With their new album, the Dirty Projectors make a Mahler – Liberation

From Black Flag to Gustav Mahler. From the High Punk Rock Californian Pavilion from the 80s to go up the currents until Song of the earth. No musicologist, even gifted in acrobatics, would have the idea of ​​finding a common thread between these opposite poles that nothing attracts to each other. A musician who has never been afraid of « nothing », however, has been working for a quarter of a century to find secret ties among the widest of the possible musical constellations. David LongstrethDirty Projectors’ main architect, has enough resources in her luggage to deliver a personal interpretation of a Black Flag album, Damaged, And less than twenty years later to build a monumental project, both fluid and complex, Song of the Earthwhich is source in The song of the earth of Mahler. Especially not a pop reinterpretation of these masterpieces, which would be catastrophic, the previous plans of the genre (the immodest Pictures at an exhibition From Moussorgski by Emerson, Lake & Palmer) being often subject to frank laughs.

The emergency was born in Longstreth when in 2020 fires ravaged Los Angeles, a region where he now lived after many years in Brooklyn. At the same time, he received a stress from Stargaze, a Berlin orchestra already heard alongside many artists from the same family as his (Julia Holter, Villars, These New Puritans or Owen Pallett), for a free creation. In just six weeks, he writes and composes these « songs » where anger, abatement and hope vibrate in front of the ravages of climate change, mirror at the birth of his daughter, which he initially destined for a two -voice interpretation, his and that of the three singers of Dirty Projectors, Felicia Douglasssurrounded by tight training in chamber music.

2020 is also the year when Dirty Projectors has chosen to break the album cycle to leaf through new songs on five EPs, one of which has the title Earth Crisis And presents these kinds of orchestrations, with a string quartet and a quintet of winds. Let’s hang on, because it is here that the convertible comes in: on these titles, Longstreth sample of ends of an orchestral version of its covers of Black Flag that his friend made Chris Taylor by Grizzly Bear. Stargaze has just made a version for orchestra of In On The Kill Taker From Fugazi with Greg Saunier de Deerhoof, the terrain is slippery but passable.

While it is immersed until saturation in Mahler, the Covid’s native offers Longstreth time to expand these new parts, build them a more solid reinforcement and develop the arrangement of resonance choirs with a range of widened instruments. « The dialogue with two voices that I had imagined at the base, taking a model on Mahler, gradually transformed into a device where there is a narrator, which I embody, and a kind of ancient choir that answers him, writes for the three singers of Dirty Projectors. I also added bass, harpsichord, saxophone …, he analyzes. This work is also an opportunity for me to revisit my own musical geography. To start from the discs that I liked as Pet Sounds Beach Boys or Revolver Beatles to go back to the composers of Western Europe at the beginning of the 20th century, to see how this tradition collapsed in the interwar period and how it re-emerged in Hollywood through jazz and then infuse in the arrangements of Nelson Riddle for Sinatra or Gil Evans with Miles Davis, themselves having inspired the great arrangers of pop in the 60s.  »

From the mystical naturalism of Messiaen (which Longstreth also quotes as inspiration) to Brian Wilson, whose obvious imprint is heard More maniaStravinskian orchestra bursts with disarmed melodies like Robert Wyatt (Circled in Purple),, Song of the Earth could obviously have been called Song of the Heartso much he lodges without weakening of a sincere and devoted love for all these masters of harmony and the desire to arrange the beauty of chaos. It is the domestic work of a man who watches the world collapses from his window, draws sketches and decides to make it the largest and ambitious out of the frescoes from which his brain in panic will have mapped the many tracks.

Never a firefighter, despite the incendiary context that inspired it, this cycle of paintings that are linked for more than an hour is also a desperate but guaranteed gesture in the face of the fracturing of music on platforms. However, David Longstreth may live as a hermit, we cannot see in him a frightened protectionist in the face of the inevitable evolution of the music of his time, to the point of seeking to take refuge in a mythified past. We would forget in passing that during the last decade, his name appeared in the productions of Kanye West, Rihanna or Björk (who recorded an entire disc with Dirty Projectors) and that the latest album, in 2017, revealed a real obsession for the vocal innovations of contemporary R’n’B.

On Song of the Earththe sporadic interventions of rapper Steve Lacy, Mount Eerie or Tim Bernardes still testify to the extent of his field of affinities and explorations. On April 12, he defeated his shyness to come and sing in the stand of the meeting organized in the Gloria Molina Grand Park in Los Angeles by Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortezalongside Neil Young or Joan Baez. The somewhat macabre irony wants Song of the Earth Born in the first mandate of Trump, while Los Angeles was already plagued by flames, and its exit coincides both with the return of triumphant climatosceptics and their pyromaniac guru as with that of the recent fires. «  »It’s a bit dystopian all that right?He wonders, almost on the point of laughing. «  »What to say about this situation that others have already expressed with more eloquence, except that it gives the impression of being suspended on the edge of a cliff and slowly slide into the void. We have a little more reason to be overwhelmed every day, and even if the theme of this album, the climate disaster, the destruction and the immeasurable pains that this chaos entrains, gives the feeling of a renunciation, I believe that I also try to reassure myself, for my daughter, through more optimistic titles Blue of Dreaming, which ends the album and which is based on an air that I sang him at his birth, he says. I came across a video of a guy who was noisily advised not to have children, because being parents came to castrate any form of citizen engagement against capitalism. I can sometimes identify myself with this kind of radical theories, but I also believe that what is greater than capitalism or anti-capitalism is life itself, life that generates life. It’s a bit naive as a feeling, but that’s what fatherhood led me to think, including as a musician. I saw myself so far as one of those types which revolved around itself, immature and reassured to be locked in the bubble that I had built myself. This album is a way of testifying to my daughter of the world as he was at birth.»»

It is a coincidence if the first American of Song of the Earth took place in March of last year at the Disney Hall of Los Angeles, but something of a Fantasia Modern arises by clarification of this long melancholy train. Without doubt the writing of Longstreth as it is made from the splendid Swing Lo Magellan (2012) is she permanently torn between sudden euphoria, irrepressible, and moments of disillusioned contemplation. This is the reason why this group with an atypical configuration (two men and three women), after having seen more than thirty members over time pass over time, persists in forming the most sustainable enigma of indie America of this first quarter of a century.

« It’s a sacred crossing right? »Answers David Longstreth when he was brought back to his beginnings, when he was still a student at the University of Yale and tried to put order in his confused musical desires with the help of his brother Jake. «  »There is undoubtedly an invisible thread that connects all the very different things that I have been able to do. It is difficult for me to reconnect to the state of mind that was mine at the beginning, the only thing I am sure, is that I had things to do, a lot of music to do and an eagerness to start putting them in shape. It was not only a question of making songs, but also of producing, arranging, of going further and further in the territories that I was seeing in front of me but which I did not, far from it, all the keys. This projectSong of the Earth, I cannot say that I had always had it in me, but it was probably unconsciously where I wanted to go. ”