In late 1996, I read with envy a friend's account of a road

trip to Oklahoma City. They were headed there to see

Flaming Lips mastermind Wayne Coyne's "Parking Lot

Experiment." Coyne envisioned a sort of car stereo

orchestra, wherein 40 cars would be arranged in a lot and

each car would have its own cassette. There would be a

countdown, then everyone in their car would press "play"

and, if everything worked as planned, there would be a sort

of auto symphony with Coyne as the conductor -- shouting

"More Pinto!" through a bullhorn, that kind of thing.

Zaireeka, the new album from the Flaming Lips, is the

closest you'll get to that experience (although, reportedly,

San Franciscans will soon be treated to Coyne's "The

Boombox Experiment," a promising-sounding nomenclature

if ever I've heard one). Zaireeka's four CDs, designed

to be played simultaneously on four separate stereo

systems, are a hell of a good reason to invite a few friends

over, if nothing else. But once you hook everything up, trip

over a few cords and self-consciously run a sound check,

expressly declaring your tech-geek-ness to whomever

you've invited, you discover that Zaireeka is unlike

anything you've ever heard.

The record has a strange jump-cut temporality, but with a

randomness that brings new discoveries every time you

hear it. The rhythms shoot in and out of synch with each

other, and the effect is unsettling and amazing at the same

time. It's an aural museum of dreams, nightmares, images

and scenes. But you don't casually observe them in rarefied

silence and pose, you pluck them out of the air around you.

On each trip, each new listen, you find scenes being

rearranged and acted out differently, new players and

images taking precedence over the old.

You never lose yourself in Zaireeka -- you are

constantly aware of the act of listening. At the same time,

you become lost in the listening itself, and in the

consistent deviousness of the sounds as they flout your

efforts to make sense of them. It's the closest a record has

come so far to simulating the effects of really good weed.

When songs end, you can actually hear people realize how

hard they were concentrating, and there's an audible series

of gasps all around.

Each person hearing a song on this record hears an entirely

different song from everyone else in the room, every time.

The songs, and peoples' experiences of them, are as

various as snowflakes -- each with its own crystalline

sound and effect, creating icy sculptures and prisms in

listeners' ears (and eyes, nose, mouth -- if you happen to

be synaesthesia). The type of snowflake on your particular

eyelash or tongue depends on where you are in the storm -

- where you sit or stand relative to the speakers, the

shape of the room, the quality of stereo systems, the

volume. This changeability -- the fact that if you move so

much as five inches to your left the song becomes

something different -- is seemingly at odds with the

robust noise-pop grandeur of Coyne's epic soundscapes.

But it is in this space, between strength masked as

weakness and vice versa, that the record's brilliance is

realized.

The songs' lyrics reflect this disconnection -- in "A Machine

In India," an epic ode to Coyne's girlfriend's PMS (sort-of),

the music searches for the perfect architecture but fails to

find it, due to the ever-shifting nature of its "foundation."

The songs are also about transformations and the fear and

joy attendant to those transformations. Often Coyne

equates insanity, or the quality of being a freak, with

genius -- he writes a song about a bug that becomes a sort

of god to three dogs, a blissful metamorphosis that ends in

cacophonous barking.

This album is about spotting a piece of clear sky at the

edge of a blizzard, knowing that soon that clear spot will

turn cloudy again, then clear, and so on, and that these

changes will follow a pattern that even "forecasters" are

often powerless to predict. Still, there are glimpses of

pure understanding and truth, images of perfection shining

through a fog of noise, tricks, obsessions and dreams. As

Coyne sings on "The Train Runs Over The Camel But Is

Derailed By The Gnat," "What if they didn't count the

molecules that failed/ and the only thing that mattered

were the pieces that prevailed." You'd be hard-pressed to

find a better description of this unusual and satisfying

record.

Nick Tangborn wrote this review using four word-

processors simultaneously.