Photograph by Ryan Muir/Stereogum.com

For many New York music fans, this was the event of the year so far; Dave Longstreth of Dirty Projectors would write a suite of songs for Björk to sing, accompanied by his band, to be played as a benefit for Housing Works at the charity’s downtown bookstore café. Ticket prices started at $100, and folks bid as much as $900 at auction to sit at a table in the front row and breathe the same air as Björk. Naturally, expectations were high, and excitement was at a fever pitch by Friday evening.

And walking into the Housing Works bookstore, as creaky and cozy as the space usually is, the atmosphere is less underground-indie-benefit, more star-studded gala (along the lines of Paul Simon’s Beacon bash in Feb). The balcony that runs around the main space, usually frequented by folks browsing books on religion or sexuality, for the purposes of the show has become the VIP balcony. Tall white chairs are reserved for the poshest patrons, so it’s kind of like an indie fashion show—here’s St. Vincent in the front row, there’s M.I.A., and so on. Also in attendance? Vampire Weekend, Battles, Kieran Hebden and of course, David Byrne, who collaborated with the Projectors on the Dark Was the Night comp. Resplendent in an orange shirt, even with his shock of white hair, Byrne has an eager-eyed beaminess to him that makes him look about 15 years old. A lady approaches Byrne with an autograph book, which he sweetly signs; she sits back down in the seat next to him.

Read on for our account of the show, review of the suite, and more photographs

Brandon Stosuy, of Pitchfork and Stereogum, takes the stage first. The show started out as his idea, and he tells the tale: Stereogum put together a mixtape of artists covering songs from Post, and Longstreth talked about his admiration for Björk. A few weeks later, Stosuy was talking to Björk, who started talking about the Projectors, and bingo.

Stosuy is a softly-spoken man, and it’s pretty hard to hear him unless you’re right by the stage; and things take a turn for the truly inaudible, when the night’s first act, Kurt Weisman, begins his set. Both Björk and Dirty Projectors have chosen a support artist for tonight, and Weisman is the Projectors’ pick. With one dangly earring, he looks like a disheveled pirate, and he begins plucking odd, Syd Barrett–y melodies from his Spanish guitar. His voice, as quiet as it is, is astonishing—a high, sweet tremble that recalls Sandy Denny. A strange and enchanting sound, I suspect that even if you could hear Weisman properly, the effect would still be like listening to children singing in the next room.

Next up is Icelandic singer Ólöf Arnalds, and, gasp! Björk introduces Arnalds herself. She says she likes Ólöf because “she has an idiosyncratic sense of chord structure.” I get the feeling that most of us could happily listen to Björk saying the word idiosyncratic for the next half hour, but she continues her explanation before bashfully joking, “I should write the essay later,” and leaving the stage.

We’ve talked about Arnalds in the Volume before, and her set tonight is every bit as good as you’d hope (even though just as she begins picking out the melody to her first song, the café’s cappuccino machine steams noisily into action.) Dressed in red silk with a shaven head, Arnalds sings in a clear warble that recalls the folk songs on the Wicker Man soundtrack—a lovely sound indeed, and you can almost feel the audience inching their heads forward to get closer to the music. Arnalds speaks just like Björk, and says she wants to play a song by her favorite Icelandic composer; and there’s a lovely moment where everyone realizes she’s started singing “Unravel” by Björk. Arnalds begins her next song saying, “We want to return to Iceland and stop this crazy stressful thing called living in New York,” then leads the audience in a sing-along to the line “Don’t go in the crazy car.”

It’s all very lovely, but, as the girl standing next to me whispers, the natives are getting restless. It’s hot and sticky in here (bookshops are usually air-conditioned to accommodate say, ten gentle browsers), and folks are essentially here to see the one Big Thing. Housing Works people are frantically oiling the hinges of the door to the toilet, which is right by the stage. A double bass is carried through the crowd. Everyone is desperate not to lose their place. And then it’s time.

Dave Longstreth climbs onto the stage, wearing a round-the-house cardigan, followed by bassist Nat Baldwin and the girls, Amber Coffman, Angel Deradoorian and Haley Dekle, dressed in blue vintage frocks. Warming up to the big number, the band plays three songs from new album Bitte Orca (“Temecula Sunrise,” “Cannibal Resource,” “No Intention”) swapping the gnarly instrumentation and R&B beats of the record for pretty Spanish guitar and rolling double bass.

“We’re just so honored to play these songs with Björk,” says Longstreth, and the crowd goes nuts. Up skips Björk, wearing a shiny royal blue gown and coiled necklace. Given that Longstreth was still hard at work writing the score a week before the show, the content of the suite has been kept deliciously secret, and now it’s time to reveal it. Longstreth says the songs are inspired by a whale-watching expedition Coffman took, and specifically, “Imagining the moment Amber saw the whale, and the whale saw her. I think it’s called Mount Wittenberg Orca.”

In this age of albums being leaked, film plots being spoiled, everything being previewed and so on, it is fantastically exciting to be gathered together, seconds away from hearing a Brand New Thing. And so it begins.

From the get-go, it’s clear that Longstreth is now using the girls’ voices as an orchestra, the trio’s “eh-eh-eh”s like rhythmic chops on strings, their soft-loud crescendos thrilling and deftly delivered. This piece brings Longstreth’s classical background (he studied composition at Yale) to the fore, and I’m reminded of contemporary composer John Tavener describing Björk as one of the greatest modern composers we have. One wonders if Björk will say the same of Longstreth?

And then Björk begins to sing, and it’s a true shivery moment, her voice every bit as grainy and strong and soaring as it is on “Birthday”—and to hear it happening in the same room as you’re standing in? It’s almost too much. Tonight’s performance is entirely acoustic, with Björk reading some of the words from a notepad in front of her, so it feels very much like a sketch, rather than a finished piece. One can imagine trombones and drum crashes and all kinds of hugeness happening to it in the future. For now, though, the sound of the girls’ syncopated three-part harmonies is literally unbelievable; there are echoes in it of Meredith Monk’s Facing North, and the vocal arpeggios from Mozart’s Magic Flute perhaps. But I’ve never heard anything quite like it before. The piece resolves with Björk singing about the stare itself, a reflection on cosmic oneness—and too soon, the suite is over.

The crowd goes berserk, clapping for an encore long after the musicians have disappeared, and Stosuy announces apologetically that the players are spent. There are a couple of quickly shushed boos, and I’m reminded of a poem by Tony Hoagland, “Impossible Dream,” which talks about pleasure— “how you have to glide through it without clinging, like an arrow, passing through a target—coming out the other side and going on.”

Byrne at least, seems to know this—standing now outside the (newly greased) toilet, clapping and laughing. What a way to put on a show.

Thanks again to Ryan Muir at Stereogum for the images. Find out more about the great work Housing Works does here.