Flaming Lips Zaireeka (Warner Brothers)
Both releases originate from an impulse to integrate the varied instrumental textures of orchestral music into rock ‘n’ roll without sacrificing rock’s simple power. But Pet Sounds is the precise and uncompromising vision of Beach Boys founder Brian Wilson, who wanted to control not just the musicians’ interpretations but also the listener’s. Zaireeka, by its very design, is an imperfect collaboration between the musicians and the listener.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
In his Kaleidoscope Eyes, which posits a broad definition of psychedelic music, Sun-Times critic Jim DeRogatis draws a comparison between Pet Sounds and the Flaming Lips’ Clouds Taste Metallic (1995). Lips singer and guitarist Wayne Coyne is no big fan of Pet Sounds, but since 1990’s In a Priest Driven Ambulance he and his band mates have been reaching past the standard pop lineup of guitar, bass, and drums just as Wilson did when he quit touring with the Beach Boys to write, arrange, and produce their records. An influx of industry cash only exacerbated the Lips’ experimental tendencies: the liner notes to their 1992 Warner Brothers debut Hit to Death in the Future Head list 33 acoustic and electronic instruments, including piano, organ, strings, horns, chimes, timpani, tabla, congas, samplers, tape, and power tools. Zaireeka was recorded, mixed, and mastered by Dave Fridmann during sessions for another record (a single CD due out next year), using a 24-track machine, a hard drive that allowed them to store another 40 tracks, and two samplers that could hold up to 16 tracks each.
A typical lineup included a wide range of percussion, bass guitar and upright bass, two or three electric guitars, piano and organ, accordion, and as many as five saxophones; on occasion Wilson called for flute, trumpet, trombone, French horn, vibraphone, harpsichord, ukulele, theremin, or several of the above. And in contrast to the Zaireeka tracks, which were built up through trial and error over a period of five months, each of the elaborate backing tracks for Pet Sounds was arranged and recorded in a single session. Wilson would show up with a simple chord sheet and work out each player’s part with him until he got what he wanted.
Zaireeka is only the latest installment in the Flaming Lips’ campaign to prove this point. In the fall of 1996 Coyne collected 40 cars with cassette decks in a parking garage and gave each driver a different tape with music, sound effects, or both. At his signal, the drivers all started the tapes. The result was “a kind of mutated symphony where the musicians are just tape decks,” he writes in the liner notes to Zaireeka. Coyne wanted to stage a musical event without performers, to give listeners a chance “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.”
