OK Good goes on their own for “Of The Blue Colour of the Sky”

OK Go, the band whose inventive internet campaigns and self-directed music videos have set records and won the band a GRAMMY®, announces the formation of Paracadute. Paracadute and OK Go will oversee the distribution and promotion functions for the band and have planned an extensive promotional campaign for OK Go’s latest album, Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, which was released in January. Just as the band saw an opportunity to do something different with their homemade videos, OK Go see untapped potential in the sea change that the music industry is experiencing and believe there are tremendous opportunities for artists capable of managing their own promotion and distribution. The band, who have always controlled their publishing, merchandise, touring, and all other non-recording rights, are parting by mutual agreement with EMI Music.

“We’d like to thank the people who have worked so hard on our behalf,” said OK Go singer Damian Kulash, who will discuss the band’s departure from the label on NPR’s “All Things Considered” today. “And we’d like to thank our fans for making this choice an easy one for us.”

The agreement will be effective April 1st. Without missing a beat, OK Go will perform on “Jimmy Kimmel Live” that evening and launch a North American tour on April 13th, which will include stops at numerous music festivals, including Bamboozle, Bonnaroo and Sasquatch. With its April 30th show at Brooklyn’s Music Hall of Williamsburg already sold out, OK Go has added another date at the venue – April 29th. (See below for tour itinerary.) The band will appear on “Late Show with David Letterman” on April 28th, “The Colbert Report” on April 29th and “Late Night With Jimmy Fallon” on May 4th.

OK Go unveiled its latest crazily ambitious clip – the video for current single “This Too Shall Pass,” which features a two-story Rube Goldberg machine built by the band and Syyn Labs, a team of creative engineers with day jobs at NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory – last Monday and it garnered over six million views in the first six days, becoming the #1 Top Rated (All Time) music video on YouTube and going to #1 on the Viral Video charts, Reddit and Digg. Kulash has been asked to participate in the “How to Create a Viral Video” panel taking place at SXSW this Saturday, March 13th. He and bassist Tim Nordwind with Syyn Labs will discuss the new clip on “Last Call with Carson Daly” on Tuesday, March 16th.

The band hosted bi-coastal celebrations of the video’s release, with 100 contest winners joining Kulash for a Q&A session in New York City immediately after the premiere. Fans could also join the live chat online via Ustream. Last Friday, OK Go screened the video and performed a special acoustic set at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for members of LACMA, MUSE and Syyn Labs. The event was a benefit for LACMA MUSE.

Recommends, the Barclaycard Mercury Prize newsletter, pronounced the video as “stunning,” adding “Few bands have a reputation that rivals OK Go when it comes to inventive videos, but even by their own high standards the LA based quartet have excelled…” CNN said it “may be the most mesmerizing music video of the year” while the Boston Herald noted: “No word on the follow up. But it will take a collaboration between James Cameron, Stephen Hawking and “Doc” Brown of “Back to the Future” fame for OK Go to top itself once more.” You can check the video out at:

http://www.youtube.com/okgo

As promised by their tag line, State Farm’s sponsorship of the new Rube Goldberg video is helping OK Go “be there” for their fans: it is embeddable by fans and can be posted anywhere on the internet. A furor erupted last month because fans could not embed earlier OK Go videos due to contractual issues. When Kulash posted a candid and even-handed explanation of the situation to fans, his letter itself went viral, netting over 500,000 hits in two days. He commented further on the issue in an Op-Ed piece that was published in The New York Times on February 21st:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/20/opinion/20kulash.html

The new video features the album/single version of “This Too Shall Pass,” and follows up on the explosive success of their last video, a live recording of the same song that featured 130 members of the Notre Dame marching band. That clip marked the first time that a song’s video and recording session were one and the same, and in only a couple weeks its online views soared past two million.

“This Too Shall Pass” recently impacted Modern Rock radio, where it’s been well-received, garnering play already on KNRK-Portland, KRBZ-Kansas City, KCRW-Los Angeles, WEQX-Albany, KCMP-Minneapolis, WWCD-Columbus and WRFF-Philadelphia. OK Go has been tapped as Xbox LIVE’s “Artist of the Month” for March, facing off with fans in a Game With Fame event.

With 180 million video streams and counting, OK Go – comprising Damian Kulash, Tim Nordwind, Dan Konopka and Andy Ross – is the most-downloaded band ever. Of The Blue Colour Of The Sky, the follow-up to 2005’s Oh No, debuted in the Billboard Top 40 and earned a 4 ½ star review from Alternative Press, while Spin hailed it as “ambitious” and absolutepunk.net pronounced it “wholly triumphant.” It was produced by ex-Mercury Rev member David Fridmann (Flaming Lips, MGMT).

OK GO – SPRING 2010 NORTH AMERICAN TOUR

Date City Venue
4/13 Salt Lake City, UT The State Room
4/14 Denver, CO Bluebird Theatre
4/16 Milwaukee, WI Turner Hall
4/17 Chicago, IL Metro
4/18 St. Louis, MO The Old Rock House
4/20 Columbia, MO The Blue Note
4/21 Indianapolis, IN Earth House
4/22 Detroit, MI Magic Stick
4/23 Toronto, ON Mod Club
4/27 Northampton, MA Pearl Street
4/28 New Haven, CT Toad’s Place
4/29 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg
4/30 Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg – SOLD OUT
5/2 East Rutherford, NJ Meadowlands (Bamboozle)
5/3 Philadelphia, PA Theatre of Living Arts
5/5 Washington, DC 9:30 Club
5/7 Boston, MA Paradise Rock Club
5/9 Baltimore, MD Rams Head Live
5/11 Raleigh, NC Lincoln Theatre
5/12 Charlotte, NC Visulite Theatre
5/13 Atlanta, GA The Loft
5/14 Tampa, FL Crowbar
5/15 Orlando, FL Firestone Live
5/16 Gulf Shores, AL Hangout Music Fest
5/18 Dallas, TX Granada Theatre
5/19 Austin, TX The Parish
5/21 Los Angeles, CA Henry Fonda Theatre
5/22 San Diego, CA House of Blues
5/26 San Francisco, CA The Fillmore
5/28 Portland, OR Hawthorne Theatre
5/29 George, WA Sasquatch Festival
6/11 Manchester, TN Bonnaroo