Dirty Projectors at Public Arts

David Longstreth

David Longstreth, born in Southbury, Connecticut, began creating experimental music when his older brother went to college and left behind his four-track recorder. Longstreth enrolled in music and art studies at Yale University in New Haven, but besides attending classes he stayed in his dorm room making complex indie music. He found no community with which he could share his compositions, however. He dropped out of school, moved in with his brother in Portland and completed his debut album in 2001. He returned to Yale to finish his degree and started using the professional name Dirty Projectors for his next recordings. Longstreth has since collaborated with David Byrne, Bjork and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The band Dirty Projectors has had dozens of members but the present lineup consists of guitarists/vocalists David Longstreth and Maia Friedman, keyboardists/vocalists Felicia Douglass and Kristin Slipp, bassist Nat Baldwin, and drummer Mike Daniel Johnson. Dirty Projectors' ninth album, Lamp Lit Prose, will be released on July 13, 2018.

In a pre-Governors Ball concert tonight, Dirty Projectors headlined the new Pubic Arts performance space, and proved there is no band more indie. Just as the band smoothed the way for a soul crooner, an off-kilter arrangement would throw train off the rails. Focusing primarily on new compositions, the band's music was chillwave until it got quirky and pop until a musical bridge tossed in odd rhythms. Longstreth led most of the singing, but when he drew in his bandmates the vocal arrangements were often based on harmony but had no predictable trajectory. Longstreth's own vocals featured unconventional chamber-like phrasings and the band's jagged rhythms paralleled the mindset of progressive rock or jazz fusion, but ultimately Dirty Projectors' performance was none of the above. The indie genre has no parameters, so that may be where the classification where the eccentric music of Dirty Projectors will live and die.

Visit Dirty Projectors at www.dirtyprojectors.net.

Setlist:

1. I Found It in U
2. Break-Thru
3. What Is the Time
4. Cannibal Resource
5. Beautiful Mother
6. Dance for You
7. Little Bubble
8. I Feel Energy
9. No Intention
10. That's a Lifestyle
11. Cool Your Heart
12. Keep Your Name
13. Impregnable Question
14. Zombie Conqueror

Encore:

1. Swing Lo Magellan
2. Rise Above
3. Right Now