DIRTY PROJECTORS with PURITY RING at the Danforth Music Hall (147 Danforth), Friday (July 6), 9 pm, all ages. $26.50-$31. RT, SS, TM. See listing.
“Informal,” “fortuitous” and “spontaneous” aren’t words typically associated with the Dirty Projectors’ music.
The Brooklyn-based band’s back catalogue is stacked with ambitious ideas, intricate arrangements and formalist concepts, like Rise Above, their 2007 reimagining of hardcore band Black Flag’s album Damaged.
The Dirty Projectors’ sixth LP, Swing Lo Magellan (Domino), is full of the tricky rhythms, pretty melodies and swirling harmonies heard on its celebrated predecessor, Bitte Orca. This time, though, songwriter/composer Dave Longstreth has abandoned rigid conceptualism and looked inward to make what he calls “an album of songs.”
In other words, it’s the Projectors’ most accessible album.
To get to that point, they hit the road in upstate New York in search of an isolated place to record. They wound up in an old house with no cellphone reception at the end of a dirt road in Andes, a town of 1,300 that’s a three-and-half-hour drive from the city.
“I think a lot of musicians living in New York find it hard to be creative, especially if you’re trying to go inward to find something,” says singer/guitarist Amber Coffman. “When we started thinking about what our needs were for that period of writing, we knew we had to get out.
“Sometimes your instinct will lead you to where you want to be – or you hope it will. We cleared the calendar so we could forget about the pressure of having to go on tour again.”
For six months, Longstreth wrote and demoed the songs, and then throughout the summer and fall the band filtered up to Andes to record their parts.
“It was like a cocoon. We really had the chance to reinvent our situation,” Coffman says, adding that she’s excited by the new, personal direction Longstreth’s writing took.
Coffman’s experience of recording in seclusion wasn’t a far cry from another situation she recently found herself in. The low-key pop ballad Get Free is a collaboration between her and Major Lazer, producers Diplo and Switch’s reggae project. When they sent her the backing track, she put down some ideas in Garageband, sent it back, and then they flew her to Jamaica’s luxe Geejam Studios.
“It was very isolated,” she recalls. “It’s the place Rihanna and Drake helicopter in to and hang out and record. It was an incredible experience – a funny little meeting between two very different worlds.”
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