It's a dirty job, but ...

After years of being the music cognoscenti's best-kept secret, Dirty Projectors are moving out of their niche ghetto and into the mainstream. But actually, the Brooklyn band are still the indiest kids on the block, David Longstreth tells JIM CARROLL.

DAVID Longstreth is talking about his band’s show the other night in Washington DC. Dirty Projectors are currently on tour with TV On The Radio, a pairing made in Brooklyn indie-rock heaven.

Apropos of nothing, the Dirty Projectors frontman remembers that Bjork was at the band’s recent gig in the 930 Club and hung out with them afterwards. The two parties have collaborated recently, so she turned up to say hello.

Such casual visits from pop royalty may well become the norm. After years of being a well-kept secret, Dirty Projectors are about to become much better known beyond the indie ghetto they’ve called home since their inception.

As is so often the case with such shifts in popularity, the band themselves haven’t necessarily done all the work. But just as a certain swathe of indie acts have seen mainstream audiences suddenly sit up and take notice of what they’re doing (see Grizzly Bear, Fleet Foxes, TV On The Radio, Bon Iver etc), Dirty Projectors are about to enjoy some prolonged exposure because the time is right.

The album which is giving them this bump is Bitte Orca. In ways, it is very different from anything else in their canon. Previous releases such as The Getty Address(an album inspired by Don Henley of The Eagles and Aztec mysticism) and Rise Above(on which the band reworked Black Flag's Damagedalbum) started with the concepts and worked it out from there.

This time, claims Longstreth, there are no concepts.But there is still a diversity of influences. The exuberant, dizzy songs are hooked around swatches of African hi-life guitars, r’n’b vocals, post-rock grooves and tribal incantations. Longstreth has long been able to balance both pop and art leanings, but he has rarely done it with songs that shine as brightly as this.

Such fondness for experimental forms and throwing unusual shapes means Dirty Projectors could never be seen as just another indie band.

Longstreth agrees that their approach is out of step with many of his indie peers. Contrasting what some of the other bands are producing with what the Dirty Projectors are creating really is a case of conservatives versus radicals.

“The attitude to experimentation right now with indie music is weird,” muses Longstreth. “There’s always been a marked trend towards revivalism and that’s really been the case since the 1990s. So many acts approach past eras in a very reverent way, and so you end up with these acts trying to sound like Neil Young between 1971 and 1973. Maybe it’s just a period of time we’re going through.

“On the other hand, there are people who are looking to expand sonic boundaries and do different things. They’re trying to encapsulate different sensations in music and make something which is harder to define. I guess that’s the area I have more empathy with.

“What I like myself happens to be the totally random stuff and that comes across in our music. I love Little Wings, for instance. He’s a Californian songwriter who has an acoustic guitar and writes these great songs. There’s nothing radical or inventive going on necessarily, but he is great at what he does. He’s an inspiring musician and what he does excites me greatly.”

Longstreth admits that a strong disdain for reverence also informs what he and Dirty Projectors do when they go into studio or on to a stage. This is a trait which has been with him since his days at Yale, where he studied music.

While Longstreth did drop out and move to Portland for a spell, he subsequently returned to the Connecticut university to complete that degree. Yale was where he first began recording under the Dirty Projectors name, though it wasn’t the only thing he took from his alma mater.

“I suppose there are two things which have remained with me from those years in Yale. I got a practical grounding in the history of music, which I loved. Learning how one thing became another and how one idea was built upon another and things like that was really inspiring.

“But I also took away a distaste and impatience with reverence which prevents people from breaking out and trying new things. I suppose you could say that being there made me approach making music with a greater degree of irreverence.” This may explain Longstreth’s zealous mission to always innovate, move and keep one step ahead of everyone else.

His work rate has been impressive, with album following album at warp speed, though it took until 2007’s Rise Above to convince many that there was more than just some maverick, leftfield character at work here.

For Rise Above, Longstreth took hardcore band Black Flag's Damagedalbum and reworked it, song by song, from memory. In place of the howling frenzy of the original, Longstreth inserted harmonies and African guitars. It worked a treat.

“I loved that album so much when I was younger,” he explains, “and it was one of the albums which made me interested in music in the first place. I had a very strong empathy with that album and I wanted to explore what it meant to me back then and if that feeling was still as strong.

“When I came to record, I didn’t listen to the album or read the lyrics; I just relied on memory and intuition. It was never meant to be an album of covers or an homage, more an attempt to write a song or an album of songs that already existed. To do that in this case meant going back to me as a teenager and exploring all that angst again.”

Not surprisingly, other think-outside-the-box musicians have flocked to the band’s side. That collaboration with Bjork took in a live performance of new songs at a New York bookshop, including a specially composed vocal suite about whale watching. Longstreth mentions that further dalliances with the Icelandic singer are planned.

Then there's David Byrne, a musician one feels would certainly be on a similar wavelength to Longstreth. Byrne and the Projectors perform Knotty Pinetogether on Dark Was The Night, an all-star album of collaborations in aid of the Red Hot Organisation and put together by the Dessner brothers from The National.

“Aaron and Bryce Dessner are great, great guys,” says Longstreth. “They were pairing people together for the album and it was their idea to pair us with David Byrne. We were all into the idea, and the collaboration proceeded from there. It was an amazing opportunity to work with him because I’ve admired him for as long as I’ve been writing music.”

After working with the band, Byrne commented on his blog that “part of what attracts me to them is something I can’t exactly figure out”. Many would concur with that, though Longstreth admits there may have been too much emphasis in the past on a perceived precociousness in their sound.

“People forget that music should be about emotion or spirit and not technique. Too often in the past, I was seen as pursuing some sort of abstract idea of the music that I was feeling. I don’t think that I went about creating concept albums as such. I was more interested in creating a body of songs and a set of characters to work around because that made sense for me.

“But this time, there is none of that. I just wanted to concentrate on beautiful songs which aren’t linked in any way.”

Bitte Orcais out now on Domino.

Dirty Projectors play Whelan’s, Dublin, on September 16th