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That's the release date of the new 'experiment' from the Flaming Lips. It's a project of
rather grand design, and it sprang forth from the mind of Mr Wayne Coyne....
"Okay, on go we start it," Wayne pauses for this to sink in and shouts, "One, two, three,
go!"
He stabs the play button on the cd player and a voice declares, "This is track number eight."
This voice surrounds us coming from all the stereos in this room and the next. It sounds...
POWERFUL.
"CD Number One," comes a voice from behind me.
From the other room, "Number Two,"
From in front of me, "Number three."
Then it begins.... unearthly yet melodic music is, quite literally, swirling around
us. We move to the hallway between the two rooms, Wayne cranks a stereo - in the room we just
left - a little higher, and then joins us in the hallway. Then he grins as his voice comes
from around a corner and begins to relate a tale about his dogs. And fluffy toy animals, and
some giant plastic bugs. There's two then three interlocking drum patterns coming from all
directions, and then it really starts... voices EVERYWHERE singing the choral
refrain, "The big ol' bu--ug is the new... ba-by..no--owww..." The music surges from alternate
directions and we start to turn ourselves round and move side to side - experimenting with
this melange that has become this glorious total sound. Gentle guitar, stray noises, voices,
voices, and beautiful strings and horns just swooping past and around. At times it's like
there are three clones of the Flaming Lips all playing at once, with slightly different songs
that only almost lock in. Then it's all synched and it's a total sound again. The process
just makes it all the more exciting and powerful. Stuff races around the room and you feel
like you've been hit in the head. This particular song ends with about a million dogs all
barking from all directions i.e. it's bloody frightening.
Which kind of sums up the record - alternately glorious, breathtaking, exciting, fragile and
ultimately frightening. An intense vision realised in the true rich Flaming Lips tradition
but eschewing the guitar pyrotechnics of the past for an altogether more atmospheric (and
ultimately more stunning) arsenal that leads, truly, to a step beyond. Wayne explains that
he was, ".. bored of people being able to point at a part of a song and say, 'Well, that's
a Nirvana influence and there's the Stooges,' and all that.." So he made a record that comes
on four cds to be played simultaneously. "Well, now no-one can say that we're doing anything
that's been done before.."
Well, not exactly - people have dabbled with simultaneous players, but it never reached this
level. It was always just a few extra warblings coming from the other direction. This is four,
count them, FOUR cds and a total enclosing sound. You see, these people didn't enter into
such an idea lightly, "Some of the songs are designed to go in and out of sync - we changed
them on purpose. I wanted a record to challenge people. Something that you have to listen to
a couple of times before you can decide if you like or not." Let's make it clear, this record
is not normal. In a sense beyond needing four stereos to play it on - for instance, Wayne is
talking about warnings in the sleeve instructions for some songs. And there's the titles -
'When train runs over the camel but is derailed by the gnat', 'Ok, I'll Admit That I Don't Really
Understand', '30,000 feet of despair' and 'Riding to work in 2025 (Your Invisible Now)'.
Take the latter, a song about paranoia - anchored in the tale of a character who imagines
he is a futuristic secret agent who collapses into insanity due to the pressure of being the
most important secret agent in the world. But the character suddenly realises that he could
imagine his own descent into insanity because of how vivid the vision of his fantasy is.
Check the lyrics - "On some driven ship, the morning commuter ride, everything is orange
and bright. Your invisible now, and I know it's hard to get used to, 'cause you're the last
secret agent reporting back to nothing...." It goes on and it's pretty wild. Imagine, if you will,
this tale set to a spooky swirl of sound - with drums that sound like they were miked in a
submarine and angular guitars that leap at you from alternate corners of the sound panorama.
The voice just creeps and floats through that web and it really does enchant you. They just
seem to have absorbed all music and put it back in a form so different that you really can't
identify any of it any more. You find yourself thinking, "Well that might have been trip-hop
but it isn't it's just... different."
So, Wayne seems to have achieved his aim - it's bold and brave - but it won't sell millions.
It will however, force people who hear it to sit down and think about what it will mean when
they say they're going to make a record from now on. And maybe, just maybe, we'll all be
looking back to the 28th of October 1997 in years to come.
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