Dan Deacon's cartoony pop sure to energize Quad crowd

Armed with only a handful of electronic gadgets and his trademark "trippy green skull," Dan Deacon will bring his Wham City jams to Seattle University for the 21st annual Quadstock.

A classically trained composer and producer of futuristic, energy-centric electropop, Deacon has built up a reputation for getting bodies moving on the dance floor. His music rarely slows to less than 150 beats-per-minute, and all of his tracks sound like cartoon theme songs shot through with vocoder and heart attack-inducing levels of caffeine.

Deacon hails from Baltimore, Md., but he's no stranger to the Seattle music scene. He's played the city half a dozen times over the last couple of years, rejecting 21-and-up shows as a kind of musical injustice. Like his records, his live shows are full of joy and vivacity, and it's impossible to make it through a Deacon set without feeling really great about life by the end.

He's also a performer with a firm grasp of the importance of community. When he rolled through Seattle in April 2009, he was suffering from a dislocated shoulder, but that didn't stop him from keeping up his trademark performance shtick: playing in the crowd, not in front of it.

Seattle U can only hope he keeps up this tradition for his Quadstock performance. The thought of human-tunneling around the fountain is just too good to be true. But regardless of whether he plays on the stage or in the crowd, his set is guaranteed to get people dancing all around the Quad.

Matthew may be reached at copy@su-spectator.com