- - - - - - - -
Current
Issue
Editor's Desk
Write for Pif
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
- - - - - - - -
|
|
| PAST MUSIC REVIEWS | MORE REVIEWS |
|
Stick It In Your Ear : Page 1, 2, 3, 4 The Lips were then without a drummer for maybe the fourth time in their career, so Wayne Coyne figured he'd invite forty people to all drive their cars to a car park. Then, he'd give each of them one of forty different pre-recorded cassettes he'd made full of synchronized sound effects, symphonic music, spoken word off of the radio and TV, etc. As I understand it, one night Wayne's air conditioner broke, so he decided to sleep on his roof. His sleep was fitfully disturbed by humming insects, car horns, and the mocking purr of his neighbor's properly functioning air conditioner. In Wayne's words, "A moth in my ear turn[ed] into a flock of hummingbirds with threads tied around their necks carrying drops of blood." And well it would! Wayne felt the need to re-create the mental effect of that night, and the parking lot idea was his way of doing it. With a bullhorn, he cued all the participants; they all pressed play on their car stereos, and then got out of their cars and just walked around listening. |
|
These parking lot concerts were so successful that they evolved into the Boom Box Concert Tour. Rather than take his band on tour, Wayne purchased a bunch of boom boxes, glued all of their knobs fixed to his specifications, filled them all with different color-coded tapes of his own devising, and hit the road. You paid your money, were handed a boom box, escorted to a particular section, and assigned a conductor. Your job was to ride the volume of your boom box as per your conductor's instructions, while an overall PA system further amplified all the boom boxes, with Coyne supervising the entire affair (see figure A).
Had Wayne Coyne stopped there, these experiments would have probably disappeared into that vast suburban garage art void, but Coyne kept going. (His band has a Warner Bros. record contract, remember?) Based on the parking lot concerts, the Flaming Lips cut a 4-CD set like no other, and now I can whimsically perform my own mini-boom-box concerts in the privacy of my own home.
FRUITS OF GENIUS (Zaireeka)
Joined by a new and better drummer, the Flaming Lips returned to the studio to record Zaireeka. Here's a short unpublished review I wrote of Zaireeka:
"What
do you get when you mix the rock opera schlock of Tommy, the acidic
lyrical musings of a Midwestern parking garage aficionado, and the chaos-infused
embodiment of Karlheinz Stockhausen's proposed process music? Yes, you
guessed it, it's the soon-to-be-out-of-print 4 CD extravaganza known as
The Flaming Lips' Zaireeka. Each CD contains different compositional
elements of the same 8 songs. The idea is to play all 4 CD's simultaneously
(low-income fans have been known to conduct in-store 'listenings' in their
local Wal-Mart electronic sections), position yourself somewhere in the
middle of this massive/hokey sonic bliss, and bug out. Even if this CD
set weren't so novel, it would still be the climax of the Flaming Lips'
diligent career. As my friends are often saying, 'Zaireeka is best
appreciated as the hypothetical soundtrack to a Terry Gilliam-directed
epic wherein Jim Carrey and Pee Wee Herman debate theology on Mt. Sinai.'
You might not be ready for this just yet."
The thing about CD players is, they don't synch up perfectly, so these songs had to be loose enough to elegantly absorb a modicum of out-of-phase-ness. Also, each stereo has its own particular tone. You can imagine the endless variations of sound that can be achieved simply by modifying a few variables (stereo placement, volume, equalization, and CD combinations, to name a few).
