Dan Deacon bends genres, burns barriers at MAO Livehouse

[Photo by Fan Zhen/chinadaily.com.cn]

Dan Deacon cuts an unassuming figure. Balding, bespectacled, and bearded, this self-proclaimed Porky Pig doppelganger took to MAO Livehouse's stage late Saturday night with a deceptively muted swagger. But to be sure, there's nothing quiet about this Baltimore indie darling.

Deacon's music is almost as hard to categorize as his live shows. What the two have in common—revel in—is weirdness. The music cribs elements of chiptune, contemporary classical and psychadelia, with the end result sounding something like the score to a Super Nintendo's dreams. Everything is frenzied, fast and refreshingly uplifting.

He is notorious for leading performances that not only respond to the audience's energy, but appropriate it as part of the act. He began his show with a disclaimer: If you're too stiff to dance, kindly find your way to the nearest exit so as to clear up a spot on the venue floor. None heeded the warning, and Deacon took that as permission to begin molding the room into a blissful dance haven.

The typical electronic musician treats the stage as fortification against their audience. They stand above the crowd, fingers flicking and twitching over mountains of sound equipment, never really interacting with the people who came to see them. They play their set, bob their head to the beat, and later retreat to somewhere behind the fog machines and lasers.

That's not what happens at a Dan Deacon show. Deacon focuses on erasing barriers, the foremost of which is the stage. Deacon isn't afraid to step into his rowdy audience to join them in dance, nor is he afraid to invite people up on stage to jam alongside him. You may never find out the names of the people around you, but by end of the show, they'll all feel like family. You'll have danced with them in synchronized routines, danced against them in spur-of-the-moment dance contests, and locked arms with them in a massive game of London Bridge.

To describe Saturday's show as just a concert would be misleading. There was live music, and there was dancing, but more than anything there was an overwhelming sense of community. In a city as big as Beijing, it's tragically easy to lose sight of that thin thread of humanity that binds us to the waves of people we encounter each day. Dan Deacon's show made that thread unmistakably visible, if only for the night.