How does it work ?
I was reaching for a Flying Saucer Attack CD this morning and scrounging around the F section of my album collection, I found myself looking curiously at my copy of The Flaming Lips' 1997 album Zaireeka. This has always been something of a dust-gatherer in my record collection - the album designed to be heard via four simultaneously-playing CDs was never possible back in the day and the album was quickly consigned to the shelf forever. But rediscovering the album again and having a couple of hours to myself at home I pressed my CD player, one of my DVD players and an old kitchen radio into action. 3 out of 4 discs was the best I could do on the day so having carefully set them all up, I let loose this wacky Flaming Lips experiment. I think I lasted all of two tracks, the whole thing sounding very much like 3 unrelated CDs playing at the same time. I had to admire Wayne Coyne's powers of persuasion for convincing Warners to put this out - this was a couple of years before the group found unlikely critical and commercial success with The Soft Bulletin, and I wonder too did anyone actually play the album as designed back in the day when DVD players weren't readily available as CD players. I imagine there's a Warners storage facility somewhere with a section of racking consisting of nothing but unsold copies of Zaireeka...
I was reaching for a Flying Saucer Attack CD this morning and scrounging around the F section of my album collection, I found myself looking curiously at my copy of The Flaming Lips' 1997 album Zaireeka. This has always been something of a dust-gatherer in my record collection - the album designed to be heard via four simultaneously-playing CDs was never possible back in the day and the album was quickly consigned to the shelf forever. But rediscovering the album again and having a couple of hours to myself at home I pressed my CD player, one of my DVD players and an old kitchen radio into action. 3 out of 4 discs was the best I could do on the day so having carefully set them all up, I let loose this wacky Flaming Lips experiment. I think I lasted all of two tracks, the whole thing sounding very much like 3 unrelated CDs playing at the same time. I had to admire Wayne Coyne's powers of persuasion for convincing Warners to put this out - this was a couple of years before the group found unlikely critical and commercial success with The Soft Bulletin, and I wonder too did anyone actually play the album as designed back in the day when DVD players weren't readily available as CD players. I imagine there's a Warners storage facility somewhere with a section of racking consisting of nothing but unsold copies of Zaireeka...
I never picked up the official release of 'Zaireeka!', but interestingly, I do have a single CD "mixed down" version created & sent to me my someone I was in touch with via an online forum many years back.
ReplyDeletePlayed in that format, it does begin to sound like a reasonably coherent (albeit typically way-out, rambling and weirdly mixed) 'Lips album, kind of reminiscent of the zanier stuff they've been putting out in the past decade or so, oddly enough.
I never fully warmed to it, but I recall there are a couple of songs on there which sound pretty cool, and it certainly marks a huge leap forward for their sound when you consider that their last album prior to this one was the 90% trad guitar rock-based 'Clouds Taste Metallic'...