Dirty Projectors, David Longstreth and s t a r g a z e join forces on new album, Song of the Earth

Performed by Longstreth with his band Dirty Projectors - Felicia Douglass, Maia Friedman, Olga Bell - and the Berlin-based chamber orchestra s t a r g a z e, the album also features 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 setting of paragraph one of Wallace-Wells’ 2019 bestseller The Uninhabitable Earth. The accompanying lyric video, shot by Jake Longstreth, features drone footage of Lake Tulare in California, which dried up from agricultural irrigation but which re-emerges periodically from excessive rain or snowmelt

Song of the Earth marks Longstreth’s biggest foray into the field of concert music. It received its US premiere in a March 2024 sold-out performance at Disney Hall in Los Angeles with the LA Philharmonic. Work-in-progress performances also took place between 2022 and 2024 at the Barbican in London, Hamburg Elbphilharmonie, and Muziekgebouw Amsterdam.

Longstreth says 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.”

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