use this fingerprint to automatically
reconcile rights. If there’s any dispute,
the fingerprint is there – as full proof of
who should get paid.
“We’ve been working with music
companies and musicians to ensure
rights information is as accurate as
possible, but Massive Attack wanted
something slightly different,” explains
Barry. “The point about Fantom is that
it remixes songs largely based on
samples. Before the rights holders of
the sample allowed the band to use
their material on an app that remixes,
distorts and even adds elements,
they needed to be sure each time their
sample was played they’d get paid.”
Blokur devised a system that assigns
a signature to a track’s stems – the
individual channels such as vocal or
bassline – tagging every sample and
recording them on the blockchain. This
stem signature means that no matter
what new effects have been applied –
no matter how distorted or mashed up
it becomes as the AI remixes it – the
stem can still be identified.
With this resolved, the band hoped to
store the song stems in the cloud – to
be played by the Fantom platform in real
time. Melchior recruited Mick Grierson,a computer scientist at Goldsmiths
College in London. Grierson specialises
in neural networks. They solve problems
in a similar way to a human brain – they
process inputs (“that’s a lion”); examine
them against patterns we already know
(“lions are creatures that kill”); and
generate outputs (“run away”). Like
humans, Grierson’s networks recognise
patterns – but only from the data sets
that they are trained on.
Intrigued by the remixing possibil-
ities of neural nets, Grierson’s team
developed one in Massive Attack’s
Bristol studio to build a generative
synthesiser: a neural network with
AIs that had been trained only on
Mezzanine. The networks can take any
input and process it as some version of
some part of the album. This synthesiser
allows anyone to modify any part of the
album, but can also be left on its own to
remix and adapt the songs in real time.
“The most interesting parts were the
mistakes the AI made,” Del Naja explains.
“You don’t want a perfect version of the
original audio to come out the other end.
You want it to combine the bass and the
harpsichord somehow, or the drums and
the vocal, to become one new sound, and
that’s all about the mistakes.”In 2018, Mezzanine was 20 years old.
Now the band – Daddy G, Del Naja and
various collaborators – are heading out
on an anniversary tour with some of
the original singers, including Cocteau
Twins’ Elizabeth Fraser and stalwart
Horace Andy. “It’s because we messed
up the anniversary of Blue Lines,” Del
Naja explains. “We didn’t engage,
refused to get behind promoting, didn’t
do any live dates. That was 2011 and the
world was very different then. We’d lost
control of our back catalogue in deals
by labels with streaming services –
we’d all been sold off. So what do we do
now? How do we keep control?”
He decided to take a different
approach to Mezzanine – he would
repurpose the band’s own material,
altering the catalogue as he went. He
also started to think of new ways ofsampling and recording – including
the use of synthetic DNA. “Repurpose
your own material into DNA and put that
into a spray paint can – that’s making
it into something new, then distrib-
uting in a whole new way,” Del Naja
explains. “If you store something on a
different medium, you change it. You’re
resampling on a molecular level, and
repurposing into something different.”
To achieve this, Melchior contacted
Swiss scientist Robert Grass, professor
at Zurich’s Functional Materials
Laboratory, who had been working on
a technique for coding books and music
using strands of DNA. Grass took the
four building blocks of DNA – adenine,
cytosine, guanine and thymine – and
converted binary digital signals into
a quaternary code, using adenine as
00, cytosine as 01, guanine as 10 and
thymine as 11, and coding the whole
album into strands of DNA.
Towards the end of 2018, the band
used this process to synthesise and
store thousands of copies of Mezzanine,
encoding them in tiny silicon beads,
which were then inserted into a spray
paint can. The beads are strong enough
to survive for thousands of years,
meaning graffiti artists could create
street art with paint that contains
millions of DNA versions of Mezzanine.
Currently, it would take a portable
real-time genetic sequencer roughly
a week to play the album.
“You could use a sequencer to
read the information in real-time and
generate a code that automatically
reverts to music,” says Grass. “That
would mean we wouldn’t need to use
huge server farms to store music.”
Melchior expects a future synthetic
DNA culture bank along the lines of
the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. “Our
civilisation could crash into dust and
rebuild itself using different technology,
meaning they couldn’t access our
computers or disks,” he says. “Since
every human has DNA, any future civili-
sation will probably try to work out how
to sequence DNA. If they can sequence
DNA, they can listen to Mezzanine. The
first thing a future civilisation could learn
about us might be Massive Attack.” Stephen Armstrong wrote about
violence and crime in Glasgow in 01.19Robert Del Naja and Andrew Melchior
discuss robotics and art for a
potential project with the Autodesk
AI team at Pier 9, via a Skype callLeft: Del Naja’s studio setup includes (l-r) a Moog System 55, a DAW/Ableton Live (plus cup of tea), and a Neve Genesys
PHOTOGRAPHY:^ ANDREWMELCHIOR