Fresh Beginnings With DAMIAN KULASH From OK GO

Interview by Kris Peters
Since their inception, OK Go has been something more than a band
and something different from an art project.
With a career that includes award-winning videos, New York Times
op-eds, collaborations with pioneering dance companies, tech
giants, NASA, animators and Muppets, and an experiment that encoded
their music on actual strands of DNA, OK Go continue to fearlessly
dream and build new worlds in a time when creative boundaries have
all but dissolved.
Formed as a quartet in Chicago in 1998 and relocated to Los Angeles
three years later, OK Go (Damian Kulash, Timothy Nordwind, Dan
Konopka, Andy Ross) have spent their career in a steady state of
transformation and continue to add to a curriculum vitae filled
with experimentation in a variety of mediums. Their work is in the
permanent collection of MoMA, and their achievements have been
recognized with twenty-one Cannes Lions, twelve CLIOs, three VMAS,
two Webbys, The Smithsonian Ingenuity Award, and a Grammy. The band
has also partnered with the Playful Learning Lab at the University
of St. Thomas to create OK Go Sandbox, an educational non-profit
that provides free resources to teachers that use OK Go's videos as
starting points to teach STEAM concepts.
The band last week released their first album in over a decade, And
The Adjacent Possible, with Kulash stopping by HEAVY HQ for a
chat.
"It's been fantastic," he smiled when we ask how the early
reception has been for And The Adjacent Possible. "It's wonderful
to get the music into people's brains. It's swimming around there
in the ether somewhere, and when you pull it out… you don't write
the songs. You find them. You define them from the world, then work
so hard to get them into shape. You can share them with people, but
then there's this arduous period where you do the business stuff,
and I'm just so happy that it's finally out and people can listen
to it and feel the emotion. The only point of music is that sense
of human connection, and it's so wonderful to be getting real
reactions from real humans now."
We ask Damian to dive deeper into the album musically.
"It feels like this is the first time that we weren't going for
anything," he measured. "We actually felt comfortable enough with
what and who we are that we were able to say these are the things
we like. Since the last album our guitarist had kids, I had kids,
then there was the pandemic, then I directed a film and that put
several years between the records, and before we knew it even
though we had never officially shut down the band or gone on a
hiatus, we'd taken enough of a step back that instead of feeling
like our foot had to be on the pedals with 'what do we do next' we
could just come back to and recognize who we are and that our flag
was planted a long time ago, and we don't have to plant a
flag."
In the full interview, Damian discussed And The Adjacent Possible
in greater detail, including the singles released and how they
summarise the album as a whole. We talked about the music video for
A Stone Only Rolls Downhill, which was shot on 64 phones with 64
different videos placed over a moving mosaic, which led to
discussion about their elaborate music videos and the process
behind them.
We spoke about musical ideas and converting them to reality, any
extra pressures coming back from a ten-year lay off, the meaning
behind the album title and more.


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