Dan Deacon has released a video for his new track “When I Was Done Dying”, an extraordinarily animated accompaniment to the song from his recently released Gliss Riffer LP. A pseudo lyrical follow-along, the video creates a distinct universe in which the song takes place, something like the ontological child of Katamari and Adventure Time. Created with the help of nine different animators, there is almost nothing unremarkable in the 4:20(!) duration of the video, throughout which colors and shapes move as freely as Deacons’ arrangements. There is a beautiful symmetry between the logical insanity of the video and Deacon’s music, especially when considering the large part of his career he has spent making songs that seamlessly slip between sounding druggy and dancey; when in the latter half of the video KOKOFREAKBEAN’s animation takes its turn, it appears as a simulacrum of a bad trip at the same time that Deacon’s looped chants reach their bouncy climax.
It is remarkably rare for a video accompaniment to a song drastically change the listening experience of a song, but in this case there is simply no unseeing. Even while listening to “When I Was Done Dying” without watching the video, its near impossible to avoid the elastic imagery popping up in my (and I suspect everyone else’s) mind. This is a testament to the video and song both that at this point it seems that neither could exist without the other.
