DAN DEACON / US

Pagan rituals for your right to party!

Baltimore's Dan Deacon has built a reputation as that crazy, brilliant live performer with a table full of gadgets planted right in the middle of the dancefloor, engaging his audiences with frenetic dancing and Dadaist theatrics.

The man has released a string of solo instrumental albums, both self-published on Carpark Records, beginning in 2003. They have included collections of computer music, live recordings of ensemble pieces and sine wave compositions. It was 2007's Spiderman of the Rings (also Carpark Records) which had, in contrast to earlier productions, vocal elements that evoked crowds and a sense of community that put Dan Deacon on the map. After touring with a 15-piece ensemble, Deacon returned with Bromst, his last album: the palette became richer, the samples smoother, the space larger, the programming slightly less buzzy. Actual instruments, the kinds with microphones next to them, abound live drums, layers and layers of mallet instruments, a player piano that goes fluttering up and down the scale like it's stuck in the lobby of an avant-garde department store, briefly an album which comes as a great follow-up to a first underground hit.

Though he ingeniously skipped through our fingers at last year's Rokolectiv and at the earlier The Bridge Festival, this year Mr. Deacon has no choice but to fight MNAC's ghosts, drag them into his pagan rituals and confront them to his massed shouting, overlapping exhortations of cartoon vocals and bespectacled conservatory-trained DD-gnomes!www.myspace.com/dandeacon