When I contacted Dave Longstreth a little more than a year ago about contributing to Enjoyed, a compilation where we (Stereogum) asked various musicians to cover individual songs from Post, he talked to me about his admiration for Björk, focusing on what he saw as her deconstructive compositional sense. (His band, the Dirty Projectors, ended up covering "Hyperballad.") A few weeks later, I was talking with Björk about new music and she mentioned she liked Dirty Projectors. She played their album Rise Above for a friend, pointing out the vocal arrangements.

Besides writing at Stereogum, I'm on the Board Of Directors at Housing Works Bookstore, a branch of Housing Works, the largest community-based AIDS service organization in the United States. One of my roles on the Board is to help organize benefit shows. It struck me on day that it would be great to put something together with Björk and Dirty Projectors since they're musicians who clearly respect each other (and also share an avant-pop lineage, etc.) Björk and David liked the idea. It took us awhile to find a time when everyone was around and we could make it work: Eventually, when we could, Björk was between albums, so she and Dave thought it would be interesting to come up with new material. This is where he suggested writing a new suite of music for five voices (Björk, Dave, and the three women in the Dirty Projectors, Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian, and Haley Dekle). The piece was indeed written and they performed it for a sold out crowd May at Housing Works Bookstore. The store's a nice old wooden room filled with used and new books.

It fits about 300 people. I'd asked each performer to choose an opener for the night: The Dirty Projectors selected the Vermont singer/songwriter Kurt Weisman and Björk selected the Icelandic singer/songwriter Ólöf Arnalds. Everyone played stripped-down, largely acoustic sets. The Dirty Projectors started their set without Björk, performing four songs from their new album Bitte Orca. After the fourth piece, Björk joined the band on the six-part 20-minute whale-themed composition. Longstreth referred to it as "Mount Wittenberg Orca." Longstreth strummed an acoustic guitar and Nat Baldwin played an upright bass, but the focus was clearly the complex overlapping of the voices. The NY Times and TIme Out did a good job describing the music and the night.

We're thankful to Björk, Dirty Projectors, Kurt Weisman, and Ólöf Arnalds for such a beautiful and successful evening. All the money raised at the concert goes towards direct services for homeless New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS. We provide housing, medical and mental health care, meals, job training, drug treatment, HIV prevention education, and social support to homeless and low-income New Yorkers living with HIV and AIDS.

The show on May 8th went a long way to making these services available for more people in need.

Takk.
-Brandon Stosuy

photos:Ryan Muir/Stereogum
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