Zaireeka

Untitled

Zaireeka is the title of the eight studio album by the __ band The Flaming Lips. Released in 1997, the experimental rock album consists of four compact discs. Each of the eight songs included consists of four tracks, one from each CD; the album was designed so that four tracks of one song, when played simultaneously on four separate audio systems, would produce a harmonic or juxtaposed sound. The discs may be included in different combinations, omitting one, two or three discs. The album's title is a portmanteau of the words "Zaire" (symbolizing anarchy) and "eureka" (representing new ideas).

Zaireeka was the first album made by the band since the departure of guitarist Ronald Jones, and it marked the beginning of the group's new direction. It defined the sound and style of later albums, especially the critically-acclaimed The Soft Bulletin. Zaireeka, and its related events, remain the predecessor to The Flaming Lips' later, more conventional surround sound releases.

Track information

Track listing

All four discs have identical track listings:

1. "Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand" – 2:51
2. "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)" [sic] – 7:03
3. "Thirty-five Thousand Feet of Despair" – 4:59
4. "A Machine in India" – 10:23
5. "The Train Runs over the Camel But Is Derailed by the Gnat" – 6:14
6. "How Will We Know? (Futuristic Crashendos)" – 2:23
7. "March of the Rotten Vegetables" – 6:28
8. "The Big Ol' Bug Is the New Baby Now" – 5:05

All tracks written by The Flaming Lips.

About the songs

Zaireeka opens with "Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand," a song about not comprehending events that are taking place. The second track, "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)" tells a science-fiction story about a man who pretend to be a secret agent in the future and imagines his own psychological demise from the stress "of being the most important secret agent in the world." "Thirty-five Thousand Feet of Despair," the third song, is the tragic story of an airplane pilot who commits suicide midflight. The next song, "A Machine in India," is about the "dull and depressing, mild insanity" that Wayne Coyne's partner slips into during her menstrual cycle. Next, "The Train Runs Over the Camel But is Derailed by the Gnat," a speech by a man who is on the verge of discovery, but ends up "talking himself into circles." Track six, "How Will We Know? (Futuristic Crashendos)" is based on an urban legend that states that being exposed to high and low frequencies can cause a person to experience premonitions. "How Will We Know?" is infamous for the high and low frequencies that caused the band to place a warning on the album cover and inside the booklet. The seventh song, "March of the Rotten Vegetables," is "music for a cartoon about a group of demented vegetables." The eighth and final song, "The Big Ol' Bug is the New Baby Now," contains a spoken-word story about Coyne's dogs and ends the album with loud barking from each disc.

Samples

The following samples are from the same 29-second section of "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)," as featured on each disc of the album, followed by a stereo mix down of the octophonic source to provide an example of how the elements of Zaireeka sound when played together.

History

Historical Context

The circumstances that led to the birth of Zaireeka placed The Flaming Lips in a position between a rock and a hard place. The departure of guitarist Ronald Jones left them attempting to once again find their footing as a band. In addition, Warner Bros. Records was unstable, and the flop of the previous Flaming Lips album (Clouds Taste Metallic) threatened their status at the label. They eventually found that drummer Steven Drozd could make up for the loss musically. Drozd's position in the band became that of a multi-instrumentalist. However, finding a way to overcome the vacuum left by Jones in the live shows proved to be much harder, and in order to maintain activity and output, Wayne Coyne created the concept of the Parking Lot Experiments.

Parking Lot Experiments

During 1996 and 1997, The Flaming Lips ran a series of events known as "The Parking Lot Experiments." Wayne Coyne had created 40 tapes intended to be played together, synchronized. The band invited people and their cars to parking lots, where they would be given one of the tapes and then instructed when to start them. The music itself was "a strange, fluid 20 minute sound composition."

The Experiments were inspired by a concert Coyne attended in 1978. He had noticed that people throughout the parking lot were playing the same songs at the same time.

Production

Production of the album was preceded by two bizarre events, both of which were later recounted in "The Spiderbite Song" from The Soft Bulletin. Michael Ivins was involved in a car crash, and Steven Drozd was bitten by a spider.

The Flaming Lips began work on Zaireeka in April, 1997 in the then-new Tarbox Road Studios. Initially, the band was frustrated while making the album. Even after funneling half of the budget for the next album into Zaireeka, there were no tangible results. The band was having trouble writing for the four-CD medium. Finally, Coyne exclaimed "Look, we don't have to be friends... but we have to make this record!" Disallowing personal relationships to get in the way of creating the album helped to generate progress, but it was only until the band discovered that it had to write for the medium (as opposed to trying to put normal songs into the four CDs) that they began completing songs.

