One of the worst things about The Flaming Lips "Zaireeka" is that not too many people have heard it the way it's supposed to be heard. If you're not familiar with Zaireeka, it's an album consisting of four cds which are meant to be played on four separate cd players at the same time. Each song on each album has a count off so that you can synchronize the cd players, and then the song starts.
When I was still a college student, I would make the trek from my home town of Trenton to Carbondale, where I would pay Jon a visit. I don't recall Jon ever paying me a visit, which might help explain the nature of our friendship, but I really don't care about that. I've never been worried that spending time with Jon will be boring, even when we end up doing nothing. We all know people like that. At least I hope that most people know someone like that.
Anyway, on more than one trip to Jon's place in Carbondale, he would throw a Zaireeka listening party, in which four house sized stereos would magically appear, and various persons would gobble up various drugs. I vividly remember people laughing for no reason other than the fact that Zaireeka was playing.
In its natural state (played as it is supposed to be played), Zaireeka is a stew of sound you can almost taste. In its unnatural state (ie. playing one of the four discs in a car stereo by itself), Zaireeka is corn, some potato bits, and a bit of bouillon lying around the kitchen, some of it in the pantry, some of it in the refrigerator.
Around the time Zaireeka was released I got into making my own music using a piece of software called AcidMusic. I never really made anything worth talking about (although I did make my own Zaireeka-like experiment called "Tiny Mouse Parade"), but I did get to use the software to mix the four albums into one. The result of that effort is song posted here today.
This particular track is interesting because of the high pitched noise in the background. In the notes for the album, Wayne Coyne (The Flaming Lips singer) talks about experiments in the 50's that were staged to see if the use of noise could change brain function (or something like that). What I do know is that when a single cd of this song was played in a car stereo, it always smelled like something was burning. So maybe it worked? Or maybe car speakers aren't meant to play that high a pitch. In any case, this isn't the best song off the album (the size of the file was too large for the space I currently have available), but it does have the weird noise thing going for it.
If you're into this, let me know in the comments and I can probably hook you up with the rest of the album.
1 comment:
you knoe, its funny you mentioned the burning smell. I too always smelled that and I always would check a receiver because it smelled like a receiver burn. You know, like when Isaac Bruce dives for a ball at the Dome.
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