Dan Deacon - Broms
I just picked up electronic music artist Dan Deacon's newest album Bromst. I'm still listening to the album, so I'll spare readers a full review, especially since it's already been done, several times. But there is one song on the album that Deacon gets so right that it cannot be ignored.
The song "Wet Wings" is based entirely around a sample of an acappella rendition of the traditional folk song "The Day is Past and Gone" sung by Jean Ritchie. Deacon stacks multiple layers of Ritchie's haunting vocal loop on top of one another until there is a full choir of voices interlocking and blending with one another in an overwhelming wash of sound. It is something like a modern day version of a tape loop piece by Steve Reich but infinitely more approachable. What works so well "Wet Wings" is the way that Deacon uses the Jean Ritchie sample as a jumping off point for his sonic explorations. Deacon is certainly not the first electronic musician to use samples of folk tunes in his music, but rarely are the samples such an integral part of the song as they are here. The difference between the way that Deacon samples folk music in "Wet Wings" and the way that someone like, say, Moby does on the album Play, is that Deacon is not just peppering the song with samples to make for a "spicier" sound. While Moby may have recontextualized folk songs by putting them on an electronica album, he uses them more as quotations than as true structural elements. In "Wet Wings," however, the sample is not just a sample, it is the entire foundation of the piece. Deacon uses Ritchie's voice like a musical instrument, not like a dusty relic to be trotted out for sonic effect. By doing so, he is able to create something entirely new and completely unrecognizable from its original form. By the time Deacon has added all the layers of voices, the lyrics are no longer discernible and all you hear is a wall of voices bleeding together in a way that sounds worlds apart from Ritchie's lone voice in the original recording. This is a totally different approach to sampling where the sample is an integral part of creating new music, and it is precisely what makes what Deacon has done so breathtaking.
Deacon is currently touring to support Bromst. Colorado residents can catch Dan in concert April 30th at the Bluebird Theater in Denver.
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