The do lab

“Becoming,” wrote Swiss-born modernist painter Paul Klee in 1914, “is superior to being.” That was a pretty solemn sentiment coming from a guy so given to stick figures, childlike pastels and whimsically skeletal little sketches with titles like “The Twittering Machine.” But it seems Klee’s wiser, quotable adulthood never quite managed to beat down a much earlier impulse: the raw, wide-eyed, gibbering glee he felt at the goofiness, sweet goofiness, he saw in nearly everything — including his own imminent end. (Just image-search “Death and Fire” for a quick and macabre giggle.)

“It’s not about who I’m going to be,” says Las Vegas singer/songwriter/keyboardist/DJ Shaun DeGraff nearly a century later. “It’s about what I’m going to do. I want to entertain. It’s about chasing a thing, as opposed to being a thing.”

And just like that, it becomes clear that Klee’s journey-over-destination preference is also his. As such, it’s no coincidence that DeGraff’s multimedia performance May 14 at Born and Raised Productions’ second annual 18b Music Festival carried the same sense of ambiguous wonderment, the same cool breaths of what we’ll call “traveler’s bliss” that made the Swiss artist’s work so welcoming, despite some fairly heavy content.

Case-in-point: “Stay the Same,” an original three-minute opus that came at the front end of DeGraff’s 18b evening set. Technically, it’s very nearly an a capella piece, but that’s easy to forget when the churchiest of gospel contemporary R&B melodies is laden with leviathan amounts of digital harmonizer and Auto-Tune processing. Like, waayy too much processing — an absolutely dehumanizing amount — resulting in a song that manages to leap over that vast and bleak no-man’s-land of “wow what a nauseating misuse of technology kill me now,” and land safely in the Kraftwerk-founded, OK Computer-blessed oasis of “ah glorious life improbably spawned from the synthetic components of life yes I’ll have more please.”

Those of us who heard “Stay the Same” unfurl at 18b (and watched it too — DeGraff’s video maven collaborator Jordan Moir has built a kind of kinetic color-blast sing-along accompaniment with lyrics) saw something pretty, mysterious, disciplined and rave-tinged that looked as though it just might be something like the future of live performance. Not many artists will attempt that jump, but it’s how you win big. And as any adult artist with an intact child sense knows, less is more, but more is everything, so adding five cups of chocolate chips to the batter just might be genius.

About those graphically enhanced lyrics: “When life just don’t feel the same/…when the lights go out and no one’s glad you came/Can you stay the same?” Like the initially suspicious Auto-Tune onslaught, there’s something deceptively crafty going on here.

“I want to make the technology friendly to people who are afraid of it,” says DeGraff. “Make it appealing, not frightening. I want to give it as much emotional flavor as I can. With [the video lyrics on] ‘Stay the Same,’ I wanted to make sure everyone knows what’s being said here. Whether you’re in or out of the spotlight … whatever happens … can you still tap in and be yourself? It’s more of an honest question than a statement about anything.”

Still, he’s stylistically all over the place, and his artistic development has always meant not quite staying the same. Boulder City-born DeGraff toured Japan with a funk band, took some hard knocks, then eventually slipped into sloth until a nightmare of his own air crash death (far less bubbly than Paul Klee’s vision) got him off the couch and into some much needed self-reflection. By 2006, he was entertaining troops in war-torn Bosnia and Sarajevo. After that came two years worth of “Best Modern Rock Album” accolades from Just Plain Folks’ grassroots music organization (for the self-released In My Room and Music for Life). 2009 brought a self-booked West Coast tour, where DeGraff played alongside Eels, DJ Shadow, Regina Spektor and Stevie Wonder.

Things have been relatively quiet of late — DeGraff works nights as half of a dueling pianos show at New York New York and Harrah’s casinos — though he says he’ll keep popping up at local venues and happenings like Born and Raised Productions’ Painters and Poets Jam at the downtown’s Bar+Bistro at the Arts Factory, where he and his keyboard recently added some sonic backdrop to the work of poets and spoken word artists with house jam band Interzone.

“[Being a solo artist] can be a great thing,” he says, “but I’ll say I do sometimes miss jamming with other people like that. That was so much fun! It’s a puzzle … like, ‘Yeah, this is working,” or “No, we’re not giving quite the right vibe for this [poet]. ”

And if becoming a sonic colorist is one of those things DeGraff is “chasing” these days — as opposed to “being” — who knows, he may well find himself visited by the same revelation that found Paul Klee, who eventually announced, “Color possesses me. I don’t have to pursue it. It will pursue me always, I know it.”

For more information visit www.shaundegraff.com.