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**Dan Deacon - Mystic Familiar**
★★★★☆

Just when you thought Dan Deacon might disappear into the ether of experimental obscurity, the Baltimore-based electronic wizard returns with "Mystic Familiar," an album that feels like both a culmination and a rebirth. This isn't the hyperactive, seizure-inducing madness of his early warehouse shows, nor is it the orchestral grandeur of his recent film scores. Instead, Deacon has crafted something more intimate yet equally ambitious – a meditation on change, growth, and the strange comfort found in life's inevitable transformations.

The journey to "Mystic Familiar" reads like a fever dream of artistic evolution. Deacon spent the years leading up to this release scoring films, collaborating with orchestras, and generally expanding his sonic palette beyond the Casio-fueled chaos that first put him on the map. His work on documentaries and his increasing fascination with meditation and mindfulness seeped into his creative process, resulting in an album that breathes differently than anything in his catalog. Where once stood a man hunched over a table of circuit-bent toys, screaming into a microphone while hundreds of sweaty bodies writhed in warehouse spaces, now sits a more contemplative artist, still wielding electronics but with the patience of a monk and the wisdom of someone who's seen both sides of the mountain.

Musically, "Mystic Familiar" occupies a fascinating middle ground between ambient meditation music and Deacon's trademark maximalist tendencies. The album unfolds in two distinct halves, with the first four tracks forming a continuous suite that flows like a digital river through various emotional landscapes. Deacon's use of modular synthesizers creates textures that feel both alien and oddly comforting, like discovering that your childhood nightmares were actually trying to tuck you in.

The opening track, "Fell Into the Ocean," immediately establishes this new territory with its patient build and oceanic sweep. It's Deacon at his most zen, but there's still that underlying current of controlled chaos that prevents things from getting too precious. The way the track evolves over its eight-minute runtime demonstrates a newfound maturity in his compositional approach – this is music that understands the power of restraint.

"Become a Mountain" stands as perhaps the album's masterpiece, a towering 11-minute journey that justifies its ambitious title. The track builds with tectonic patience, layering crystalline arpeggios and distant vocal samples until it achieves something approaching transcendence. It's the kind of music that makes you want to stare at clouds for hours, but with enough rhythmic complexity to keep your brain engaged. Meanwhile, "Sat By a Tree" offers the album's most accessible moment, with its almost pop-like structure wrapped in Deacon's signature sonic sculptures.

The album's second half shifts gears slightly, with "Weeping Birch" providing a more percussive, almost tribal energy that recalls his earlier work while maintaining the album's overall contemplative mood. "Arp I: Wide Eyed" closes things out with a gorgeous piece of ambient minimalism that feels like watching the sunrise through a kaleidoscope – familiar yet completely transformed.

What makes "Mystic Familiar" so compelling is how it manages to feel both deeply personal and universally resonant. Deacon has always been interested in collective experiences – his legendary live shows were essentially group therapy sessions disguised as dance parties – but here he's found a way to create that sense of shared transcendence through purely recorded music. The album works equally well as background music for meditation and as foreground music for active listening, a rare achievement in the ambient realm.

The legacy of "Mystic Familiar" continues to unfold, but its immediate impact was clear: here was proof that electronic music could evolve beyond its established boundaries without losing its essential character. Deacon had successfully bridged the gap between his carnival barker past and his more introspective present, creating something that honored both phases of his career while pointing toward new possibilities.

In a musical landscape often obsessed with nostalgia and retro-fetishism, "Mystic Familiar" feels genuinely forward-thinking. It's an album that suggests electronic music's future might lie not in ever-more-complex production techniques, but in a return to the medium's essential capacity for creating new emotional spaces. Deacon has given us a roadmap for how to grow up without growing boring, and the journey is absolutely worth taking.