The Flaming Lips
Zaireeka

Sixteen years have passed since my arrival on the planet Debaser, a lifetime…

Many things have changed since then, apart from the fact that I’m sixteen years older.

It was 2004, and without getting into personal matters, just speaking about musical facts, many things were different, the first that come to mind:

• Mark Linkous, Elliott Smith, Vic Chessnut were still alive
• The first edition of X Factor was still a long way off
• Lucio Dalla and Pino Daniele were still alive
• The Blue still existed (see below)...

In that year, exactly on May 7, I wrote my first "review" on the site, I was rightly taken to task, it was truly atrocious, I couldn't even believe someone would publish it...

I started it like this, caught in a wave of creative originality:

"Zaireeka is the most visionary product of the mind of the Flaming Lips' latest phase."

Today, to celebrate, encouraged by some new friends from Debaser, I decided to publish a new edition ("Zaireeka – Sixteen Years Later"), revised and corrected (but only to a certain extent), at least to explain to everyone where my nickname comes from. (A user years ago told me they were convinced with a name like that, that I was a blonde, with long hair and blue eyes, and they were really disappointed when I told them it wasn't so..).

A little preface.

I don't know if anyone has so brazenly circumvented the good rules of Debaser (someone will say: "Why didn't you just make a new version using the tools already provided by the review protocols?" I answer, "It wouldn't have had, I think, the right visibility, the one I desired" forgive my arrogance..).

So, let's come to Zaireeka, most of this new review is based on my comments (to which I wanted to make almost no post-correction) in response to the perplexities expressed by some users, who then became my un-friends in the days that followed.

The review is written in the present, despite the comments being from 2004, because this way I have the illusion of still being in that year, how nice it would be...

The Work consists of four CDs to be played simultaneously (I managed to do this more or less once by setting "appointments/relays" between the CD players).
The result is hallucinogenic (in the truest sense of the word) and difficult to explain in words.

Moments of heavenly sweetness (note from 2020: Exactly "celestiaca," a "blend" of "heavenly" and "paradisiacal"..) from the four corners of "paradise" (see the end of The Train...) alternate with sonic encirclements (from the drum solo coming in turn from the four speakers, in March..., to the barking dogs tearing you apart at the end of The Big...)…

… a track (How Will I Know) works like this: one CD "discusses by singing" (the melody is very beautiful) about a popular belief regarding the fact that listening to extreme audio frequencies allows you to predict the future. Meanwhile, the other three are playing those very frequencies!!!.

Another (Twenty-five thousand ..) has a beautiful melody (even if it's painful) immersed in ambient airplane and generically airport noises (different for each CD) aimed at describing the situation (a suicidal pilot in flight due to excessive responsibility towards passengers) from various different viewpoints (the suicidal pilot, the air traffic controller who is still monitoring the radar screen late at night in the hope of seeing the plane again)…

So let's put it this way. I consider myself one of the fans (unfortunately not many since it seems there's not even an Italian site dedicated to them while the great "Blue" will probably have one...) of a rather crazy band and one with unlimited imagination whose best definition I think might be: clowns obsessed with death led by a completely insane adult-child.

This means they often publish stuff that to most may seem outlandish, out of tune (people I try to make listen to FL stuff usually, thankfully not always, are horrified by Coyne's voice after two seconds of listening, but you know people are more allergic to peculiar and "off-key" things than to grasses since we're all now homologated) and completely senseless.

Go listen to Moth in the Incubator from Transmission From the Satellite Heart, a track which I think summarizes all their way of making music. A moaning melody and singing at the start, a disengaged interlude, and finally an explosion into a circus-psychedelic pandemonium at the end. When I listen to it, I imagine someone who has just discovered death (maybe a child who still thought he was immortal) or even someone who has been touched by the "Black Lady" (and Coyne, apparently was really touched by the "Black Lady" since once he was almost finished off by someone as mad as him, but with a gun in hand when he was earning a living working in a restaurant in Oklahoma City). And reacts by getting drunk on life and madness.

To understand the FL, one needs to understand that everything they do is born from the union between death and madness/lightheartedness (but also childish curiosity). If you don't understand this, there's a risk of judging them and those who follow them as just stoners if not worse (truth be told, Steven Drozd did sip some LSD, but Coyne, although it seems strange, never did)

That being said, something more on Zaireeka:
According to Coyne reported in the booklet, Zaireeka (the project which comes from the Parking Lot Experiments, a kind of crazy Drive-in where, under Coyne's direction, each occupant of a car played, possibly in sync, a cassette with specifically arranged music, sounds, and frequencies) is born from the combination of the words Zaire and Eureka, to highlight the union between chaos and the creative moment.

By their own admission, not even the FL knew what they actually wanted to achieve at the start of the project, they had only decided who should be the father (chaos) and the mother of the new-born (creativity)...

The particular thing about Zaireeka is that each performance of each of its single tracks is practically unique because it's virtually impossible to reproduce everything in the same way twice in a row (also depending on the quality of the 4 CD players used and their ability to maintain synchronization) so the listener becomes an actually active part and not just passive in listening. So in a certain sense it's the listener who "plays" Zaireeka.

As far as how to listen to it, like all things in life, if you really want them, you get them (the only problem is the price, but unfortunately as a fan, I had to sacrifice). I don't have four stereo systems at home, especially not in the same room. I managed as follows: a) CD1 on the main stereo system b) CD2 on a portable radio of my own c) CD3 on Walkman with speakers taken from my PC d) CD4 on a radio borrowed from a friend.

In conclusion, I like to think that the reason why record companies put out so much rubbish good only for selling is precisely to allow themselves to publish stuff like Zaireeka that only those who really want to find something out of the ordinary rush to buy.

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Post-script of June 2020: I didn’t want to post any tracks, because they couldn’t convey the idea..Just one more thing.. Sure, I may have lost some spontaneity, but on the other hand my way of writing has improved a lot since then, the sixteen years from this point of view are a good thing to have passed, but only for that...