Dan Deacon started out as a solo electronic musician, but after doing tours with the Dan Deacon Ensemble, Deacon began to embrace making music with large groups of people.  And so for America, he resolved to do something he’d never done before: try things out in the studio with different players on different instruments.

America is a study in density, a thick but nuanced mix of acoustic and synthetic timbres, a mix of Deacon’s pop side (as in 2007′s Spiderman of the Rings) and his more composerly side (Bromst).  There’s also dance music culture in the DNA of this music, but suffused with the top-to-bottom distortion and overdrive of noise music and the instrumentation and sweep of orchestral music.  America has echoes of Steve Reich and Terry Riley for sure, but Deacon engages with minimalism in a maximalist way — dense and relentless, it’s crammed with sound and joy, an overwhelming experience to immerse and dance within.

And so what to do? America doesn’t pretend to supply the answers, but it does offer the energy to help us find them.  As Deacon is fond of saying, “The future surrounds us.  Let us begin.”