Bjork and David Byrne are fans and others hail him as inspirational. Does the latest album from Dave Longstreth and his band live up to the hype? Gaby Wood reports
Dave Longstreth has asked me to meet him in a Polish greasy spoon in Greenpoint, the latest corner of New York's Brooklyn to be colonised by the semi-poor and very hip. The restaurant is called Happy End, a name that suggests a glorious death by deep-fried latke, and after a while I begin to wonder if something along those lines may have happened to Longstreth.
I leave him a couple of messages. Eventually he calls. He just bumped into a member of Battles, he says, the band they played with in London last year, and he had to say hi. He directs me to another place, where I find him sitting outside wearing a Lacoste cardigan and espadrilles, so long and lean that he drapes over himself, like an articulated skeleton in a museum.
Longstreth is the frontman and mastermind of the Dirty Projectors, a band adored as much by indie rock gurus as by its disciples.
The band includes the voices of Amber Coffman (Longstreth's girlfriend), Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle, as well as drums and bass from Brian McComber and Nat Baldwin. Longstreth is only 27, and this latest album, Bitte Orca, is his fifth.
He has collaborated with Bjork and David Byrne, both of whom have long been fans, and the Vampire Weekend boys have referred to him as "one of the most inspiring musicians alive".
That's not to say everyone understands exactly what he does. After writing a couple of songs with Longstreth and recording them with the band, Byrne wrote: "Part of what attracts me to them is something I can't exactly place, can't figure out ... the band's music remains completely strange and oddly familiar at the same time."
Known for his arty and conceptual experiments (one LP is a reconstruction from memory of Black Flag's punk album Damaged), Longstreth writes music full of intricate choral conflations and fiendishly complicated shifts, with some African arrangements and classical dissonances.
His friends at the website Stereogum - who arranged for him to write a six-part song cycle with Bjork this year - describe his work as "wildly ambitious, cross-pollinated sonic documents". Bitte Orca, the most accessible of these, is stealthily addictive, and has already been hailed as the triumphant sum of all his work to date.
Longstreth himself will concede only that his music is "very involved", and that the other singers do a brilliant job of learning the music, which is completely unwritten and taught to them by him.
Something of what he set out to achieve, though, might be read into his admiration for the deconstructions of Bjork, whom he loved when he first heard her a decade ago because she combined art music and pop music, "as if the entire world doesn't have to believe they're opposed". She has, he remembers thinking, "one of those paradigm-shifting voices", which was "this impossible thing, this ecstatic thing".
His own sound is heartfelt and acrobatic. "I feel like I'm definitely trying to take the male voice where it doesn't often go," he says. "People seem to either dig it or really hate it." He pauses and smiles. "Which I kinda like."
By coincidence, we are a couple of blocks away from the first place Longstreth lived in when he moved to New York several years ago. He used to rent a practice space in the basement of an old warehouse, and under the stairs there was "a peculiar-shaped, long, narrow space filled with trash". The landlord said if he cleaned it out and put in the electricity himself, he could live there free. There were no windows, "the average decibel level was about 85, with three rock bands playing at all times", but Longstreth was happy. He taught himself a lot of "later, weirder Dylan", an experience he refers to as "holistic".
Longstreth grew up in Connecticut, where his father managed a nature centre and his mother worked as a lawyer for the state. His parents weren't interested in music but his brother, who is five years older and a painter and musician in Oakland, drew him in.
Longstreth taught himself to play the guitar ("you pick it up naturally - it's all around you", he shrugs) and then went to Yale to study music. Not long afterwards he dropped out because he thought it was "dumb" - they were interested in "preserving old things, establishing canons", whereas he was interested in making new things.
He moved to Portland, Oregon, and went on tour, playing house shows and warehouse parties. Now, he says drily, things are a bit different: the band stays in hotels, the venues are larger, people actually come to the shows ...
He went back to Yale to complete his degree, because, he says, "it would have been a cop-out not to finish it". Along the way, he learned a great deal about orchestration and harmonic theory, and by the time he graduated he'd pulled together the knowledge and experience that would lead to the Dirty Projectors.
He plays down the cleverness of what he does. "The point about the music is not that it's more technically difficult," he explains. "The thing that's important is the same thing that's important in Lennon or Coltrane or Wagner: that the music be a vessel for emotion or spirit."
What his training does help with is to "render and communicate" the ideas he has. He thinks of someone like Captain Beefheart, "who was more of a visual artist by training, and who left a legacy as an arcane and maniacal bandleader: he had tremendous trouble getting the ideas out of him".
But he continues to favour self-teaching. "If you have a kid who has an incredibly wild talent," he suggests, "you shouldn't nurture it - you should let them domesticate it, because then it has the chance to be something the world has never seen before."
What was his particular gift as a child? "My thing was that when I got into something, I'd obsess about it," he replies, thinking back to the age of 9 or 10, when he became deeply fascinated by "gallinaceous birds" - grouse, pheasant, prairie chickens and ptarmigan, a species that, he informs me as if reciting from an encyclopedia, "lives in exclusively alpine regions out west".
After the birds he moved on to "lower primates, like lemurs" and, eventually, orang-utans. "I wasn't into chimpanzees or gorillas, because I kinda felt like they were the Coke and Pepsi of the primate world." That wore off and art took over.
He was "very obsessed with Picasso for a couple of years", and then he got into music. He stops his story there, as if the rest were history - but is it?
So this music thing ...
Longstreth nods and smiles: "It could end tomorrow."
LOWDOWN
Who: Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors, New York indie-rock buzz band.
What: New album Bitte Orca out now.
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