During production of Zaireeka, several songs were written that did not work in the special format, including "Race For The Prize", which would later be featured on The Soft Bulletin.

Release

Warner Bros. Records was initially apprehensive about releasing Zaireeka, so The Flaming Lips' manager Scott Booker carefully researched the costs of releasing a box set. Through his work, Booker discovered that Zaireeka could be released so that once 12,000 copies had been sold, the label would break even (advance orders came to 14,000 copies). Booker pitched the album to Warner Bros. Records president Steven Baker.

According to the deal they made,

• For an advance of $200,000, the band would make both Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin.
• Zaireeka would not count towards the seven albums The Flaming Lips were under contract to create.

In addition, Booker mentioned that by allowing the media to proclaim how "weird" the band was with Zaireeka, they would be more prepared to treat The Soft Bulletin as a serious album.

Zaireeka was released in October, 1997. As of 2006, 28,000 copies have been bought.

Boom Box Experiments

After completion of Zaireeka, The Flaming Lips tried an unconventional method to tour the album. "The Boom Box Experiments," like the Parking Lot Experiments that preceded work on the album, involved taped being played at the same time. However, these shows were held in actual rock venues, and the band supplied their own boom boxes. Coyne and Drozd conducted two "choirs" of people controlling the boom boxes, giving them instructions for actions like turning the volume up or down, while Ivins controlled the PA mixer.

Songs played in the Boom Box Experiments include:

• "The Big Ol' Bug is The New Baby Now"
• "A Winter's Day Car Accident Melody"
• "Altruism, or That's the Crotch Calling the Devil Black"
• "Heralding In a Better Ego"
• "Realizing the Speed of Life"
• "Schizophrenic Sunrise, or The Loudest Blade of Grass"

Aftermath

With Zaireeka, The Flaming Lips had overcome the loss of Ronald Jones and proved they could still work as a band. The situation at Warner Bros. Records was still dire, including a risk of being dropped from the label. Songs had already been written for the next album, The Soft Bulletin, which would turn out to be a critical hit and breakthrough for the band into the mainstream.Zaireeka remains obscure compared to later Flaming Lips releases, but it is also an important album in their canon of works.

Logistics

File:Zdiscs.JPG

Zaireeka is typically played with more than one piece of equipment. Here, discs one and three are in two boomboxes.

The speakers being used may be physically positioned in any number of ways—high and low, in entirely different rooms, and so on; some may even choose to disable the left or right speaker of one or more systems. The discs may be played (intentionally or not) slightly out-of-sync, resulting in effects such as an echo dying away before the original sound is produced from a different disc. Further, the type of equipment the discs are played on affects the results; thus, a cheap boombox may be playing one disc while another is playing in a DVD player through a television and a third is in a high fidelity system—which discs are in which systems will determine the relationships between them.

Other formats

Flaming Lips member Wayne Coyne confirmed that Zaireeka will eventually be released on DVD format in the vein of the surround-sound special editions of Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, The Soft Bulletin and At War With The Mystics.

In the UK, the Race for the Prize and Waitin' for a Superman singles were released in 2-disc sets. Each disc of the two sets contained both "Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now)" and "Thirty-five Thousand Feet of Despair," each CD in the sets containing a different version from a CD in Zaireeka, so that by buying both sets the listener can play the songs as they would if they owned Zaireeka. This marked the first time material from the album would be released in the four-disc format in Europe. The Waitin' for a Superman Maxi-CD, as released in the US, contains stereo mixes of the two songs.

Critical reception

Critical reaction to the album was mixed. Rolling Stone gave Zaireeka four stars out of five, writing: "Zaireeka's wall-of-surround-sound approach melds droning-rock dissonance with warped, off-kilter pop melodies, producing a totally immersing post-Pet Sounds audio seance." All Music Guide mentioned that the album would only really be accessable to hardcore Flaming Lips fans, but that "they're in for the musical experience of a lifetime."

Critics who disliked the album cited what they viewed as a ridiculous concept. Pitchfork gave the album its rare 0.0 rating, criticizing the concept for its "ridiculousness" and dismissing the project as "completely useless." The Flaming Lips' next album, The Soft Bulletin, received a rating of 10.0 (nearly as rare as 0.0) Similarly, Salon remarked in its review that "Musically... their 1995 album "Clouds Taste Metallic" offers the same psychotic results without all the technological hassle. And conceptually? The same thing, just all at once: stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid."

External links

• Album information at the official Flaming Lips website.
• Information about the Parking Lot Experiments at the official Flaming Lips website.
• Information about the Boom Box Experiments at the official Flaming Lips website.
• Complete transcription of Zaireeka liner notes.
• Zaireeka at All Music Guide.