Warren Ellis wants out of Washington D.C.

"The car is parked. It's cold as hell and I'm happy to be on the phone," Ellis said.

The Australian-born violinist for the instrumental group Dirty Three thinks the capital of the United States is a little beaten up.

"You got the really wealthy people and then the incredibly poor people. One extreme next to the other. You've got the White House and then the Vietnam veterans missing limbs."

The tour has only begun, but the dichotomy of our cities has Ellis missing his wife and kids. Suddenly, performing in D.C poses a horrible possibility in an already downtrodden moment of life on the road. Hopefully, Bush did not show up for their concert the night before.

"Well no, he certainly wouldn't have been invited. Motherfucker."

After 10 years and 10 albums as a group, Dirty Three just released a new one ÷ She Has No Strings Apollo. Alongside Ellis, Mick Turner on bass and Jim White on drums comprise the other dirty two.

"It was an act of desperation, this album. We tried and it didn't really work. The songs we originally had didn't seem like a step in any direction so we shelved it. And this was the first time that had happened. None of us wanted that so we sat down again and worked some more. Then it felt like we re-found how we play together. We re-found a sense of purpose."

Ellis makes the album sound like a Robert DeNiro home movie ÷ a couple cuts of the band doing this and that. Nevertheless, these are musical geniuses and the album seems anything but desperate.

"Going to the studio represents nothing but the means to an end. It is a way of documenting how we play at that particular point. The main attraction with our group is how we interact as three people together playing in a really old fashioned way. We didn't even plan to play instrumental music in the beginning, but that is what we had because none of us could sing," Ellis said. "This band was a way of expressing ourselves and it has always felt like it has had that really strong narrative. Recording has never been about trying out any new technology, we just want to capture how the band sounds. Our record to me sounds like diaries."

In fact, this record is the Anne Frank diary of albums ÷ emotionally germane and beautifully troubled, but inherently important.

With a violin, drums and bass, the band relates a narrative without telling you the story.

"I don't really want to understand it. I think if I did it would all be lost. It is not a good idea to gnaw away at people's intentions anyway because the whole beauty of something seems to be the meaning you bring to it. As a looker, a reader, an observer; the way that you consume it. It doesn't really matter what was intended then. When you watch a film in the cinema there are 300 different versions going on at the same time and it is reading everybody very differently."

Suddenly, Ellis is not just speaking of the music anymore.

"It doesn't really matter what you intended once you've done it anyway, does it? You don't even own it anymore. In a legal sense, but you don't own how it's interpreted. If you did a painting and it lived in a cupboard and no one ever saw it, it isn't a work of art. It is only in the consumption that something has a life," Ellis said.

And suddenly, he is talking about the band again.

"We are older."

Wiser?

"No, not at all but we have managed to laugh because this is not an easy thing to hold together. We're not kids anymore and never were in this band. Sometimes the things that used to mean the world to you don't meant the world to you anymore and they take on a different importance that may not have even been there before. Ostensibly, I feel like the spirit of the band is still there. That is our biggest achievement," Ellis said.

"The road for me holds nothing sentimental; no romanticism at all. That is some concept invented by incredibly depressed people to try and deal with it. I could give a shit about the good ol' boys and on the road again. But I need to be creative and I need to play music, or else I don't feel complete."

Which brings him to Tucson. But the college crowd that will come and listen to Dirty Three on Tuesday will not be rendering any of this. And when they leave Solar Culture, what will have been salvaged is the instrumental resonance of a brilliant wreck.

"I've never asked anything of people. That is why I don't feel like I've been misunderstood," Ellis said. "Things that have moved me incredibly in my life ÷ I don't even know the people that made them. They are things that have gotten inside me and I have never been the same ever since. If anyone ever told me what they were about I would really resent them for that."

Dirty Three will play at Solar Culture on Tuesday, April 22 at 9 p.m. Tickets are $10. The gallery is located at 31 E. Toole Ave. Call 884-0874 for more information.