In my review of Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, I theorized about the circular nature of experimentation in music. My basic philosophy was that the first step was just being experimental, then weird, then downright pretentious. But after the pretentious stage, something interesting happens, and the music reaches a point where it’s so ridiculously pretentious that you can’t help but recognize the genius within it. Metal Machine Music, Jethro Tull’s Thick As A Brick, and many others fall into this category, and much of The Flaming Lips’ catalogue is borderline brilliant. But, without a doubt, The Lips’ 1997 opus Zaireeka is truly deserving of the title ‘so pretentious it’s brilliant.’

The Flaming Lips are finally coming into their own after toiling in obscurity for the better part of twenty years, which is perhaps a testament to popular music’s cyclical nature. After years of boy bands and faux-angst uber-metal, some bands are suddenly being recognized for their own merits. Mind you, it’s a small revolution, but it’s a revolution nonetheless. A Grammy for Best Rock Instrumental at the 2003 Grammy Awards serves to illustrate just how far the group has come since fighting their way out of the wet paper bag that is Norman, Oklahoma.

Rumour has it that Wayne Coyne formed The Flaming Lips after he stole a number of musical instruments from a church hall in 1983. The story is probably just that - a story - but serves to exemplify the band’s twisted sense of humour and far out ideas. Whether or not the church incident happened isn’t important. What’s important is that Coyne formed a group along with his brother Mark, bassist Michael Ivins, and (eventually) drummer Richard English. Only the band themselves knew what they were thinking when they chose the name The Flaming Lips, but the moniker has been attributed to a number of sources, among them a porn film and a drug reference. The group debuted at a club for transvestites, eventually recording a debut on an independent label.

When Coyne’s brother left, Wayne assumed control of the group, and what followed was a prosperous career, albeit one featuring a revolving door at just about every position in the band. In 1993, Coyne recruited Ronald Jones and Steven Drozd to cut Transmissions From The Satellite Heart, the group’s first glimpse at stardom with the minor hit She Don’t Use Jelly (funny story, my biology student teacher had Transmissions playing in the background on his desk for the entire two weeks he taught us. Everyone else thought it was terrible and had no idea what it was - I just sat there with a goofy grin in appreciation of his unorthodox methods). She Don’t Use Jelly prompted the group to make an appearance on Beverly Hills 90210. As fate would have it, The Lips then proceeded to fade from sight, prompting the label of one hit wonder to crop up every so often.

After cutting one more album, The Lips just about fell apart. Jones departed on a spiritual journey of sorts, and drummer Steven Drozd’s hand nearly had to be amputated after a serious spider bite (a tale later recounted in The Spiderbite Song off of The Soft Bulletin). To make matters worse, Ivins was injured in a serious but appropriately bizarre car accident. After several months of recovery, the group went back into the studio as a trio (minus Jones, who as far as anyone knows, is still in the process of undertaking his “odyssey”). Several months in the studio resulted in Zaireeka, one of the most twistedly brilliant pieces of music ever cut to CD… rather, four CDs.

You see, Zaireeka is a four CD set, but it’s unlike any four CD set ever released before in that each of the four records contains different parts of the same songs. The idea is to synchronize each of the four records on four different CD players, and play them all in time with one another. When all four are combined together, the result is a complete song. The concept itself is bizarre, and it’s a logistical nightmare unless you’re like me and own about a dozen CD players, but if you’re able to get it just right, the result is absolutely magnificent, as if the band is right in the same room with you, playing personally for you. There’s so much clarity, and the sound is so airy, it’s a remarkable experience.

Part of the appeal of Zaireeka is it’s history and the context of it’s recording, all of which is chronicled in painstaking detail by Wayne Coyne in the record’s liner notes. A combination of the words Zaire and Eureka, Zaireeka represents a monumental oxymoron that represents chaos and genius, anarchy and brilliance, together as one whole creation. The entire catalogue of The Flaming Lips is rather bizarre in and of itself, but Zaireeka defines the group’s decidedly perverse philosophies about popular music.

Wayne Coyne’s conceptual opus, uniting madness and brilliance, is a direct result of Coyne’s own experimental nature. In the record’s liner notes, he accounts the first inklings of ideas that would eventually result in Zaireeka. The first inkling of the album is now referred lovingly to as The Parking Lot Experiments. Upwards of fifty cars would park themselves in the same covered parking garage, with Coyne giving each automobile a cassette with very carefully constructed arrangements. Every car would press play at the same moment, resulting in a massive orchestral movement that was as uncanny as it was interesting. Each cassette had a different arrangement with different sounds, frequencies and effects, with the end result being a piece of music that surrounded the audience, with each cassette working against one another musically in such a way that it created something lush, yet extremely unorthodox. These Parking Lot Experiments went over so well with their small audience, that Coyne toyed with the idea of attempting something similar, but slightly more conventional and easily digestible.

