{"id":1250076,"date":"2025-03-25T12:33:30","date_gmt":"2025-03-25T12:33:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/?p=1250076"},"modified":"2025-03-25T12:33:30","modified_gmt":"2025-03-25T12:33:30","slug":"dirty-projectors-creates-a-symphony-for-a-burning-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/dirty-projectors-creates-a-symphony-for-a-burning-world\/","title":{"rendered":"Dirty Projectors Creates a Symphony for a Burning World"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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In 2020, California was swept with some of the worst wildfires in its history. One morning in September, David Longstreth woke up at his home in Los Angeles to find the sky glutted with smoke. His wife, Teresa Eggers, was three months pregnant, and the couple decided to book a last-minute trip to visit a friend in Alaska. The Burbank airport was deserted. They boarded their flight wearing masks and plastic face shields, and discovered that they had the plane nearly to themselves. The irony of burning more carbon to escape the consequences of burning too much carbon wasn\u2019t lost on them. When they got to Juneau, the landscape was cool and lush, and the air was clear. \u201cThe idea of the forests as the Earth\u2019s lungs, it felt literal,\u201d Longstreth recalled. \u201cWhat an exhalation for us.\u201d It was the end of the salmon run, and the streams were thick with decomposing carcasses; other animals had set upon them, an interspecies feast. Bald eagles and red-tailed hawks stood sentry on lampposts. \u201cThe assertiveness of nature felt different,\u201d he said. \u201cThe number of birds in the sky, in the trees\u2014just teeming life everywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Longstreth is a musician, composer, and producer, best known for his work under the band name Dirty Projectors. The group, which he started as a college student, was a paragon of the Obama-era indie-rock ecosystem. \u201cIs there a 23-year-old alive in northern Brooklyn who\u2019s not making music right now?\u201d New York<\/em> magazine asked in 2009. \u201cWhat are they all after? It could be that they want to be David Longstreth.\u201d He has collaborated with Joanna Newsom, Solange Knowles, Major Lazer, and David Byrne. Bj\u00f6rk, who released an EP with Dirty Projectors in 2010, called Longstreth an \u201cidiosyncratic talent,\u201d and told me that he is \u201cpsychic in his way of writing melodies for other singers.\u201d A classically trained musician, he has a complicated harmonic language and an incredible ear for a hook. His work draws on jazz, folk, pop, classical, West African guitar music, and Slavic choral traditions: chaos on paper, but it works. \u201cThere\u2019s lots of tricky musical stuff going on, like bars and measures in odd time signatures,\u201d Byrne told me. \u201cThese things contribute to the music sounding familiar but a little off-kilter.\u201d One of Longstreth\u2019s trademarks is treating production like an element of orchestration; another is his voice, a folkie, feral tenor that he pushes until it cracks. Hrishikesh Hirway, a musician and the host of the podcast \u201cSong Exploder,\u201d said, \u201cI don\u2019t understand how his brain works. With other musicians, it\u2019s my job to try and get deeper into their process\u2014it\u2019s a matter of turning up the lights. With Dave, I feel like I\u2019m walking into a pitch-black room.\u201d<\/p>\n

At forty-three, Longstreth is tall, left-handed, handsome, and creaturely. He scrunches into chairs with his legs folded, and drives his car in a relaxed, almost reclined posture. Lately, he has worn his dark hair short and kept an articulated mustache. He tends to dress in loose earth tones, vintage sweaters, and chore jackets. In conversation, he is sincere and thoughtful, with the open, generous demeanor more typical of someone who has recently taken a heroic dose of mushrooms. The pleasantness of his company sits unsteadily beside his reputation for being, at times, hard-driving, harsh, and unempathetic. People in his orbit repeatedly described him to me as \u201cintense,\u201d with varying degrees of affection and animus. \u201cDave is really funny, he\u2019s devilishly smart\u2014what a smiley, loving guy,\u201d Katy Davidson, who performs as Dear Nora, said. \u201cUnderneath that, there can sometimes be turmoil and tension. Those things show up in the music. He\u2019ll take you to a beautiful place, but there will be an edge to it.\u201d Lucy Greene, a friend of Longstreth\u2019s from high school and college, described him as \u201cprofoundly loyal\u201d and sensitive to others\u2019 struggles. \u201cIf you had his admiration, it could launch a thousand ships,\u201d she said. \u201cBut he also had the capacity to lethally wound people\u2014to injure people in a deep, deep place. If we were to try to connect it to the artistry, I would say he really feels the full range of emotions. Some of his songs are exquisitely beautiful. It\u2019s very plaintive, and it gets excruciating.\u201d<\/p>\n

