Brian Dewan

Brian Dewan emerges as an autonomous creative force who fuses playful heritage with irreverent wit across ventures that merge music, visual art, and furniture construction. Residing in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood, he performs on an array of eccentric instruments—autoharp, accordion, Moog, theremin, guitar, and organ—yet his defining device remains the electric zither he assembled in 1989 from guitar and harpsichord fragments. Fitted with eight humbucker pickups and 88 strings, the instrument evokes an oversized autoharp and anchors his experimental yet accessible folk-rock idiom.

Dewan has composed and performed for the Blue Man Group while joining forces with the Sixths, Drink Me, Brian Woodbury, Laura Cantrell, and especially his cousin Leon Dewan on Dewanatron, the enterprise built around their custom cabinetry synthesizers. Repeated engagements with They Might Be Giants have included touring, designing artwork for Lincoln and the Miscellaneous T singles collection, contributing vocals to Apollo 18 snippets, and issuing two singles on John Flansburgh’s Hello CD series.

Amid these partnerships he issued his first album, Brian Dewan Tells the Story, in 1993, then The Operating Theatre in 1998; Instinct Records re-released the latter in 2001. In 2007 Dewan presented Words of Wisdom, a collection drawn from yard-sale records, obsolete textbooks, and assorted basements and attics, inaugurating his twice-yearly Humanitarium series on the Eschatone label.

As a graphic artist he supplied imagery for David Byrne’s Uh-Oh, Neutral Milk Hotel’s In the Aeroplane Over the Sea, and the Music Tapes’ First Imaginary Symphony for Nomad. He also produces I-Can-See Filmstrips that lampoon the authoritarian tone of educational films, adding a multimedia layer to his performances. Additional endeavors encompass an eccentric spot for MTV’s M2 channel, music written for Sesame Street, and membership in the Raymond Scott Orchestra.