DIRTY PROJECTORS
Interview by Marisa Brickman
Images by Andreas Kohler

A rock opera dedicated to Don Henly (Getty Address). A concept album based on Black Flag’s Damaged recreated from memory (Rise Above). A student at Yale. A resident of Portland, Providence, Baltimore and now Brooklyn. A big fan of Black Dice.
I have to say, I wasn’t sure what to expect when I went to meet David Longstreth (the man who is Dirty Projectors), but I had some pretty strong preconceptions. Clever. Talented. Inventive. Check. Ironic. Hmm, maybe a little. Pretentious. Well, no, not really. Serious. Yes, but in a good way. Vegan. Not sure but quite likely. Funny. It actually wasn’t on the initial list, but yeah.
Dirty Projectors make music that is occasionally a bit hard on the ear, but only because the song structures,
harmonies and compositions are not what most are probably used to hearing. David never writes on a computer and often uses several layers of instruments and vocals to create his tracks – fancying himself more a classical composer than an indie musician.
We met up before a gig at Cargo club in London and I noticed he’d swapped out the lumberjack shirt and moustache from 2005 for a red hoodie and clean-shaven face. After breaking the ice a bit and bro-ing down about Brooklyn, he let his guard down enough to have a real exchange, but he definitely didn’t seem to be that bothered.

I have a real interest in composing and orchestras – we just went to go see an orchestra last Friday conducted by Glenn Branca.
Which one was it? Hallucination City?

Yeah, the one with 100 electric guitars.
I was actually in the original recording of that, well the aborted recording.

You have written pieces of music that was more along the lines of classical composing.
Well, I taught myself how to orchestrate.

How does that work? Can you tell me how you do that?
How to orchestrate?

Well, how you compose work for an orchestra. I mean it’s not like you sit at a computer and write each part and then layer them over each other to hear what it sounds like do you? You’d think that good composers just hear all the instruments playing in their head?
Yeah, that’s kind of true. I write everything on the guitar for the most part and then I just kind of elaborate it and figure out how I want to color it. The only way to learn about colors is to look at the past and see how people did it before. For a little while, I was super into doing that. I just kind of absorbed it. You can do it on
a computer. That happens. There is software. A lot of kids my age who are super into new music and that kind of bullshit--that’s what they do. They just sit in front of a computer and write. I’ve tried it, but I just find that compositions that way have this stiffness and this feeling of –

Cleanliness maybe?
Yeah, cleanliness and it doesn’t sound like inspiration. When something’s real and something’s felt and you
can tell the person was thinking about it as they made it – you can hear that. I think a lot of that computer-notated music doesn’t sound like that.

How do you go about recording?
Recording is a different thing. That’s kind of a funny question. I love to get super involved in recording and think about recording just as its own thing completely divorced from any kind of live sound. That’s a different thing, you kind of have to listen and respond. That’s kind of like painting.

A lot of your projects have had a visual component – like your film project Getty Address? I read about it on some blog and it was saying that a series of animations turned into a film project. Do you approach making music like making art?
That’s one of the things about music is how variegated it is. You can think about music as art or you can think of it as text or as science.

Do you look at what you do as an entire package with its own aesthetic?
More or less. I think depending on which set of songs and which work it is, its different. Getty Address was very, very visual. It was very much about the interaction of these certain emblems with this plotline. Absent a formal staging, I really thought of that as an opera in making it. Rise Above is kind of less so. If there’s an apparatus there, it’s more of a concept.

Rise Above is definitely the most tuneful and most um, songlike than the other stuff you recorded.
Right on. That’s good.

The most accessible.
That’s awesome that you see it that way. That’s good.

I know well, now that I don’t live in NYC, I feel like I’m losing touch with what’s going on there. So I got online and starting downloading and –
[Laughing] Getting on the blogs and shit.

Totally. And after hearing a bunch of your music – Rise Above is definitely the most accessible. Some of your stuff is just weird!
[Laughing] With that, I was listening to a lot of FM radio and getting inspired.

Do you believe in guilty pleasures?
Not really, I, uh, don’t think pleasures should come with guilt [laughs].

If you look at some of the stuff you put on your list for Pitchfork or the idea that Getty Address is an ode to Don Henley--
What was on that list? Oh, you talkin’ ‘bout Beyonce? That’s just real.

[Laughing] Can you tell me how you feel about Beyonce? People are a bit divided on how they feel about her. I mean, do you like her? Do you think she’s talented?
Beyonce’s music is amazing. I love her persona. I don’t know how much of it is a construction or how much of it is really her, but I’m inclined to think that it really is her because it resonates so deeply and truly; this character of a woman who is alienated by her excellence.

And the only man who is right for her is Jay-Z.
See, I don’t believe that. I think you listen to B’Day and I think you think this is not what she needs.

[Laughing] She doesn’t need the Jiggaman.
[Laughs] That’s the thing. I don’t know if she does. I’m thinking about a song, “Me Myself And I”. A lot of it is her being indignant at her man for mistreating her; blah, blah, blah but I think the deeper thing with her is the woman who is such a good singer and so creative and so prolific and so beautiful; all of these things. But she has no friends. In “Me Myself And I” she’s singing to herself, ‘Ladies if you feel me, can you sing it out?’ And you just imagine a silent room when she says that. But you know, it’s kind of like this odd perfection.

In listening to a lot of FM Radio –
What I mean by that; that would imply some level of disdain for the pleasure of FM Radio. I didn’t mean that. I meant structurally Rise Above, for me is the thing that would be most in the step of direction to accessibility from the older stuff that I made because it is verse chorus verse chorus. It’s definitely the closest thing to being sing-a-long than anything else we’ve done.