Jimmy Joe Roche and Dan Deacon were in Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands, a while back where they made a film titled after the historic Dutch town. It’s completely hilarious, surreal, and absurd, but it somehow captures something about the pop-saturated, neon apocalypse a lot of us have in mind.

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Noise-dance band Extreme Animals and neon cultural detritus art collective, Paperrad, both feature my friend and huge inspiration, Jacob Ciocci. His style is heavily borrowed by lots of visual artists and musicians, such as Dan Deacon.

Dan Deacon has somehow managed to become a divisive figure without actually doing or saying anything controversial. Apparently, the cartoon voices, his psychotically happy and celebratory music, his big glasses, his physique, his whole vibe pisses off a lot of people. Good. That’s what punk rock was all about.

Dan may be becoming a big celebrity, but he’s still just Dan in Baltimore, one of the many people making shit happen for themselves, a guy who very much is still involved in what’s going on around here. He’s into what he’s doing, and that’s what a lot of the people who leave nasty comments online don’t seem to understand.

Anyway, the big news lately is that Dan has been selected by none other than Francis Ford Coppola to compose the score for the legendary director’s next film, Twixt Now and Sunrise, which will star Val Kilmer and Bruce Dern. Sounds like it could be really rad, even if it’s really goofy. Go Dan.

It’s been said recently that it’s amazing how in a town where the dominant music scene is very loud, a quiet band can still be heard. But Baltimore has always had loads of lower-key music, and while our ears may still be ringing from Whartscape, Small Sur hasn’t exactly been a sleeper act.

The folk/pop project fronted by singer-songwriter Bob Keal will obviously garner comparisons to Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, but there’s distinctly less pathos in Keal’s songwriting. That’s not to say it’s just mellow times, there’s almost a feverishly spiritual hum throughout the band’s debut, We Live in Houses Made of Wood (check out the haunting saw solo on The Kelp).

The band’s name is an allusion to an area along the central Californian coast, but for those of us who have floated around at the Prettyboy Reservoir or gotten lost at midnight in the woods at Patapsco State Park, Keal is singing our language too. Baltimore is, if nothing else, a city of extreme contrasts, where gang violence and urban decay exists next to a cross-demographic cultural revival and some of the most beautiful countryside in the nation. It only makes sense that for every Dan Deacon and MullyMan, there’s a Wye Oak or a Small Sur.

One of Dan Deacon’s partners in crime is video/performance artist Jimmy Joe Roche. I saw one of Roche’s latest videos, Gather Round, this weekend at the Transmodern Festival, which consisted of the artist animatedly ‘preaching’ in front of a green screen background that shifted between color-saturated images of mountains, forests, and various other psychedelia. Though Roche seems to epitomize Baltimore at the moment with his crypto-hippie, neon-colored, absurdist mock-Americana, I have to wonder what all the fuss is about. I appreciate this latest iteration of the DIY spirit, but I get tired of the ‘just kidding’ vibe that guys like Roche and Deacon give off.

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I was introduced to Baltimore artist Erin Womack’s work via her incredible, paper-mache masks. These masks happened to be on display this past weekend on the last day of the Transmodern Festival, the poster for which Womack also designed. Womack’s work stands apart from the day-glo spazz aesthetic the minions of Dan Deacon and company go nuts over in this city. Dark without being gothic, drawing from nature and natural materials without being hippy-dippy, Womack creates eerie drawings, bulb-headed masks, installations, and Super-8 films of the creatures that inhabited her childhood imagination.