Massive Attack are preserving Mezzanine in DNA for its 20th anniversary

Massive Attack will always go down as one of the true inspirations to the sound of electronic music we hear today. The Bristol group burst onto the scene in the 90s with their debut album ‘Blue Lines’ and since then have gone on to produce some of the most innovative work we’re likely to ever see that has placed them in the same echelon as legends such as the Prodigy, Portishead, Leftfield and much more.

One of their most iconic albums, ‘Mezzanine’, celebrates its 20th anniversary today and to celebrate Robert Del Naja and Grant Marshall have elected to preserve the album in DNA, which is slowly but surely becoming a more accepted way of storing data.

The pair are working with scientists from Zurich to compress the files down to 15 megabytes where they’ll be small enough to fit onto 920,000 strands of DNA that will then be stored on 5,000 tiny glass beads that will be too small for the naked eye to see.

The storage method will allow the music to be basically immortalised, which the scientists stressing that a CD will usually only last for 30 years on average.