Excerpts from "Petri-Dish Pop,"
Andrew Marantz,
The Musical Life ,
The New Yorker,
November 24, 2014:
"Damian Kulash, the lead singer of the band OK Go"...
"OK Go makes power-pop songs—verse, chorus, bridge, chorus. What sets the songs apart is the way in which they are packaged and promoted. In the video for 'Here It Goes Again,' a 2006 single, the band executed the choreography on and around eight moving treadmills...
"Two years ago, at a conference, Kulash met Sri Kosuri, a biochemist at U.C.L.A. 'We are starting to reach fundamental limits of how densely we can store data on microchips,' Kosuri told Kulash. 'We need new ideas.' Given that Kosuri is a biologist, his idea is DNA. 'It's information,' he said. 'Our bodies use it to code for life, but it could be anything.' DNA comes in strings of "A"s, "C"s, "T"s, and "G"s; digital files—including music files—are strings of ones and zeros. Translating one code into the other is, for people like Kosuri, relatively straightforward. In 2012, Kosuri converted a book into DNA. Kulash said, 'As soon as I heard that they could do this with a book, I went, 'This is how we're putting out our next album.'
'Hungry Ghosts,' OK Go's fourth studio album, was released a couple of weeks ago as MP3s, a CD, and a vinyl record. Later this year, it will be released as DNA. ... In theory, an OK Go fan would receive a small plastic vial containing a few drops of water. Dissolved in the water would be a few nanograms of DNA containing around a hundred thousand copies of "Hungry Ghosts.'
"...visiting Columbia to see how a fan might convert nucleic acid into digital songs. ...'It's an exponential amplification,' he said. 'If you run it fifteen times, you get into the millions of copies.' ... 'So, if we sell just one or two water droplets, we'll have the highest-selling album of all time.'" ♦
Continue reading at
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/11/24/petri-dish-pop
