Dirty Projectors at the Cedar

The Brooklyn-based experimental rock group Dirty Projectors is the brainchild of frontman and chief songwriter Dave Longstreth, who released his own first album, The Graceful Fallen Mango, in 2001, before formally creating the band that launched his career. The group has pushed its sound with each new release, creating concept albums ranging from an opera about Don Henley to a re-imagining of Black Flag songs written from memory. With each new album, Longstreth's style and cast of musicians has changed. Longstreth and company released Bitte Orca in June, earning rave reviews from critics and fans. The new album continues the band's trademark experimentation, mixing traditional string arrangements with exploding drums, spidery guitars and boisterous keyboards. The band's evolving songwriting has helped make BItte Orca its best work to date. (NPR World Cafe).

"The brainchild of Yale music-composition grad David Longstreth, his prickly surface belies a bright pop center: tart, sweet, and gushing all at once." SPIN Magazine The Best 20 Albums of 2009...so far (Dirty Projectors #4)

"Bitte Orca is one of the more purely enjoyable indie-rock records in an awfully long time...It's breezy without a hint of slightness, tuneful but with its fair share of tumult, concise and inventive and replayable and plain old fun." Pitchfork 9.2 review of Bitte Orca

tUnE-yArDs is the singular musical project of New England native Merrill Garbus. Possessing an expansive sound that marries a coarse folk ingenuity with the bold pop sensibility of an R&B siren, BiRd-BrAiNs was assembled with a staunch DIY aesthetic. Recording herself using a digital voice recorder and assembled using shareware mixing software, she was described by Stereogum as "a self-contained Sublime Frequencies compilation, jumping between blues, African tunes, shiny reggae-esque sprawls, and lo-fi folk", infusing the worldly sonic palette of M.I.A. or post-punk pioneers The Raincoats.