Real Brooklyn Vegan Hours: Bjork & Dirty Projectors - “On and Ever Onward”
It's May 2009, Dirty Projectors frontman David Longstreth is in a New York City bookstore, set to perform with Bjork for charity. Notable attendees include M.I.A., St. Vincent, David Byrne, Ezra Koenig, Four Tet, and (for some reason) Haley Joel Osment. It was some real Brooklyn Vegan-type stuff. Dirty Projectors and Bjork played a short set of new music, which Longstreth prefaced as being about an interaction his girlfriend and bandmate Amber Coffman had with a whale in California, seeing it from Mount Wittenberg. Logically named, the Mount Wittenberg Orca EP was a companion to the full-length album Dirty Projectors released in 2009, Bitte Orca (which, oddly, has nothing to do with whales). The concept is super weird, examining a brief moment between human and nature from a familial perspective, a more natural one, and a PETA-core one. Weird, definitely, but maybe perfect for a Bjork collaboration.
In the headline of Pitchfork’s review of the EP, they stressed how it was “written and assembled quickly”, noting in the larger review that the songs were less fleshed out than either artist’s respective library, possibly to a fault. The first statement is definitely true, however I’m not sure there’s anything wrong with letting the collaboration maintain its spontaneity. While two highly creative artists are certainly able take a long period of time to collaborate and create something that aligns with each artist’s creative outlook, they risk muddling each other’s voice by trying to forward their own, individual creative agenda. The serendipity of initial contact, discussion, and creation provides a near-instant return on the whole collaboration, and this inceptive value may have even more merit than an ultra-fleshed-out project. All this being said, both Bjork and Dirty Projectors have ambitious careers and ideas of their own, and don’t necessarily have time to test the limits of their collaboration anyway. In my humble, non-music-making opinion, I feel like the short-term collab model is capable of creating great results, and Mount Wittenberg Orca is a fantastic example of a success story.
Weird, stripped back, yet dense both in sonics and content, I really like the entire EP. At 21 minutes long, it’s short enough that you don’t have the chance to overanalyze what you’re listening to, succinct enough that it gets a feeling across, and makes for a really soothing listen. “On and Ever Onward” is my favorite track, highlighting Bjork’s unique voice over barebones instrumentation, while a chorus of others provide percussion and a skeleton of song structure. Each of these elements can stand alone, and do not necessarily gel exactly with the others, but as a whole, each piece has a place in the sphere of the song in its entirety. Like whales in a biosphere, I guess, if you’re into that kind of weird external representation shit.