Last Halloween at Beauty Bar’s Monday-night variety show, Salonathon, I happened to see a synth-pop group called Daan—a trio of svelte gay men who on this particular evening were decked out S&M style, in black hot pants, leather chest harnesses, chains, and studded codpieces. The moment they hit the stage they launched into a tightly choreographed dance that would’ve made a boy band blush—between the lascivious petting and pelvic thrusting, two members took turns literally picking up the third by the crotch. The front man made a beeline for the crowd, mike in hand, slinking smoothly through the crowd and between the rows of benches, and as he went he grabbed glasses of beer from strangers’ hands and downed them—sometimes between his lines, sometimes when he was obviously supposed to be singing.
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During a show devoted to robot fetishes, one member attached “female” pieces of PVC pipe to his body with medical tape, and the other two screwed the “male” pieces into the sockets; later in the production someone tried to connect a dryer-vent hose he was wearing on his arm to one of his bandmates’ dicks. For a 2010 Valentine’s Day gig at Boystown bar Cocktail, one member played a butcher who rips out his bandmates’ hearts—made of sponge and hidden under the men’s shirts in ziplock bags, the hearts were soaked in stage blood, waiting to be wrung out. The band earned a reputation fast, and landed gigs opening for glammy Toronto synth-pop act Diamond Rings and Brazilian electronic rockers CSS.
Another thing I didn’t know last Halloween was that Daan would only put on two more big productions before going on hiatus in early 2012. But now they’re back, reinvented as Baathhaus—the first show for their new incarnation, which adds a live drummer, is this Friday at the Empty Bottle.
Foley also has a theater background—he studied performance in college—but he hadn’t stuck with it, and he felt awkward at Mary’s Attic. He even told the audience. “I’d never met him,” Andrews says. “And he was up there onstage by himself and he was so adorable.”
“And you thought I was,” Young says. “So I was like, ‘OK, let’s just do it for the show,’ and then people lost their tits, as they say in the industry.”
At first Foley focused on music, Andrews on choreography, and Young on direction, but as Daan evolved those roles blurred. The majority of the band’s recordings (which they posted on Soundcloud) used multiple tracks of Foley’s vocals, rather than singing from all three like the live show, and he handled most of the instruments too. By the middle of 2011, though, that began to change. Andrews says the turning point came when he contributed lyrics to “Cave Song,” a sprawling trance number. “That song was one of our first that really started to come from all three of us,” he says.
In early September they recruited Hozeny as a full-time member, and since then they’ve been practicing three times a week, learning how to perform material that they previously used only as canned tracks. “That is something we’ve never done before,” Andrews says. “It feels very vulnerable and very kind of exactly what we’re trying to do—like, push ourselves in a sort of uncomfortable spot to see what comes out of that.” According to Hozeny, it’s going well. “I’ve been really surprised by how much the deconstruction process has then led to a more organic thing,” he says.
Fri 10/26, 10 PM, Empty Bottle, $12, 21+.