In 2021, not long after the fires, Longstreth began working on \u201cSong of the Earth,\u201d a song cycle inspired by Mahler\u2019s \u201cDas Lied von der Erde,\u201d from 1908. He had long admired Mahler\u2019s symphony for its expansiveness and audacity. \u201cThe idea of somehow capturing an experience of Earth, human or otherwise, in a song, seemed very grandiose,\u201d he said. We were on a walk, squinting against the haze. \u201cBut it also seemed sort of magical.\u201d Longstreth\u2019s \u201cSong of the Earth,\u201d which will be released as an album in early April, weaves the usual elements of Dirty Projectors\u2014guitar, drums, and four voices, including Longstreth\u2019s\u2014through textured orchestral music performed by the chamber group Stargaze. (The piece was developed for the group.) It is moving and unusual. Andr\u00e9 de Ridder, the conductor of Stargaze, told me that the work has \u201ca sense of space, a sense of longing, a sense of epic journey, a sense of urgency.\u201d Longstreth thinks of it as \u201clandscape music,\u201d in contrast to portrait-oriented songs about people: \u201cmusic that feels like the natural world, and feels tilted on its side, like a landscape orientation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Two-thirds of the way through the album is a song called \u201cUninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One\u201d: a near-verbatim setting of the first paragraph of David Wallace-Wells\u2019s best-selling 2019 book about climate change, \u201cThe Uninhabitable Earth.\u201d Longstreth had picked it up on a whim at Newark airport. He read the first page with a sense of \u201cgiddy disbelief\u201d: after decades of decorous scientific communication about global warming, Wallace-Wells leaned into truth and terror. \u201cI felt like I had just been slapped,\u201d Longstreth said. At one point, trying to convey the song\u2019s intended energy, he played me the opening to Nirvana\u2019s \u201cFloyd the Barber,\u201d then pulled up photographs of a Butoh performance. This was inscrutable. \u201cThere\u2019s irony, there\u2019s humor,\u201d he explained. \u201cIt\u2019s wearing a mask to tell the universal truth.\u201d In the book, he said, Wallace-Wells \u201cgets a little futurist Nostradamus on it,\u201d and predicts that, one day, there may not be art about climate change: everything will just be embedded with the emotional texture of life during environmental collapse. \u201cHe presents it as far off, but I feel like we\u2019re already there,\u201d Longstreth said. \u201cThe simultaneous awareness of and inability to acknowledge our destruction of the planet could be the room tone of all twenty-first-century testimony.\u201d All songs were climate songs; all paintings were climate paintings. He pointed to \u201cTwisters,\u201d the recent tornado film, and \u201cThe Meg,\u201d a 2018 movie about ancient, ferocious, enormous sharks. Rihanna\u2019s \u201cUmbrella\u201d was a climate song, he suggested, in the same way that \u201cWhite Christmas\u201d was a Second World War song. \u201cThis already is our art,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd \u2018Song of the Earth\u2019 is a very pastoral contribution to that conversation.\u201d<\/p>\n

Longstreth was raised in Southbury, Connecticut. His mother, Carolyn, was an assistant district attorney for the state, and his father, John, left a career at a community bank to study at the Yale School of Forestry, eventually becoming the director of a local Audubon center. The pair, Stanford graduates involved in the back-to-the-land movement, were birders with a D.I.Y. sensibility. They kept a vegetable garden, raised sheep and chickens, and worked constantly on their eighteenth-century home. During one renovation, they pulled up a floorboard in the entryway and found a pewter coin from the seventeen-hundreds, commemorating the founding of the country. The family had an extensive record collection, which was Longstreth\u2019s primary exposure to music. \u201cI know now that there was a hardcore scene in Connecticut, but we were totally disconnected from that,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n

In 1995, Longstreth, then thirteen, taught three of his friends to play drums, bass, and guitar, and started a band called Cartesian Divers. \u201cHe wanted to be in a band, he didn\u2019t know any musicians, so he made musicians,\u201d Peter Sobieraj, a childhood friend who played bass in the group, said. \u201cThere were times we were practicing twelve hours a day.\u201d That year, Longstreth\u2019s brother, Jake, went off to college, leaving behind a TASCAM<\/em> 424 Portastudio, and Longstreth began experimenting with multitrack recording. \u201cThe tapes were amazing, just the layering,\u201d Jake, now a painter in Los Angeles, said. \u201cThey were crudely played, but the ideas were so rich.\u201d In the tenth grade, Longstreth transferred from the local public high school to Phillips Academy, a private boarding school in Andover, Massachusetts. \u201cIt\u2019s almost hard to talk about how sincere I felt about studying and learning and the value of knowledge, the reliability of history,\u201d he said. \u201cI just ate it all up.\u201d<\/p>\n

