Dan Deacon, who returns to Dublin next week, has found an enthusiastic audience in Ireland for his riotous solo live show. But his new album and his recruitment of extra musicians show a change of tone from the former Wham City man. He talks to JIM CARROLL

FOR THE LAST couple of years, Dan Deacon has wowed audiences in Ireland with his one-man show. The more shows the Baltimore-based electronic musician plays here, the more word-of-mouth raves about him and his music. Naturally, the pay-cheque for his Irish shows increases with every visit.

A Deacon show is quite a sight. Eschewing the stage in favour of playing from the floor in the midst of his audience, Deacon’s extravagant performance and euphoric, gleeful barrage of sounds has turned his live show into a loud, screaming riotous playground.

In fact, the playground analogy is apt, given Deacon’s liking for getting the crowd to engage in running and jumping during the show. His show at Dublin’s Vicar Street last summer will be one of the few times you’ll see people skipping hand in hand in a giant circle around that venue.

But when he returns to Ireland in early June, he will not be alone when the lights go down to signal the start of the show. To promote his new album, Bromst, Deacon has recruited a 14-strong ensemble for the live experience. It is, says the performer, an ambitious undertaking.

“It’s actually a logistical nightmare, but a nightmare I welcome,” says Deacon, from his tour bus somewhere in the middle of Massachusetts. “It has changed everything, from how I travel around to the venues we’re playing. In some cities, I just knew we wouldn’t fit in the room in question or that it wouldn’t make sense to do the show as an ensemble show. We don’t ask for much – all we need is a space which can fit 15 people and three drum kits”.

The idea for a full band show came on the back of making Bromst."I've been doing the solo show for a long time, even though it was never my intention to keep doing it so long," Deacon explains. "It was just the most sustainable thing to do for me. It's much easier to practice, tour, write and record when the band is just you – but it's also very limiting. It was really fun to do, and I'm glad I did it and I will probably do it again.

"But the new record is much more than me and a bunch of computers. With Bromst, I was able to go to a studio and bring in a bunch of musicians to play on certain parts. The album is a mixture of electronics and acoustics, and I thought it would be stupid to record all these great parts with other people and then just do the same tour. When it came to the tour, thankfully it made sense economically to bring along a band too." The jump between his last album, Spiderman of the Rings, and Bromstis considerable. The former was the one that introduced him to the world beyond Baltimore's Wham City arts collective and saw him having a whale of a time on the back of it. Spidermanwas giddy and goofy, an album with party anthems such as The Crystal Catand absurd, anthemic madcap thrills such as Wham City.

By contrast, Bromstis a more considered and muscular affair. The electronic pop smarts are still present and correct, but they've been sidelined somewhat as Deacon concentrates on testing his compositional limits. For every potential flight of fancy, there are also moments when Deacon reins in his more wayward intentions to concentrate on building and maintaining the overall buzz.

Deacon certainly sees a definite divide between the two albums.

"I did want to make something which had some more content and nourishment to it this time, I suppose, an album which was more meaningful than that sugar rush you got with the last one," he says. "I like to think of albums as food, and Spiderman of the Ringswas like hors d'oeuvre or a really tasty snack, while Bromst is more like a long savoury meal you can really relish."

WHEN IT COMES to the change in tone between releases, Deacon does not think this was necessarily a deliberate decision on his part.

“I suppose the change might have been an unconscious reaction to things over the last few years,” he says. “It does bother me when people are short-sighted and only see one aspect of the show. A lot of people thought I was just being goofy and mad and I suppose I wanted to show them there was more to me than what they might have got from the live show.

“Also, I’ve been feeling less attached to electronic sounds on their own and didn’t want to just focus on one type of sound or instrument when I was in the studio. But I haven’t gone completely over the top or changed direction,I’ve just added some stuff, like percussion, and went back into the more acoustic sounds I did when I started out.”

As a student at Purchase College’s Conservatory of Music in New York, Deacon specialised in electro-acoustic composition. After college, he moved to Baltimore to join a bunch of other Purchase graduates who were availing of cheap rents in the city.

That group became the Wham City collective, a focus for many in Baltimore’s art and music scenes. Its warehouse space was used for theatrical shows, video productions, club nights and dozens of other happenings.

“I didn’t have much of a plan,” says Deacon about those early days. “I thought I’d play shows and continue to compose, and maybe live with a group of artists and make visual art. Baltimore came up as an option and it ended up being one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. It’s a really small city, so it’s easy for people to get ideas out and circulating around the scene. It was the right place at the right time and gave me the time and space to work on what I wanted to do.”

He still lives in the city, but finds himself away from home more and more. That means tours abroad too, something which was never really on the cards to begin with.

"After I released Spiderman of the Rings, I started doing shows abroad and the reaction just blew my mind," he says. "I was not prepared for all that and it did change my life, especially how things have gone in Ireland. I remember my first show in Ireland at Crawdaddy in Dublin. For a start, there were people there, which was amazing. But these people also knew the words to the songs, they were singing along and they were yelling out song titles. It was just mad."

Dan Deacon plays Dublin’s Andrews Lane Theatre on June 3 and 4. Bromst is out now on Carpark Records; myspace.com/dandeacon