Projecting a new sound from a hard-core punk classic

"The challenge became, could I enfold [Black Flag's 'Damaged'] into something I can value?" said Dave Longstreth. (MIA FERM)

A couple of years ago, while digging through crates in the attic of his parents' Connecticut home, Dave Longstreth unearthed a worn cassette of "Damaged," the propulsive hard-core record by Black Flag. Longstreth had never been much of a punk kid. His tastes ran, instead, toward the melodic: the Beatles and glossy '80s rock. But something about the cassette's cover art - a portrait of singer Henry Rollins glaring into a cracked mirror - looked "really exotic and very foreign. Very appealing."

"I didn't know much about Black Flag, or their history, or their legacy," Longstreth remembers on the phone from his Brooklyn home. "I knew that the music was really, really raw. And at the time, I was looking for something to latch onto, creatively."

Longstreth, whose project, the Dirty Projectors, plays the Museum of Fine Arts on Sunday, has long enjoyed a reputation as a musical auteur. At a time when the best indie acts are experimenting with fuzz and noise and looped beats, Longstreth is writing symphonies - towering compositions flush with complex harmonies and tempests of atonal instrumentation.

Says Chris Taylor, a friend and a member of Brooklyn buzz band Grizzly Bear: "This dude is among the most talented musicians I've ever met. And part of his aesthetic is [expletive] with people - challenging them. There's too much boring music out there. Here's someone scripting these big, eruptive moments."

The first Dirty Projectors albums started cropping up early in the decade, cobbled together in Longstreth's spare time in dorm rooms and on the road. In 2005, Longstreth graduated with a music degree from Yale, moved temporarily to Providence and then to New York, where the Brooklyn music scene was beginning to cough up its first big acts.

"If you've been even mildly itinerant, and you're used to touring, which I was, New York is a natural place to be," he says. "All your friends are there, all the time," allowing musicians to absorb a variety of influences.

By the time he climbed up into his parents' attic, some time in 2006, Longstreth had five Dirty Projectors albums in the bag, including the happily lo-fi mess of "Morning Better Last!" and the relatively melodious "Slaves' Graves and Ballads," which he recorded with a 10-piece chamber orchestra.

Surrounded by those old cassettes, Longstreth began to mull over the prospect of a new and "possibly strange project." Black Flag, he says, was not a band that he listened to very much. "I wasn't open to angsty, suburban white-person music. The challenge became, could I enfold this into something I can value? Can I make it a part of me?"

And yet he had no special urge to make a covers record. There was the matter of logistics, for one: Black Flag had met its targets - corruption, poverty, and violence - head on. The Projectors, on the other hand, often arrived at a theme elliptically, if it arrived anywhere at all.

So instead, Longstreth set about exploring the idea of "Damaged," reconstituting lyrical and instrumental fragments from memory. "I wrote a lot of the material quickly and on my own," he says. Then he took them to the Dirty Projectors touring band, where winds and strings and beats were added, "and they took on a life of their own."

Listening to the finished product, "Rise Above," which was released last fall on Dead Oceans, is a restive experience. The album is serpentine and unrelenting and - in its own strange way - aggressive.

"It's not supposed to be easy to listen to, exactly," says Grizzly Bear's Taylor.

In early 2007, Longstreth had arrived at Taylor's apartment with a handful of tracks from the album, all recorded live, and all "really heavy stuff."

"It was amazing," Taylor says, "and I thought, 'It won't do it justice to leave it like this.' " Over a series of weeks, the duo set about re-jiggering the tracks from the original skeletons, removing dense prog elements to "make it a bit more palatable," and adding voices.

Songs like "Six Pack" now float on staggered vocal phrasings, descending across registers and ascending in an operatic roar. The score is dominated by arpeggios: chords, broken into their parts, and plucked note by note. What's left of Flag is the subject matter, from anthems of working-class angst to throaty ballads of "Depression."

"I'm not unused to finding myself the only one who cares about a certain sound," Longstreth says about the challenging nature of "Rise Above." And yet the album has been stunningly popular, coveted on music blogs and by online tastemakers and cherished by fans.

"A few months ago, I went to see [the Projectors] play a sold-out show at the Bowery [Ballroom]," says Taylor. "For me, it was like watching something go full circle. It's obviously a record [that] you come back to over and over again."