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He went to Yale, but felt an immediate aversion to it. \u201cOh, this is where the children of the very wealthy learn to trade in the signs and signals of power,\u201d he recalled thinking. Lonely and alienated, he dropped out after two years, and crashed with Jake in Portland, Oregon. He had begun releasing music as Dirty Projectors, and, using MySpace, booked himself a national tour, playing \u201cice-cream shops, people\u2019s apartments, moms\u2019 basements.\u201d The following semester, under pressure from his parents, he grudgingly returned to Yale, where he studied composition. To make money, and \u201cin a slightly Charlie Kaufman-esque spirit,\u201d he worked part time for Domino\u2019s. (\u201cThe only weird part was delivering pizza to Yale,\u201d he said.) The composer Missy Mazzoli, a graduate student at the time, recalled visiting his apartment and finding the floor covered in sheet music. \u201cThere was an obsession there, and a single-minded focus, which I was always really jealous of,\u201d she said. \u201cI thought, This is someone who feels he can, or has to, tune the world out_._\u201d Longstreth regularly performed in Brooklyn, where a passionate, scrappy indie-rock scene had taken root. Bands played in warehouses, basements, and unmarked, illegal venues on the Williamsburg waterfront. There was a sense of community; the stakes felt low, and the creativity was high. \u201cFive-dollar cover, P.B.R. in a bucket behind a folding table, one of the bands, maybe in a biodiesel school bus, from DeKalb, Illinois\u2014and they have a saxophone player,\u201d he recalled. It was \u201can actual D.I.Y. subculture incongruously blooming beneath the scaffolds of rapid gentrification.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yale\u2019s music program leans heavily on the classical canon. Longstreth\u2019s senior thesis, an opera based on the testimonies of the disciples of the Heaven\u2019s Gate cult, for which he\u2019d designed an original notation system, received a D. But by then he had put out five full-length albums, and was getting attention in the music press. One review, published by Pitchfork<\/em> in 2004, described him as \u201ca nobrow genius, who claims to find similar solaces in the work of Beethoven, Wagner, Zeppelin and Timberlake.\u201d After graduation, he didn\u2019t want to move to New York. \u201cIt was too hard to live in big cities, and the music you would make was safe, or social, or functional in that way,\u201d he said. \u201cIt wasn\u2019t the product of idle experimentation, daydreaming, hours of unhurried exploration.\u201d He wound up in Brooklyn anyway.<\/p>\n

In 2006, Longstreth met Amber Coffman, a San Diego-based singer and guitarist. He told me, \u201cShe was this soulful, savant shredder,\u201d as well versed in prog rock as in nineties R. & B. Coffman moved to New York to join Dirty Projectors, and began attending practice sessions in a deteriorating Brooklyn brownstone where Longstreth lived with a revolving group of other musicians, including Phosphorescent\u2019s Matthew Houck, Ra Ra Riot\u2019s Wes Miles, and Ezra Koenig, the front man of Vampire Weekend. At the time, Koenig was an English teacher with Teach for America; Longstreth recalled him leaving early in the mornings, wearing a tucked shirt, a braided belt, and a tie. \u201cI\u2019d never been exposed to Ivy League kids, or the East Coast at all,\u201d Coffman told me. \u201cWe were working ten- and twelve-hour days, rehearsing. No one I knew would even fathom doing that.\u201d Initially, she enjoyed it. \u201cIt\u2019s exhilarating to learn where your limits are, and push through them,\u201d she said. Longstreth described it as a \u201ccone of focus,\u201d where everything else dropped away.<\/p>\n

During rehearsals, Coffman and Longstreth began to fall for each other. \u201cIt totally caught me off guard,\u201d she said. \u201cIt just came over the room. It felt very innocent.\u201d At the time, Longstreth was working on \u201cRise Above,\u201d a reinterpretation, from memory, of a Black Flag album. The songs were written for the higher end of his own register, to strain his voice. \u201cFor me to be singing there, it\u2019s yelpy as hell,\u201d he said. Coffman, who had grown up singing R.\u00a0&\u00a0B., made intricate compositions more approachable. \u201cAmber is one of the vocalists of our generation,\u201d Longstreth said. The album \u201cBitte Orca,\u201d released in 2009, pushed Dirty Projectors into the mainstream. By that point, the band had a relatively stable lineup, including the bassist Nat Baldwin, the drummer Brian McOmber, the multi-instrumentalist and singer Angel Deradoorian, and the vocalist Haley Dekle. Longstreth\u2019s songwriting played on sharp juxtaposition and counterpoint. \u201cHe has this amazing ability to cast a group together as one entity, like a collective voice,\u201d the artist Jacob Collier said. Onstage, Coffman, Deradoorian, and Dekle were thrilling to watch. \u201cThe harmonies of those three women were almost inhuman,\u201d the musician Tyondai Braxton told me.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.newyorker.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n

\u2018 O artigo anterior foi obtido e traduzido do site internacional da celebrity.land \u2019 Source Link <\/em><\/p>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In 2020, California was swept with some of the worst wildfires in its history. One morning in September, David Longstreth woke up at his home in Los Angeles to find the sky glutted with smoke. His wife, Teresa Eggers, was three months pregnant, and the couple decided to book a last-minute trip to visit a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1250077,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[42],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1250076","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-musica"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250076","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1250076"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1250076\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1250077"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1250076"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1250076"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/pt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1250076"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}