- #Flaming lips soft bulletin about atomic war archive#
- #Flaming lips soft bulletin about atomic war series#
It sounds like a recipe for chaos and understandably concert flyers would warn: "we are sceptical about the entertainment value," but herein was the genesis of the Z aireeka idea.Īt roughly the same time as Zaireeka the band recorded the more conventional The Soft Bulletin album which (as the only Flaming Lips album I own) does gain a place in the magazine this week.Īlthough it was already their 9th album it represented a leap forward in quality to what had come before and for many fans was their masterpiece. Concert goers or "volunteers" would convene at a space and "lend" the band their car or boom-box cassette decks and would orchestrate the simultaneous mass playing of pre-recorded tapes to provide an immersive surround sound experience.
#Flaming lips soft bulletin about atomic war series#
The band convened a series of interactive concerts or events dubbed parking-lot and boom-box experiments. We will need you and your car, and your tape deck, and your co-operation for about 2 hours.īut in 1996 the ever creative Coyne decided to try something different. Coyne kept his regular job in a restaurant for many years after the The Flaming Lips' formation. The Flaming Lips Man Festival, Wales, 2010įair enough, they started out like many high school bands without any pretensions and band members picked from friends and family dependent on whether they possessed any equipment (let alone if they could play it at all). This isn't news to me as they've always struck me as a high profile band without much substance, relying hugely on their original stage performances which involve amazing props, animal costumes, confetti guns, lazers, blow up balls and balloons (the arena carnage the morning after a headlining gig at Green Man Festival back in 2010 was something to see). In fact the reviewer had not actually heard the 4 parts in unison admitting he'd "never know because I don't have the proper amount of stereo equipment" concluding that the product was "completely useless".
#Flaming lips soft bulletin about atomic war archive#
The zero Pitchfork review (since deleted although there is an archive link below) was based on the impracticality of the concept rather than the music. It sounds similar to some avant garde experiments going on in the minimalist classical world by composers like Cage, Reich and Riley. As it was rare for different players to run at exactly the same speed or even for the operators to start the process at exactly the right moment interesting phasing and echo effects would ensue, and no two "performances" would be exactly the same. Infamously given a rating of 0.0 by Pitchfork (the follow up Soft Bulletin scored 10.0 from the same reviewer!) the album comes on 4 CDs each containing a quarter of the whole! Wtf? The concept was that four friends would have listening parties where they would each bring their CD player and play one of their CDs in synchronicity with the other 3 thus hearing the whole as it was intended. So what about Zaireeka? Well I haven't heard it and as you will read shortly I'm not likely to either.