For the second FRICTION party at Mercury Lounge, the line-up featured Dan Deacon, Ponytail, and Meneguar — bands that you would normally seen in a hot, musty, and usually stageless warehouse, loft, or basement across the water in Brooklyn (For a side note, see this article in the NYT about far-off Brooklyn venues).

However, Dan Deacon recreated that ambiance by setting up his keyboard and other gizmos, including a trippy green skull, on the floor and by turning off the AC. Dan felt a little bad about his odd request to generate stuffiness in the room, so he started the show by leading the crowd with a few cheers of "Air conditioning is appropriate!" One thing I learned from Dan at that show is you can pretty much turn any awkward situation around with a cheer. When his CD player ran out of juice, stopping the show momentarily, he had the whole room rally with the chant "The batteries are dead! The batteries are dead!" Later, we all recited a long-winded apology to his friend, in the same fashion as your favorite religious creed, for the mysterious disappearance in another friend's car of the Animatrix bonus disc. The entire show could have been a call and response lead by Dan Deacon and it would have been just as entertaining.

Dan also insisted upon a dance circle for one song with people tagging in and out. For his 12-minute epic "Wham City," he passed around lyric sheets and the crowd did their best to sing along. Usually at a one-person show with few live instruments, the performance hinges on their personality, sometimes it even feels a little like stand-up comedy. But Dan Deacon somehow made the show about the audience with him as their muse.

Stereogum and of course Crackers United were also there.