New York’s Long Island is the original American suburb, the model for every middle-class community where the houses all look alike and the children can’t wait to escape. Like most American kids his age, Long Island native Dan Deacon grew up watching too much television—and fit, for a while at least, the profile of a particularly American type: the funny fat kid with a keen understanding of pop culture.

Now 26, Deacon says it’s been almost 15 years since he watched TV with any regularity, but that medium’s influence on his music remains powerful. The songs on his Spiderman of the Rings—one of Pitchfork’s top 50 albums of 2007—evoke a kind of manic channel-surfing experience for the mind’s eye, warped synthetic shapes in rainbow colours racing along at seizure-inducing speeds. Deacon’s music is no halfway proposition; either you immerse yourself in its brutality or you leave the room.

“To say the music is assaulting is not right, because that carries a negative connotation,” argues Deacon, reached on tour in New Orleans. “It’s just very intense. We’re trying to create an all-encompassing sensory overload when we play live, and we have two drummers and two PAs and the screen for visuals as large as we can make it. We’re very much focused on maximalism, but we also want the experience to be a positive one.”

The method to Deacon’s madness is born of his background in noisy indie bands and his master’s degree in electroacoustic composition. After university, the New Yorker decamped with a half-dozen friends to Baltimore, where the rents are low and the disused buildings are many. The group eventually moved into a warehouse and christened it Wham City, a site for concerts, movie screenings, and theatrical performances. Thanks to Deacon’s growing notoriety, Wham City has become a crucial node in North America’s DIY arts community.

“It’s exciting,” he says. “It’s not like we created this underground arts world, but we’re helping to promote it.”

Wham City’s most recent artifact is Ultimate Reality, a movie by video artist Jimmy Joe Roche. The piece—available on DVD—is a paradigmatic trash film, a psychedelic montage of scenes from Arnold Schwarzenegger movies set to a frenetic electronic score by Deacon. On his current tour, the producer-singer is screening the movie before his sets, which find him setting his equipment up on the dance floor, not on-stage, and handing out lyric sheets to the crowd to incite a messy sing-along.

As a growing celebrity in the indie-pop world, Deacon is facing a strange state of affairs: the better known he becomes, the harder it will be to call him an outsider artist. For now, that prospect doesn’t seem to bother him at all.

“When it came time to decide whether I would start doing interviews and play these established club venues, I knew it would change the whole structure of being a DIY artist,” he offers. “Ultimately, it came down to whether it would help me or hinder me as an artist. If I didn’t think it was helping me, then I wouldn’t be doing it.”

Dan Deacon plays Richard’s on Richards on Monday (January 21).