Album review
Dirty Projectors frontman David Longstreth has collaborated with his bandmates (Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, and Olga Bell), the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, and a number of guests to release a new “song cycle” called Song of the Earth. Longstreth premiered the composition at Hamburg, Germany’s Elbphilharmonie back in 2022, and the album is set for release on April 4 (via Nonesuch/New Amsterdam in the US and Transgressive in the UK). The first single is ‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’, which comes with a visual shot by David Longstreth’s older brother, Jake, featuring drone footage of Lake Tulare in California. Check it out below.
Longstreth spent three years rewriting, rearranging, and recording the piece in studios and homes in the Netherlands, Los Angeles, staging several “work in progress” performances along the way. He drew inspiration from the pandemic, the “radical psychedelia” of new fatherhood, and the fresh challenge of writing for a large ensemble.
“The need for this music arose in a few days in Fall of 2020, when T was pregnant with our daughter,” Longstreth explained. The fires in California were insane, as they are right now. We got on an empty flight to Juneau. It was the middle of the pandemic; no one was flying. The irony of escaping the fires by burning more carbon.” He described what they found upon arrival: “The beauty and restorative cool of Alaska. A muddy bald eagle sitting on the shale stone bank of a coastal slough surrounded by rotting carcasses after the salmon run.”
Longstreth added that while Song of the Earth “is not a ‘climate change opera,” he wanted to “find something beyond sadness: beauty spiked with damage. Acknowledgement flecked with hope, irony, humour, rage.”
Song of the Earth features contributions from Phil Elverum (Mount Eerie), Steve Lacy, Patrick Shiroishi, Anastasia Coope, Tim Bernardes, Ayoni, Portraits Of Tracy, and the author David Wallace-Wells. (‘Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One’ is a word-for-word retelling of paragraph one of Wallace-Wells’ 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth.)
Song of the Earth Cover Artwork:
Song of the Earth Tracklist:
1. Summer Light
2. Gimme Bread
3. At Home
4. Circled in Purple
5. Our Green Garden
6. Walk the Edge (with Anastasia Coope)
7. Opposable Thumb
8. More Mania
9. Spiderweb at Water’s Edge (with Patrick Shiroishi)
10. Mallet Hocket
11. So Blue the Lake
12. Dancing on our Eyelids
13. Same River Twice
14. Armfuls of Flowers (feat. Steve Lacy)
15. Twin Aspens (feat. Mount Eerie & Patrick Shiroishi)
16. Uninhabitable Earth, Paragraph One
17. Kyrie/About My Day
18. Shifting Shalestones
19. Appetite (with Tim Bernardes)
20. Bank On (with Portraits Of Tracy)
21. Paper Birches, Whole Scroll
22. Raven Ascends (with Patrick Shiroishi
23. Blue of Dreaming (with Ayoni)
24. Raised Brow
