The delightfully weirdsmobile (literally) process that went into the making of the Zaireeka LP is so quintessentially Flaming Lips, and one of the many reasons I love them.
It started with Wayne hearing the same tune coming out of two or three different cars in a parking lot, and digging that they were slightly out of sync—eventually leading years later to the whimsical explorations known as the “Parking Lot Experiments.”
In the experiments Wayne and Steven took dozens of cassette tapes of stuff they’d recorded —each cassette tape held different bits, and each was to be played in a different car. The fact that they sent out flyers seeking 50 cars with tape decks to play 50 cassettes, inviting their community to participate is just the coolest thing ever. If you were there, you were assigned a cassette and instructed to play it loudly on cue. In the video footage from one of the experiments, you can see Wayne using a hand-drawn chart and megaphone to conduct an unruly orchestra of car stereos. Who knew that such far-out happenings were a thing in Oklahoma City in the late 90’s?!
As Wayne and Steven worked to turn the material into an album, Wayne originally envisioned 100 CDs, but was talked down to 20 CDs, then 10, and finally 4 CDs. Fortunately, some of the material created that didn’t fit onto Zaireeka was used on The Soft Bulletin. And as Wayne explains in the video below, this was a turning point for the band, expanding their sound to include more layered and complex compositions.
I haven’t yet listened to Zaireeka but I’m working on it. I’ve got the four CD players —one dusty boombox, the disc player on our PC, and two portable car CD players. Next will be finding the time and extra willing hands to help me hit “Start” on all four CD players at once. But inevitably the machines run at slightly different speeds, and that’s part of the fun, as Wayne explained in an October 27, 2002 post on TheDig.com:
“Part of it is that your mind is just so used to music being connected, you can’t quite comprehend that this music is starting to lose contact with itself,” Coyne said in 2020, explaining how it feels to be listening to Zaireeka when the CDs inevitably begin to fall out of line with each other. “So your mind stretches a little bit to connect a beat that now is, little by little, getting ahead of itself. A bass line that’s dropping behind everybody else. And a voice that used to be in time now isn’t. And so there’s this strange floating moment where you’re trying to concentrate and keep them all veering straight ahead. And it’s exhilarating. There’s no other music that is going to do that.”
There’s also no other music I know that comes with a warning label:
WARNING: This is a unique recording. These eight compositions are to be played using as many as four compact disc players, and have synchronized start times. This recording also contains frequencies not normally heard on commercial recordings and on rare occasion has caused the listener to become disoriented. These extremely high and low frequencies can cause a person to become disoriented, confused or nauseated. DO NOT listen repeatedly at high volume. Make sure infants are out of listening range. Zaireeka should not be listened to while driving.
Will I become disoriented? Confused? Nauseated? I’ll have ample chances to find out. The Zaireeka liner notes say each disc can be played alone, or in combination with any of the other discs, in twos or threes. In fact, there are 15 total combinations possible!
Hearing all 15 combinations is now one of my life goals.
