Dirty Projectors Through the Years: A Spectrum of Sound, But a Singular Vision

Photo: Jason Frank Rothenberg

Published Aug 29, 2018

There's no easy way to describe Dirty Projectors

Indie rock, R&B, punk, West African music, glitch — no single genre, song or even album can encapsulate the totality of stylistic fusions nomadic singer, guitarist and sole consistent member David Longstreth has in play at any one time. Even their lineup remains an ever-shifting beast, and with it, the band's sound. As New York magazine put it in 2009, since he started releasing his lo-fi home recordings for public consumption, the Dirty Projectors name has

stood for whatever music David Longstreth was making, wherever he happened to be, with whoever was at arm's length

The one constant across the band's decade-and-a-half in existence is Longstreth's willingness to reinvent it. "We're not one of these bands that does one thing sublimely well over and over and over again," he told Pitchfork in 2012. "It's about taking risks, and with all the glory and hideous failure that that entails." With the Dirty Projector's latest reinvention, Lamp Lit Prose , due July 13, we take a look back at the iconoclastic career of David Longstreth.

the unhinged, half-formed kind who sometimes overconceives and overexecutes (see Phil Elvrum)."

After playing a solo gig at a San Diego ice cream parlour, he meets 22-year-old singer Amber Coffman. Speaking with the San Diego Union Tribune in 2009, she'll call the show an "artistic epiphany." Another earlier admirer is future Dirty Projector touring player and Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig, who, in what he says is his only published music review, describes the record as "Dave Longstreth making his own fucked-up version of American music."

as dour and gray as the record may occasionally get, it's impossible to be sullen by music so boundlessly visceral."

Koenig, Phosphorescent's Matthew Houck and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles.

Longstreth latches onto a new, left-field project: recreating the sensation of listening to Black Flag's classic LP Damaged — a song-for-song tribute, even though he hadn't listened to the original in over a decade. He rehearses the core group of himself, Coffman, Baldwin and drummer Brian McOmber incessantly. "I never worked on anything so hard in my life," Coffman tells New York. They record in the basement of their house — credited as the Flavorzone — with Grizzly Bear's Chris Taylor producing, in December and January.

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a musical suite and perform it at a benefit concert for the Housing Works non-profit organization in Manhattan.

Longstreth even writes a song each for Coffman and Deradoorian to sing lead. "Bitte Orca was about making an emblem of the touring band that we had become, and creating this caricature out of our individual personas," he'll tell Pitchfork in 2012.

has an almost psychic ability to write for other voices" Björk will tell The Guardian in 2012.

I was building fires in the wood stove and using New York Times papers from 1994 as kindling," he tells Spin. In June, the rest of the band joins him for a week — the first time they've seen each other in months. They spend the rest of the year recording some of his 50 new songs in fits and starts, in a more live-off-the-floor manner than usual. Notably absent is Deradoorian, who amicably bows out.

You could call it more basic and conventional, but that's the challenge: If I just focus on the most straight-up shit, is there something there, or is it just a brightly coloured cloud? To me, it feels like a risk to have done that," he tells Pitchfork.

2014

It was a good thing for our friendship, to reverse the roles we'd played in Dirty Projectors," he'll tell The New York Times two years later. The album is finished by the end of 2015 and the two stop speaking for an undisclosed reason.

Longstreth is invited to a musical incubator session at Kanye West's Los Angeles mansion, along with French Montana and the Weeknd. West then invites him, Koenig, Rhymefest and Big Sean to a rented mansion in Mexico owned by Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis, where West is working on what will become The Life of Pablo. Longstreth writes the organ part used as the bridge on "FourFiveSeconds," a song featuring Paul McCartney that West gives to Rihanna.

The album doesn't aim to do anything more than just make a series of emotional states or worlds," he tells Exclaim!, while telling The New York Times that the record is "not a journal."

Abandoning Swing Lo Magellan's more pastoral musical palette, the beat-heavy album updates the cut-and-paste aesthetic of The Getty Address. Though guitars appear on almost half the record's songs, for the most part they are not the musical driving force

I consider it a loss to no longer be involved with Dirty Projectors, but ultimately walking away was the only healthy choice for me."

Dirty Projectors play "Cool Your Heart" on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon in May, but do not tour; they play only two shows in support of the new record.