Coyne first envisioned the other aspect of the recording while synching up the same song on two different stereos and listening to them in a sort of pseudo-surround sound. This experiment resulted in a strange discovery. Even though two discs contained the exact same music and were synched up purposely, at times one CD player would lag slightly behind the other, then catch up. In short, after the first moments of a song, the players would gradually begin to wobble in and out of synch with one another. This discovery is one of the main principles under which Zaireeka was created: CD players will not play in synch with one another. They can get extremely close - especially with higher end models - but there will always be slight differences in the speed at which discs are read by a stereo.

Wayne wanted to capture these different aspects of music, and allow a mass audience to understand the power that music can actually have. Coyne wished to capture the unstructured nature of the parking lot he first worked and put them into a format that a regular person could still listen to and appreciate. Coyne wanted to create songs that were different every time you heard them, an album in which the listener themselves got to participate in along with the composer.

The basic premise behind Zaireeka, in Coyne’s own words, is to present music that is both clear and confusing, where rhythms fight each other, and where time signatures were simple yet unpredictable - music that would be unfamiliar even after a thousand listens. It’s for just that reason that it’s extremely difficult to review Zaireeka as a set of songs, but the songs themselves are really only half the fun of the whole surreal experience.

Because of the logistical challenges that come hand-in-hand with four separate compact discs meant to be synchronized, Zaireeka is really a record that benefits from an audience. For one thing, it makes setting the four CDs up that much easier, and it’s quite breathtaking to just lay down on the couch or bed and absorb the swirling sonic mish-mash, making the occasional comment about how particularly powerful a particular portion of a song is. Actually acquiring the services of four stereos was a problem due to several broken machines, but we eventually resolved it with some ingenuity. After some searching, we were able to find four separate stereos. One disc was played in my main JVC MX-J500 mini-system, one in my JVC KaBOOM! Box, one in my Sega Dreamcast (through the television speakers), and one on my computer, being blasted out of a set of grainy, dinky speakers. It took five tries before we were able to synch up properly, and then we were off.

Listening to Zaireeka alone presents much more of a challenge. In the liner notes, Coyne establishes that each disc is still listenable on its own, or two or three at a time. Disc 1 by itself is the most interesting of the individual parts, featuring most of the thumping bass and drums, but the long drawn out silences and missing crescendos only serve to prove that each disc is really only one part of a whole that needs to be played all at once. Three discs at a time gives a good approximation of the experience, but it’s still not quite there. However, I was lucky enough to stumble upon a method to listen to all four records at once. I press play on the fourth disc first, pausing it several seconds in. Then I can start the other three all at once (two remotes and my toe operating the third), before running back to the forth and activating it just as the others reach the same time on the display.

The music itself is absolutely gorgeous. The Flaming Lips eschew many traditional rock instruments in favour of a heavy techno and electronic vibe, but the guitars, basses, and drums are also present, creating a wild amalgamation of electro-rock that swirls all over. The instruments, with an extra six channels to work with, are much broader and more airy, with more room to work with. They seemingly hover in the air long after the sound itself has disappeared, and the sound itself is so rich and full that it’s amazing. The drums thunder all on their own, and the instruments move from album to album, taking up on one where the other left off. Coyne’s vocals are deep and textured as they emanate from two or more of the CDs at the same time. But at the same time, there’s always that margin of error and the wobbling sounds of different stereos that always create something new. Sometimes it creates a false echo in the vocals. Crescendos are late or early, and the rhythm on one disc seems to swirl arbitrarily in and out of synch with that of the other three discs. The result is both confusing and intriguing, and the pursuit of a perfect synchronization becomes all-consuming, yet it will forever remain just out of reach.

The idea and execution itself are enough to create an amazing (four) record(s), but it’s even more impressive that the songs themselves are excellent, not at all suffering from the novelty of Zaireeka’s concept. If Zaireeka had been only one disc, most of the numbers here still would have succeeded, because they were well-written and excellently arranged even before the process of cutting and pasting from disc-to-disc came about. Lyrically, Wayne Coyne is just as avant-garde and unconventional as he’s ever been, putting a decidedly twisted spin on far-out situations with a sly, sardonic wit about him. It’s apparent that Coyne doesn’t take himself or his band, fame, or even the conventions of music either. He’s instead more concerned with creating something that has meaning and will last long after The Flaming Lips have parted ways. The instruments and Coyne’s eccentric arrangements are aurally interesting, engaging the listener, and he utilizes the four CD format even more to his advantage, oftentimes utilizing frequencies that wouldn’t normally be possible with one record.

