Dirty Projectors

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Dirty Projectors are a music group led by singer/songwriter and multi-instrumentalist David Longstreth. Based in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, New York City, with connections to the Portland, OR and Olympia, Wash. music scenes, the group has produced a distinctive sound of electronic experimentation, melded with traditional instruments and discordant vocals. Their recordings range from Prince-style one-man-recording-studio productions (New Attitude EP), to arranged orchestrations (the "Slaves' Graves" half of Slaves' Graves & Ballads, to basic voice over nylon-string guitar (the "Ballads" half of the aforementioned, recorded at Calvin Johnson's Dub Narcotic studio.) Throughout, Longstreth's aggressively melodic vocals provide a consistent identity for otherwise widely divergent approaches to pop music. Longstreth claims influences ranging from Don Henley (who appears as the main character in his 2005 album The Getty Address) to Mariah Carey [[1]. The former's influence is hard to tease out, though the latter's vocal gymnastics clearly provide a clue to Longstreth's approach. Longstreth's forthcoming album is an attempt to write Black Flag's Damaged, a task he compares to that of the main character of the Borges story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote."