About Dan Deacon
Daniel Deacon 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 . 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.
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."
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