Density in music can be its own reward, unless it gets in the way of everything else.
Electronic composer Dan Deacon’s music has a clear, approachable harmonic language, rooted in major keys and simple chord progressions. It has more fun, danceable, hard grooves than you should be able to enjoy at one concert (or on one album). His lyrics (on songs that have them) are often whimsical and trippy, seemingly inspired by dreams or hallucinations. At the same time, Deacon absolutely pummels you with sonic information.
“Think about a waveform,” Deacon said. “It’s a squiggly line, and if you zoom out it becomes a sort of dense blob. With my music, it looks like someone put paint on each one of their fingertips and dragged it across the duration of the track.”
Deacon performs at College Street Music Hall in New Haven on Saturday, Sept. 19, at 8 p.m. He’ll be joined by Minneapolis experimental-pop band ON AN ON, Eliot Sumner (Sting’s daughter) and fellow electronic musician Martin Dosh.
On his 2012 album “America,” Deacon worked with live musicians. He embraced the subtle imperfections in human performances and manipulated acoustic sounds as though they were electronic. “Guilford Avenue Bridge,” the opening track, alternates primal, distorted washes of sound, with breaks for cleaner, banjo-like arpeggios. The comparatively song-like “Crash Jam” offers huge masses of sound over a galloping beat. Even where acoustic instruments ring out — strings at the outset of “USA I: Is a Monster,” or the entirety of the gorgeous, minimalist “USA III: Rail” — density prevails.
For 2015’s “Gliss Riffer,” however, Deacon went back to working alone.
“I really loved working with people on America, but I feel like I didn’t really fully embrace that concept,” he said. He also recalibrated his relationship to sonic space. Tracks like “Meme Generator” and “Learning to Relax” sound more permeable: You hear Deacon’s gift for melody. On “When I Was Done Dying,” a rambling, almost folky triple-meter ballad form, you also hear his voice — both processed and natural — more clearly than on previous records.
“It just became nonsense and chaos,” Deacon said. “I started to really appreciate hearing nuance. That’s when the space between the sounds started becoming more important than the non-existent space.”
Like many contemporary composers, Deacon is influenced by minimalism — Steve Reich, Philip Glass, John Adams, and so on — and that accounts for some of the density in his own music.
“Not to be corny,” he said, “but [minimalism] has a kind of maximalist nature,” Deacon said. “It’s very dense music. I just fell in love with that as a palette, using sonic density as the focus of my compositions. It’s the sound that the combination of the sounds makes up.”
Another idea that appeals to him: On any given, supersaturated track, not everyone will hear the same sounds.
“Some sound might stick out to somebody else and be completely unheard to another person,” Deacon said. “Or you can listen to a track a million times and hear sounds you’ve never heard before. It’s kind of like seeing a film projected on a screen for the first time, having only seen it on your laptop before that.”
As a young composer, Deacon wrote mostly atonal and pitchless music.
“I think dissonance is beautiful,” he said. “I like beating sine waves. I like working with the space between semitones.” Discovering tonality, however, meant there was no going back: Nearly every track on “Gliss Riffer” is in a major key. (“Steely Blues” is in Lydian mode.)
“I’m rooted in the major scale pretty hard,” Deacon said. “If anything, I’m reducing notes by going straight pentatonic. At times, I think it’s a crutch and it’s something I know how to work with. It’s like having a color palette that I know.”
Recently, Deacon has performed with a live drummer, which he likens to “building a gigantic library of samples” for chopping up or using as is.
“That’s what I’m most excited about,” he said. “I really look at ‘Remain In Light’ [Talking Heads’ 1980 album] as a major inspiration for making a studio record with live content, thinking of each session as a sample library.”
Deacon composes for new-classical shows, experimental art projects and film scores, all of which he keeps separate from his album work. He’s in the early stages of making a new record, and he’s trying not to think of the live show as he writes and records.
“I’m trying to discipline myself to have that mindset, to not let one context override the other,” Deacon said. “I’m ready to make an album in the truest sense. I feel that way every time I go into the studio. But I’ve learned a lot with each record, about myself and about the process of making a record.”
DAN DEACON performs at College Street Music Hall in New Haven on Saturday, Sept. 19, at 8 p.m., with ON AN ON, Eliot Sumner and Dosh. Tickets are $15. Information: collegestreetmusichall.com.
