Dirty Projectors Essentials

Dirty Projectors are the brainchild of Brooklyn experimentalist David Longstreth, who began flooding the world with tapes soon after leaving Yale. Inspired equally by worldbeat, modern classical music and punk rock, he combines those sounds in ever-changing ways, even covering an entire Black Flag album (2007's Rise Above, based on Damaged) in ways that Flag never imagined. Yet Longstreth's emotive singing voice gives the band some pop appeal, even when the music is at its densest. He's worked at times with fellow freethinkers Björk and David Byrne.