Professor Yeti

I got a copy of Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka in the summer of 2002, but I didn’t listen to it in its entirety until last weekend, almost three years later. The delay wasn’t out of a lack of interest — after experiencing impressive Lips albums like Transmissions From the Satellite Heart and The Soft Bulletin, I was pretty eager to hear it.

Rather, it was a logistical hang-up: Zaireeka is an album of four coordinated CDs that contain different elements of eight tracks, so it takes four stereos synced together to produce the full work. This difficulty is why a lot of people have dismissed the album as absurd. Pitchfork, an online music zine which has since grown into an arbiter of indie rock taste, gave the album a rating of zero upon its release in 1997 because the reviewer only had one stereo, asking “Do I wanna buy three more CD players with which to enjoy Zaireeka or, say, eat?”

This misses the point, however. As Wayne Coyne, the band’s leader, says in the liner notes, Zaireeka shouldn’t really be thought of in the same terms as a typical album. Coyne describes how the project grew out of his experiments with synchronized tapes blasting out of the decks of cars — as many as fifty of them — in a parking garage. Along with the striking effects of music and sound rendered in so many dimensions, the way the people playing the tapes had a feeling of participation in the event appealed to him. Zaireeka grew out of this desire to allow people “not just to go and witness an event but to be the event. Not just to experience the ‘show,’ but to have the ‘show’ and the audience participate in each other.”

The album is indeed open to interpretation by the listener-cum-performer. With the option to play any combination of the four CDs, along with the arrangement of the stereos, adjusting the base and treble, volume levels, and of course controlling the discs’ start times, the Zaireeka can sound quite different depending on exactly what you do. And combined with the fact that, as Coyne also notes, no two CD players have the ability to stay exactly in sync — nor even to play at a completely steady speed — the album comes pretty close to achieving his goal of “music that would be unfamiliar even after a thousand listens.”

When we listened to it on Saturday (with the help of some friends with a larger apartment than my own), we went for a fairly straightforward configuration of stereos in each of the four corners of the room, with roughly equal volume levels. About twenty of us huddled in the center of the room to listen.

Though Zaireeka is thoroughly experimental and uses its format in luxuriously eccentric ways, it actually contains some fairly accessible music. It opens, for instance, with a funky, friendly bass groove that would be at home on a pop album. That sound, coming from one CD, is soon joined by wholly different sounds coming from the other three stereos, melding into a cacophonous racket that is intriguing but a bit off-putting. Coyne says in the liner notes that the various elements of this particular song — “Okay, I’ll Admit That I Don’t Really Understand” — were put together randomly, and this is the most discordant track on the album. But similar collisions between the comfortable and the freakish occur throughout.

Perhaps the most impressive thing to me about listening to Zaireeka was how enveloping the sound was. I didn’t expect sound coming from eight speakers to sound so much different than the normal two, but having the music separated out into all these different channels was immersive in a way that I don’t think those new surround-audio CDs will ever be (though I’ve not tried them). The slight mismatch in timing and the variability of that timing during the course of a track has a lot to do with it, I suspect. For one, it mirrors the unpredictability of listening to an actual performance. It also creates spooky, fleeting quasi-harmonies when the same vocal or instrumental part comes out of multiple channels fractions of a second askew.

I found the interplay between elements on the four CDs enthralling, with instruments and voices moving around in space and relative time. True to the project’s intent, our particular setup conjured some additional dynamics for the performance: There were times when a bass- or drum-heavy part vibrated the floor through the stereo with a big fat subwoofer hooked up to it, only to have its relation to the rest of the music change dramatically moments later when it shifted to the aging boombox.

The overall experience of listening to Zaireeka was thrilling, and most of the friends I had invited seemed thoroughly engaged in it, too. My immediate reaction was that I’d like to listen to it again soon — it won’t be another three years before the next session, though it will of course be different by design than this one.

It also occurred to me that it’s a shame this album hasn’t gained broader notoriety in the wake of the Lips’ more recent million-selling hits. In a world of Muzak, iPods, homogenized radio and other forces that often conspire to make music merely background noise, Zaireeka is exactly what we need — songs that make us a part of them, even if, like me, you can’t strum a chord.

Teague Lyons (teague@professoryeti.com) is planning another Zaireeka listening party, if you want to come.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, May 17th, 2005 at 7:09 pm and is filed under Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.