Dirty Projectors & Alarm Will Sound: The Getty Address

New York band Dirty Projectors come to the Barbican for a varied evening of music. They’ll play a selection of songs from 2009’s celebrated Bitte Orca. They’ll also perform their 2005 album The Getty Address in its entirety, back with 20-piece contemporary ensemble Alarm Will Sound.


Bitte Orca (2009), the Projectors’ first album for Domino Records, was a popular and critical smash and year-end list favourite. It came on the heels of the band’s collaborations with Björk and David Byrne, who could almost be the band’s spiritual godparents - inspiring their innovative marriage of musical eclecticism and true pop sensibility.

The Getty Address (2005) is a rapturously strange album, unique in Dirty Projectors’ discography in its unsettling mix of jokes, high concept and existential urgency. The story it tells - roughly about a guy named Don Henley who falls in love with a girl named Sacagawea - plays out over heavy sequenced beats, choirs of women and orchestral arrangements that sound as if they’ve been salvaged from a lost vault of American music. In its European premiere, it will be conducted by Alan Pierson.

The previous two engagements of this program - at Lincoln Center in New York and Disney Hall in Los Angeles - were completely sold out.

‘A bold reminder of Longstreth’s background in (and continuing commitment to) experimental art music in all its challenging structural complexity.’ LA Times the Getty Address

‘As close to being a rock band as a Chamber Orchestra can be.’ NY Times on Alarm Will Sound