a zaireeka reflective

sunday afternoon, about tea time, i had the esteem privelege of joining fellow bloggers joe, amanda, jenn, cody, ryan, jon, and a few others for a listening part for the flaming lips album zaireeka. sadly, wayne coyne was not present, as he had to leave the state for a prior engagement.

i'll get it out of the way and explain that "zaireeka" is a combination of the words "zaire" (yes, the african nation) and "eureka" (not the springs in arkansas). "zaire" represents chaos in life (and, i suppose, in music), and "eureka" represents that serindipitous moment where something occurs to us (again, both in life and music). and truly the album had a certain zaireekan quality to it, a sort of chaotic jumble of sounds that gave life to auditory epiphanies from time to time.

my most striking acknowledgement is that the listening experience was distinctly different for each person in the room. while jon & i manned disc number 2, joe was enveloped by disc 1, ryan and jeff huddled closest to disc 3, and amanda was near disc 4 (though cody handled it's play/pause duties). jenn split the distance between 1 and 2, though she probably had a better angle on 3 and 4 as they were both pointed at her. likewise, cody had good angles on 1, 2, and 4, with the wine rack blocking much of 3.

and i think the varieties of listening experience is the essence of what wayne was seeking to create in recording the album. in the liner notes, wayne notes that not all CD players play at the same speed, which inherantly provides some degree of mismatch between the sounds of the discs (we witnessed this as well). Perhaps this is most appropriately conveyed by quoting said liner notes:

"From what I can tell, CD players will not play in synch with each other. They get close, depending on the quality of the players, but for the most part it can be pretty random. It was this part that excited me, the fact that they played close enough together that you could tell what was going on, but also played unpredictably in front of or behind the other making it confusing. Sometimes one would start behind and catch up to the other, other times the opposite. What I like best about it was how different and out of whack and otherwise simple song could get...and with that in mid I started to think with an "expanded" view of what music and songs could be... I would try to present music that was both clear and confusing, where rhythms fought each other, where time signatures were simple yet unpredictable... music that would be unfamiliar even after a thousand listens. Music that, according to the normal ideas of what music is, doesn't work... instead of listening to a song and passively being either entertained or bored the listener would be engaged and agitated.. soothed but suspect.. in a state of suspended anticipation.. The listener could hear an exaggerated dimension of sound where sometimes reverb comes before a sound occurs, other times it's delayed.. Where a melody that's pleasant and uplifting, upon being shifted slightly, becomes dissonant and interruptive.. Where crescendos miss their cues either late or early or both... making music that purposely destroys its own momentum... and instead of hearing these things and thinking of them as being wrong or annoying... I heard the possibilities of a bizarre new format."