100 years after Gustav Mahler’s “Das Song of the Earth” David Longstreth with an album equal to the borders of Pop: Song of the Earth, a song cycle for orchestra and singing created by Longstreth’s band Dirty Projectors with the European Orchestra collective Stargaze, was premiered in the Elbphilharmonie in 2021. For three years he revised the studio recordings, which, he says, was not a climate change opera, but a declaration of love to the earth.
With Song of the Earth, Longstreth finally joins the Olympus of timelessness
We remember: Stargaze equipped Poliça with violins, viola, oboen, harps and flutes in 2018. Music for the Long Emergency became an orchestral pop album, but the cooperation with Longstreth, however, is revealed over long distances as contemporary classical music. 24 tracks, including many contemplative, small etüden, in which angelic women’s choirs have been planted, alternate between chamber and scorem music.
Few titles are to be understood as pop, including the “Uninhabitible Earth, Chapter One”, which is provided with Dirty Projectors Manuscript, almost a folk song with percussive clacking. Here Longstreth immediately addresses climate change. With Song of the Earth, Longstreth, who reinvented his band umpteen times, finally joins the Olympus of timelessness.
You can find out which albums were still published in April 2025 via our monthly publication list.