Zaireeka

About

Zaireeka is the 8th studio album for The Flaming Lips and was recorded between April and August of 1997, and released on 28th of October of that same year. Zaireeka is well known and infamous for its concept. At the time, Zaireeka was released on four CDs and were meant to be played with four CD players simultaneously. And in doing so, this would create a juxtaposed and almost aleatory sound as a result. Wayne Coyne would write on the CD pamphlet of Zaireeka and express his own opinions on the album and it's concept as a whole. Calling it, "Retarded, but none the less invigorating...". After the release of Clouds Taste Metallic, the guitarist Ronald Jones leaves the band in the summer of that same year. Dave Fridmann, an engineer and producer whose worked with The Flaming Lips, was quoted saying after the departure of Ronald Jones, "What the hell are The Flaming Lips anymore?". And Wayne further doubled down on this statement by saying, "Why don't we do something completely absurd?" off of the 2013 documentary for The Soft Bulletin by Pitchfork. And then, Wayne convinced an experimental show that would later be called, "The Parking Lot Experiments". The Parking Lot Experiments were concerts held between 1996 and 1997, in which Wayne created 40 cassette tapes that were meant to be played in full synchronization and harmony. The band invited people to bring in their cars and put them in parking lots in which they would be handed one of the tapes and given instructions on when to play them. This would create a strange, indeterminacy sound collage; sound that lasted between twenty minutes. During the recording for Zaireeka, some songs wouldn't make the cut due to not wanting to split one song onto four CDs. One of these songs were, "The Race for The Prize", and would later be reserved for their next album, "The Soft Bulletin".

via Last.fm