Ready, Set, OK Go –Eight Songs In Eight Hours

The group has given themselves an eight-hour deadline to write and record eight songs in eight hours on April 25 at Berklee College of Music in Boston. Fans can watch the project as it unfolds through a live broadcast from the recording studio at rethink-music.com.

After recording from 4 p.m. to midnight, the album will be released 10 hours later through Bandcamp.com, a site that allows artists to sell music and merchandise directly to fans. Proceeds from the first week of downloads will go towards Berklee City Music, a nonprofit organization that provides music education for 4th to 12th graders.

“Digital technology allows singers who can’t sing and musicians who look better than they play to sing and play in tune and in time,” Folds said in a statement. “At the same time, it empowers the musicians to distribute music without a middle man and directly to an audience within moments of its creation. It even allows two-way communication during the process so that the audience might collaborate to some extent or be present in some way – like live music.”

The writing/recording/album release collaboration corresponds to the timing of Rethink Music: Creativity, Commerce and Policy in the 21st Century. The conference takes place April 25-27 at Hynes Convention Center in Boston.

Folds, Kulash, Palmer and Gaiman will give a presentation about the project at 10:40 a.m. at Rethink Music, followed by an 8 p.m. private concert for conference registrants at the Berklee Performance Center. The concert will also feature Basia Bulat and Black Joe Lewis & The Honeybears.

Kulash released his own statement about the project:

“Can the album cycle actually be reduced to a single day?”  If the recording industry is supposed to be a means of connecting musicians to music listeners, well, then, here it is – spontaneous and circular. They send us ideas and a day later we have an album, a show, and some semblance of a documentary. And then the next day (we hope), a big public flameout and a battle over rights and the release of competing slanderous autobiographies.”   

Click here for Rethink Music’s website.

Click here for Bandcamp’s website.

Click here to learn more about Berklee City Music.