We live! We die! We live again! There's something remarkably pointed about the War Boys' rallying cry from Mad Max: Fury Road. Their goal was Valhalla, sat at the table of a megalomaniac hopped up on guzzoline, but nevertheless their bodies would continue to serve the land as tasty snacks for all the worms and critters.
Gifted experimentalist Dan Deacon won't be speeding across apocalyptic deserts anytime soon, but he is thinking about our earthly passage of time. Surrounded by discarded cheese curls and cupcakes — not to mention several creepy crawlies — actor and comedian Aparna Nancherla stars as a decomposing corpse in the video for "Sat by a Tree," the first single off Deacon's forthcoming Mystic Familiar. After a couple of soundtrack scores and some assists for other artists, this is Deacon's first album all his own since 2015.
"A lot of my work focuses on death and it's pretty upbeat music, most of the time," Deacon explains.
As flesh-eating beetles and maggots swarm Nancherla's character rotting to bones, Deacon's whiz-bang bleeps and ecstatic melodics expand as the process of putrefaction comes full circle — the video ends "as a prequel to the life of a plant rather than the death of the person in the video," Deacon offers. We live! We die! We live again!
Mystic Familiar comes out Jan 31 on Domino Records (physical, digital).
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