Dan Deacon - Mystic Familiar
Additional Editing by Anouska Liat
I never fathomed how popular Dan Deacon was until the release of this new record. His feral breed of corybantic synth-pop isn’t exactly lounge music to set a mood after all, but the invasive nature of his music is also its immersive virtue. In the wake of his 5th studio effort came the realisation that many of my friends were already under his spell, and on his most impressive release to date, the Baltimore synth wizard gifts us an almighty valley where emotions soar above the green crests, tumble down the hills, contemplate in the creeks and peek out from the canopies of forests.
Since his last record 5 years ago, he has scored 8 films and bolstered his skillset to include string arrangement, showcased by the project’s heightened cinematography. Chipping away at the album through the prolific scoring period, he was hastily evolving and constantly coming back to this sanctuary fresh with newly-refined ideas. That on-and-off process has brought along something similar to Bon Iver’s new works, using the 21st-century mantra of material abundance to hitch together something that’s equally striking from a distance, and impressively detailed with time and closer inspection.
“Sat By a Tree” is the most instantaneous song in the herd; though the verses have admittedly timid vocals, the chorus does better to cut through the noise and deliver the song’s momentous hook. Among the fray is a swirling flock of gliding voices, rubbery bass tones and synths that are best described as “stabby”, but it’s the undividable interplay that makes the track shine. These stems are forged together, pushing each other forward with thrilling counterplay.
Deacon’s animated songwriting returns once again, however there’s a newfound oneness he has with the Earth; he’s talking to trees now, and shape-shifting into a mountain on one track, the ocean on another. After being inspired by meditation, he has employed the type of sustained stillness heard in new age music. Consider the self-describing “Hypnagogic”, an interlude based on a set of electric bagpipes beaming in and out of the clouds. It laps smoothly into the oncoming track, illuminating how the record’s flow is enhanced greatly through laudable in-between transitions, making the dichotomy with its orgiastically restless sounds all the more palatable.
Yes, regardless of his recent spirituality, Deacon’s music doesn’t stray from the formula. Songs trenchantly shake with the power of his patently hyperactive arpeggiation, and are rife with so much electronic scree to discover. Lean into how he shepherds his instruments into every orifice of your ear, activating and exercising each part, and you may turn into a junkie, coming back once more to re-experience it all. “Become a Mountain” begins the album with slightly uncoordinated piano chords, intensifying with thicker layers before cutting to a grand, weightless display of Mort Garson-like synths; every piece utterly tempestuous. The elements move at the pace of a timelapse in the land of Mystic Familiar.
His voice plays a bigger role than ever, bearing many states, and even unfiltered for the first time. This is largely due to the abstract concept that he finds himself creating, pulling from his internals. Deacon frames his emotions as what he calls “mystic familiars”, supposedly self-made beings that live in your head and hold an eternal conversation with you - much like the Pixar-created multiverse of Inside Out. Through the limitless manipulation of his voice, he personifies these feelings into characters that have their moments in the spotlight, or topple over each other in the windrush of a track’s pinnacle.
The canorous heart of this is the four-part “Arp” suite, named after the very Arp 2600 synthesizer that was used to write it. First ascending with “Wide Eyed”, its optimistic hookiness rivals any great synth-pop track, telling an equally heroic short tale of wanting to escape and forget the world he lives in. Once charged into the stroboscopic mania of “Float Away”, the track changes course completely, storming ahead with ferocious black MIDI keys and plucking xylophone. In that dream world, the listener slowly becomes bone-crushingly confined in the mayhem, all the while hearing these warbled vocals (which sound straight out of a Boards of Canada track) instructing to “close your eyes, float away...”. “Far From Shore'' clotheslines that momentum with a squeaky trumpet solo, the vocals switching to a vocoder filter to express the first part’s premise again, this time with more determination, more tenancy. Underneath the cascading electronics, the leaves begin to rustle again as the song gathers pace and an assortment of voices circle around one's head like a colourful hallucination. It’s as if Jean Michel Jarre adopted the childlike wonder of Animal Collective.
Finally, it all crashes down on “Any Moment”, as the main vocal line is reprised. “Close your eyes, float away...” - the sounds become so overwhelming to keep up with at the suite’s climax, they simply transform into one overarching texture, like a car’s wheels spinning slowly as it reaches enough speed. Perhaps that was the intention, to create an oddly-absorbing illusion. Life is filled with interesting disorientations, and Deacon is a fantastic perpetuator of them - as is said in the official description for the album, he embraces and compliments “bliss and disruption”.