THE GENES OF A ROCK STAR

2003. In the voice and synthesizers of Ladytron, there was Mira Aroyo. In a laboratory at the University of Oxford, behind a high-range fluorescence microscope, there was Mira Aroyo as well, a graduate student in genetic science. With her pale complexion, black hair, and uncanny voice, having abandoned her studies just a year short of completing the impressive postgraduate program, she is now one of the best-known icons of the musical genre known as electroclash.

Mira Aroyo was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1977. As a girl she like to play the guitar and the accordion, but she was also interested in science. Years later, her family moved to Israel and then to the United Kingdom, where Mira began to collect vintage synthesizers and to work as a DJ. It was there she came into contact with other musicians interested in breaking up the stereotypes of Britpop, which had been in fashion through the 1990s and the early years of the new century: Helen Marnie, Daniel Hunt, and Reuben Wu. Assembled under the name Ladytron, they sold millions of albums between 2001 and 2013. And in 2019 they released a new album bearing simply the name of the group as title.

Speaking of her parents’ reaction, Mira told an interviewer: “Naturally they were a bit scared and skeptical at first, but they knew it made me happy and that we were taking it seriously, so they ended up being supportive.” For as it happened, while Ladytron was recording Light & Magic (perhaps their best album) in 2002, the secondary vocalist of the band, which produced a sophisticated, sometimes darkly-tinged combination of pop, rock, and electronic rhythms, was also working in the field of genetic science, under the supervision of two legends in biochemistry François-Xavier Barre and David J. Sherratt as part of a research project entitled “The Role of the C-terminus of FtsK in Xer Recombination,” about a product of protein truncation and its relation to DNA: “In simple terms it is about how bacteria know when to divide, which is something they do in order to replicate, and make sure they have the right kind of genes in each new cell,” commented Mira in an interview with Peter Quincy Ng in a Swedish online magazine.

“I was a geneticist doing a PhD and realizing lab work wasn’t for me. We were doing Ladytron at the same time and I was enjoying it more. It was easier and more fun.” This was Mira Aroyo’s account of her abrupt abandonment of her postgraduate studies, just a year before completing them. As she explained in an interview with Thomas Matich:

“For a while I was balancing both, and then it became impossible. It’s not the kind of thing that you do a little bit of freelance stuff, it totally consumes you; you work seven days a week —people work 70 hours a week with their heads in the dirt. It’s not something you can dip in and out of... and the field moves so quickly that even when I was working, to now, it’s Just light years ahead— it’s moved on so much. It’s easy to read scientific american or something, but it’s hard to stay in touch with exactly What’s going on.”

Por: Farahnoise y Dolores Garnica

Essayist and journalist. She has worked as a promoter, manager and communicator. She is a columnist for ITESO’s Magis magazine and a regular contributor to Luvina, a magazine of the University of Guadalajara. His first book of essays, “Un gris, casi verde ”, by Editorial Paraíso Perdido, was presented in 2017.