By Matt Fink

Believe it or not, Dan Deacon never wanted to be a solo artist. While studying composition at the Conservatory of Music at Purchase College in New York, he had been performing in ensembles, playing tuba for Langhorne Slim, and kicking up a racket in a grindcore band. But when he found himself alone in Baltimore, with no friends and no real prospects for collaboration, he had a decision to make. He'd already made a handful of records, experimented with sine waves, and made sound collages, but he wanted to attempt something different. "I knew that I could either spend a year trying to convince someone to play my music," he says, "or I could just do it myself and not lose the momentum that I had going in school."

He translated that momentum into 2007's Spiderman of the Rings, a leftfield classic that married cartoon samples with pitch-shifted vocals and candy-colored electronics, setting him across the country on a public bus to play basements and houses. By the end of the year, he was an underground sensation, filling clubs with sweaty throngs of kids who just wanted to dance. Then he got the itch: He wanted to play music with people again.

Few knew at the time, but even while he was touring with his brand of electronic pop, Deacon had already started writing his next chapter. While he was writing Spiderman of the Rings, an album he never expected anyone outside of his friends and fans to hear, he was writing music for ensembles again. Heavily percussive and elaborately layered, these arrangements would show off his compositional chops -- if anyone ever heard them. "If the album is never going to exist anyway, I might as well make it as awesome as possible," he says, recalling his fantasies. "I started composing in a different way, and that's when a new body of songs came on the scene." Those songs became Bromst.

Did this album change much from the way you had originally envisioned it?

Yeah, I'd say it did. A lot of the tracks that I wrote for Bromst were very slow and very droning, and I think there are only a couple tracks that reflect that way of thinking. I worked on it for a long time, so while I was writing it, my musical tastes would slowly evolve and the shows I was playing were changing, and that would effect how I thought about the music I was making and how the crowd would react to it. But I never thought Bromst would exist, because I didn't think Spiderman of the Rings would be as successful as it was. I didn't think I'd be able to play pieces that were both loud but delicate at the same time through PA systems that were good.

When I first started, I was playing basements and house shows, so I was up for whatever equipment was there. I toured by Greyhound bus, and it blew my fucking mind that I was able to play for large crowds through good PA systems. It was working, this weird music that this weirdo dude was making. People seemed to like it, and I am very grateful for that. And it changed my approach. But, at that point in my life, if I had tried to play a track like "Of the Mountains" or "Snookered" through those types of PA systems, it would have sounded like garbage or it would have blown the PA. The timbre of the piece would have been completely compromised. After Spiderman of the Rings came out, and I found out I would have that kind of opportunity, I started thinking about having live performers and not just me playing the tracks. Does that make any sense?

I think so. Listening to this record, it definitely sounds like this it isn't going to let people construct any sort of easy caricature of you.

Cool! Then it worked. I think a second record -- and for a lot of people this will be my second record -- is a good opportunity for an artist to figure out if this is the style they want to continue working in or to branch away from it. I didn't want to write another record like Spiderman of the Rings, and I didn't want the same kind of show. I didn't want it to be a sequel. I wanted it to be something that was in the same nature and had the same musical ideology but had a different focus and different overall feel.

In retrospect, do you think the reaction to the last record created a caricature that you weren't comfortable with?

Like in terms of the "wacky" shit? Yeah. I read a lot of reviews of the record where they put on the album, listened to the first song, reviewed the album, and took it off. "Woody Woodpecker," the opening track, is certainly absurd to a lot of people. It seemed to paint a very vivid picture in people's minds of the music that I make. There are definitely "wacky" parts of the album, but they are also juxtaposed against some pretty serious counterpoint. It wasn't the goofy, jerk-off record that a lot of reviewers put it as. I think a lot of press, at least within blog culture and the internet, feeds off of itself, and someone will read a review and then write a review based on that review. And it will start feeding back in on itself, with certain key words. And those key words would be the things that everyone would hear, and before they'd even hear the record, those are the things that would stick out in their minds. Like, "Oh, he pitch shifts his voice, and he uses a cartoon sample, so he's a wacky jokester. Let's put him in the wacky jokester pile and not write about anything else on the record."

I wanted there to be lightheartedness, because I think a lot of electronic music is way too esoteric and pretentious and full of it. I wanted to write something that was accessible yet radical at the same time, and I feel like a lot of people couldn't get past the absurd element of it, and that was a little disheartening. But it's okay. I was really worried about being typecast as a joke, because nothing about the show is a joke.

Just like the "dark" thing, where I said in an interview last year that this album is much darker than the previous one, and all of a sudden that became the word for this album. And it's not a fucking dark album! It's not a goth album. It just has more dark tones that the last one and a story that's focused on an apocalyptic view of the future. That's what I was talking about, but the early press was focusing on that word so much, so I decided I had to squash this or dark would become the new wacky. And people are going to put it on and think it's going to be dark and be like, "Well, what the fuck is this about?" It sets expectations, which I don't think are ever good. When I go to the movies, I don't want to know anything about it. I just want to see it and enjoy it at face value. I think a lot of stuff gets too hyped. Does that make sense? Sorry, I keep saying that...

No problem. Did you construct this album as a complete narrative?

No. Musically, there is a narrative, but lyrically it varies from song to song. It's about cycles in time and parallel existences and what happens after we're done with this stage of life and what happens after we die. I think there is going to be a shift in the way humanity exists, and it can be a positive direction or a negative one. I think we can enter into a new age of enlightenment and collective consciousness or we can enter into a dark age and it will be an age of kings and horrible exploitation and greed and fear. The album focuses on those lyrical aspects, and I guess the last one was about having guns that shoot rattlesnakes out of them and cats made of crystals. It's a different lyrical approach. Does that make sense? God! I need to fucking stop saying, "Does that make sense?"

When I was writing these songs, I was living at Wham City, which was this paradise land where nothing could go wrong, and we didn't need any jobs because our rent was so cheap and we could eat out of the dumpster. After we got evicted, that mindset didn't exist anymore, and everything became real. I became interested in researching the ideas of how society is run and books like The Power Elite and Democracy for the Few and Ruled by Secrecy. Those spoke to me very powerfully in that period of my life, and I wanted the record to have some sort of tone like that. Even though it was music that was meant to be played in a celebratory and uplifting way, I wanted it to bring light to these topics and have people geared toward a positive and more connected future. Where the last record was made for people to dance around to, I wanted this one to inspire something other than partying. Does that make sense? Damn it! I've said that five hundred fucking times!

So, overall, what would be a gratifying response to this record?

I don't know. Do you know that scene in Miracle on 34th Street where Santa Clause gets bags and bags of letters? I want to get Santa Claus' letters.