon has described the album as representing his conflicted feelings toward the country and world he calls home: "The inspiration for the music was my love of cross-country travel, seeing the landscapes of the United States, going from east to west and back again over the course of seasons. "The lyrics are inspired by my frustration, fear and anger towards the country and world I live in and am a part of. As I came closer to finishing the album these themes began to show themselves more frequently and greater clarity. There seemed no better world to encapsulate both inspirations than the simple beauty found in the word America." Gliss Riffer was released on Domino Records on February 24, 2015. Deacon describes the album title as "something that auto-correct wants to make sure that no one can actually type." The album was produced by Deacon alone, who notes that he created the album "trying to confront my own anxieties or insecurities and the stresses in my life." Gliss Riffer yielded the singles "Feel the Lightning" and "Learning to Relax", as well as a viral video animated in the exquisite corpse style for "When I Was Done Dying", produced by Adult Swim and featuring the work of nine different animators. "When I Was Done Dying" plays at the end of the HBO docuseries The Dark Wizard (2026), which chronicles the life and death of Dean Potter, an extreme athlete known for free-solo rock climbing, highlining, BASE jumping, and wingsuit flying. The song echos faintly Neutral Milk Hotel's "Marching Theme" from On Avery Island. Gliss Riffer received four-star reviews from both The Guardian and AllMusic. In his A− review of the album for Consequence of Sound, Derek Staples noted that "the universal motifs of his discography are now refracted through a more personal lens", and praised the record's "new lyrical depth". In 2017, Deacon released a 10th-anniversary edition of Spiderman of the Rings that also included the soundtrack to 2007's Ultimate Reality. Deacon produced and co-wrote the album Riddles by Ed Schrader's Music Beat, released March 2, 2018 on Carpark Records. Writing for NPR's All Songs Considered, Bob Boilen described Riddles as "a fascinating piece of work that is both ugly and beautiful, often at the same time", likening its sound to late-1970s records by Suicide and Pere Ubu. Nina Corcoran noted in Pitchfork that "You can hear Deacon's style, especially that of 2012's America, all over this album: the gleeful piano fluttering in 'Riddles,' the manic percussion buried in fuzz on 'Dizzy Devil,' the thick wall of synth on 'Kid Radium.'" Deacon's fifth studio album, Mystic Familiar, was released on January 31, 2020. A first video from the album, for the song "Sat By a Tree" starring Aparna Nancherla, was released October 29, 2019. The second single from Mystic Familiar, "Become a Mountain", was released on January 13, 2020, with a video by animation studio Rapapawn. In his 4-star review for AllMusic, Paul Simpson characterized Mystic Familiar as Deacon's return to "majestically arranged synth pop", characterizing its arrangements as "driving and full of excitement" and finding the album's lyrical themes of nature and inner peace "encouraging and empowering without relying on self-help clichés." For Under the Radar, Scott Dransfield noted that Mystic Familiar is "far and away his most personal work yet", and concluded that "the best thing about Mystic Familiar is how the beautiful composition of the music reinforces the power of the lyrics' message." Deacon's remix of the Future Islands single "For Sure" premiered on January 19, 2021. In 2011, Deacon began to work more outside of the indie and pop music scenes and began working in the contemporary classical scene and film scoring. On January 20, 2011, Deacon and percussion quartet So Percussion premiered a new piece composed by Deacon titled "Ghostbuster Cook: Origin of the Riddler" at the Merkin Concert Hall in New York as part of the Ecstatic Music Festival. New York magazine listed the performance as one of the top 10 classical music performances of 2011. "Ghostbuster Cook" was also performed at The