Dirty Projectors share 'Earth Crisis' EP with Kristin Slipp on vocals & animated film by Encyclopedia Pictura

Today, Dirty Projectors release Earth Crisis, the penultimate installment in the cycle of 5EPs the band has been releasing throughout 2020. With music owing as much inspiration to J Dilla as Igor Stravinsky, the mode of Earth Crisis is through-composed art song, sung by Dirty Projectors vocalist and keyboardist Kristin Slipp.

It arrives today with a stunning short film of the same name written and directed by friend and longtime collaborator Isaiah Saxon of Encyclopedia Pictura (Björk, Grizzly Bear, Dirty Projectors’ “Up In Hudson”). Encyclopedia Pictura is a Los Angeles-based film and animation studio whose passions include gardening, villages, friendship, science visualization, social ecology, adventure, and country living. The Earth Crisis short film features a special medley mix of the EP’s songs, and tells the prescient and poignant tale of an elderly woman alone in the arctic wilderness. Watch Earth Crisis via Adult Swim below, and listen to the EP here.

The music of Earth Crisis has a backstory. In 2007, Dirty Projectors released Rise Above, a reimagining of Black Flag’s seminal 1981 album Damaged. The album was out, but Dave Longstreth kept working through the musical material, spooling out arrangements of the songs for wind quintet and string quartet. In February 2008, Chris Taylor (Grizzly Bear) recorded these arrangements at the Greenpoint, Brooklyn church where they’d recorded parts of Yellow House and Veckatimest, with NYC avant music heavy Sam Hillmer (Zs, Diamond Terrifier) conducting. Shortly after the session, Projectors embarked on a three-month tour; when they came up for air, Dave got distracted writing Bitte Orca and never finished the orchestral Rise Above.

When he found the lost recordings on an old hard drive last year, Dave began reworking them—looping, pitch-shifting, deconstructing—and reseeding the resulting orchestral collages with new vocal melodies. “To me it felt like ecological processes: recycling, making new life from old,” he says. 

These collages form a harmonic ground for Kristin to take center stage with her strong soprano lead. Earth Crisis’ environmental undercurrent emerged out of the metaphor of the musical process—recycling, reuse of materials—and its title arrived serendipitously, a playful nod to the eponymous hardcore legends and to the Rise Above source material. From here, themes of environmental collapse and eco-dystopia poured organically into the lyrics Kristin and Dave wrote collaboratively. While penning the lyrics, they considered a 21st-century rewrite of Gustav Mahler’s epic symphony, Das Lied von der Erde (“The Song of the Earth”).

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On November 20th, Dirty Projectors’ diverse and dynamic sequence of EPs released in 2020 will culminate in a twenty-song anthology titled 5EPs. With each installment fronted by the voice of a different band member, 5EPs marks the group’s growth, transition and communal power, which has prevailed even in this most isolating of years. Thus far, guitarist Maia Friedman led the existential folk of Windows Open, keyboardist and percussionist Felicia Douglass helmed the super-future soul of Flight Tower, Dave Longstreth delivered an intimate João Gilberto homage on Super João, and now Kristin Slipp brings her keening and surreal soprano to Earth Crisis. The fifth and final EP will feature all four singers together.

For more on 5EPs, read Dirty Projectors' recent interview with Entertainment Weekly, listen to them via NPR's Weekend Edition, or watch them perform on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, NPR's Tiny Desk (Home) Concerts, , and Adult Swim's Fishcenter Live.

5EPs will be available as a standard black double LP, with a clear version exclusive to indie stores, as well as a CD, and a deluxe box set of five 12" colored vinyl. Pre-order 5EPs on LP and CD, or the limited edition, foiled and numbered box set, below.