Dan Deacon Does DeKalb

Though he’s set to rock a much larger crowd this weekend at Pitchfork Music Festival, kooky dance guru Dan Deacon got down in a more intimate setting last week in the middle of a corn field.

It wasn’t a literal corn field — it was DeKalb, Illinois, home of the sizeable Northern Illinois University. But inside a relatively small cafe named The House, five to six dozen body shakers clustered around the knob tweaker to surround him in his own figurative field of maize.

Deacon, who stood in front of the venue’s stage while being encircled, whipped the crowd into a frenzy with a unique opening salvo. He convinced the crowd to count down — all shouting — from 35-25 with the emotion that each member’s parents had nearly put his or her suffering dog out of its misery with a hammer.

Attendees were then instructed to silently groove in place from 24-11 while making eye contact with a stranger, but the electronic composer saved his most absurd for after the count reached zero: screaming “DeKalb is a pyramid” using an entire breath per syllable. By the time Deacon tore into “Okie Dokie,” the crowd nearly lost its collective marbles while chanting “I’ve got a rattlesnake gun” along with him.

In his trademark huge, red-framed glasses and loveably geeky garb, Deacon proceeded to orchestrate a miniature light show and twist like a white Chubby Checker. The night, which reportedly included a house show a few hours later, was chock full of singable sine waves and voice-encoded vocals and was certain not to forget a dance-off.

The Baltimore resident then finished the festivities by passing out hideously unwashed neon robes for a choir-like sing-along to “Wham City,” an electronic epic for which he brought a gigantic lyric sheet and smaller copies to hand out. It was a glorious affair meant to induce spastic movement — one that is also captured on his most recent compact disc, Spiderman of the Rings (Carpark).

– Scott Morrow

Photo credit: Lindsey Choy

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