In fact, Zaireeka comes complete with a label that warns of frequencies not normally heard on commercial recordings, “on rare occasions has caused the listener to become disoriented.” An exaggeration, but only a mild one, as the swirling mass of instruments has an almost inebriating quality that music listeners would have to spend a lot more money to achieve. In fact, I’m sure there are many Flaming Lips fans that were never able to pile up enough cash to purchase Zaireeka, because of the money spent on various classes of toxins.

Zaireeka begins with a prompt on each CD that informs the listener of the track number and CD number that is heard as a list, starting with the first disc and ending with the fourth. The track then immediately segues into a heavy drum beat and a driving, funk-styled bassline on CD 1 that largely dominates the track, appropriately titled Okay I’ll Admit That I Really Don’t Understand. Random vocal melodies dominate most of the track, rising and falling over the repetition of the track name. Riding To Work In The Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now) is dominated by a piano and a fuzzed-out descending guitar riff that overpowers the listener, resulting in a subconscious nausea as your ears try to follow the intricate pattern.

Thirty-Five Thousand Feet Of Despair is perhaps the most ambitious track on Zaireeka, telling the detailed story of an airline pilot slowly losing his mind until he completely loses control on a trans-Atlantic flight, going to the bathroom and hanging himself. Each CD tells a different part of the story here, developing a marked contrast. CD 1 is from the perspective of a journalist reporting the story, while CD 2 is the last moments of sanity for the pilot. CD 3 is the airport where the plane is scheduled to land, interspersed with cuts of dialogue, and CD 4 is the insane side of the pilot. There’s eerie laughter and random, disconnected sounds run through a heavy processor. A Machine In India is over ten minutes in length, displaying Wayne Coyne at his wittiest, detailing what he describes as the “mild insanity that is PMS.” The song is lyrically entertaining (All that I think, all I thought and all I know the Syrian missile guides itself into the vaginas), but the true beauty is in the beautifully arranged acoustic guitars.

The Train Runs Over The Camel But Is Derailed By The Gnat continues the Lips tradition of unorthodox song titles, while How Will We Know? (Futuristic Crashendos) comes complete with a warning that it not be played while driving or near small children. Of the four discs, three contain frequencies much lower than what is normally heard on CD, which can cause dizziness for the listener. Essentially, the track is a play on the old urban legend that being exposed to extremely high and low frequencies at a high volume for a long time leaves people feeling as if they could predict the future. That of course, is untrue, but it’s remarkable the way the high, constant low and high hiss gradually works it’s way into the back of your head until it takes over some of the music and creates a vague feeling of disorientation.

March Of The Rotten Vegetables is, again, appropriately silly, while the closer The Big Ol’ Bug Is The New Baby Now is an interesting piece more reminiscent of a monologue than a song. Coyne just talks, telling an impromptu story about his pet dogs who love to chew things, complete with the ums and uhhs as he thinks of what he will say next. As the story goes on, the pitch of the background music increases (two of the discs actually contain audio from Coyne’s backyard at different times of day, complete with crickets chirping and dogs barking), before the story finishes and all of the discs dive into total madness with wild squeals, passionate screams and the feral barking of dogs that slowly gets louder and louder before, all of a sudden, dropping away to nothing.

Zaireeka is a remarkable album not only because it’s experimental and original conceptually, but because it’s also filled with beautiful arrangements and songs that lend themselves well to that concept. The chaos of out-of-synch stereos missing crescendos and wobbling in and out of speed still works sonically speaking, with a powerful groove and an innately experimental appeal. Zaireeka means progress in the face of decay, which is exactly what it is. The interlacing melodies are pretty, and the songs themselves are entertaining in more than just the context of the record’s concept. For anyone who considers themselves an audiophile, Zaireeka is an essential record that establishes the sonic capabilities and pure breadth of rock and roll music as an art form. I can't even begin to grasp the enormity and possible ramifications of the ambition which Zaireeka is built upon, but I know enough to realize when something is as oringinal and as powerfully executed as this four CD set is.

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The Flaming Lips - Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots


Recommended: Yes