Four compact discs in one box, each meant to be played simultaneously on four separate stereos. That was the strange object The Flaming Lips, the rock group, handed to the world on October 28, 1997, when their eighth studio album, Zaireeka, arrived on Warner Bros. Records.
A fragile deal and a lineup change
The idea sounded like a prank, but it was born from necessity. The band's previous album, Clouds Taste Metallic, had met with limited success, and their deal with Warner Bros. was suddenly fragile. Then guitarist Ronald Jones quit, and the group had to rebuild how it made music. Drummer Steven Drozd stepped into the gap, becoming a multi-instrumentalist, while the remaining members searched for a new reason to exist.
Wayne Coyne, the singer and guitarist, had been chasing a strange memory from his youth: at a concert parking lot, car stereos had all played the same songs at once. In 1996 and 1997, the band turned that memory into a series of events called The Parking Lot Experiments. Coyne made 40 cassette tapes, handed them out to drivers, and told everyone when to press play. The result was a strange, fluid 20-minute sound piece filling the lot.
Those experiments became the blueprint for Zaireeka. The band struggled to write songs for the album until they stopped trying to split ordinary tunes across four discs and started composing specifically for the format. Eight songs, each made of four stereo tracks, one per disc. Listeners could play all four discs together, or drop one, two, or three, changing the music each time. Synchronization errors were not bugs; they created echo and reverb effects no single disc could make.
Synchronization errors were not bugs; they created echo and reverb effects no single disc could make.
Where the title came from
The title itself was a mix of two words. Zaire came from a radio news story about political chaos in that country, which Coyne saw as a symbol of anarchy. Eureka meant joyful discovery. Together they described an album that was a mix of anarchy and joyful discovery. Several songs, including Race for the Prize, did not fit the four-disc format and were set aside for the next album, which became The Soft Bulletin.
Warner Bros. Records was nervous. Manager Scott Booker calculated the album would break even after selling 12,000 copies, and pre-orders reached 14,000, so he took it to label president Steven Baker. They made a deal: Zaireeka would not count toward the seven albums the band owed Warner Bros., and for a $200,000 advance the group would deliver both Zaireeka and The Soft Bulletin. Booker saw an advantage: if the press called the band weird for Zaireeka, the next record would look serious by comparison.
Critics could not agree. Rolling Stone gave four stars out of five and described a wall of surrounding sound mixing drone-rock dissonance with distorted pop melodies. NME awarded 10 out of 10. Pitchfork, in its early days, gave a score of 0.0, though in 2002 the site published a response to its early review that praised the album. Jason Ankeny of AllMusic said the album would only be available to devoted fans, but that they would receive a musical experience for a lifetime. In October 2009, Mark Richardson released a book about the album in the 33 1/3 series from Continuum International Publishing.
The album changed what The Flaming Lips were. By 2006 it had sold 28,000 copies, a small number that still mattered more as a statement than as a product. The same sessions and the same turmoil produced The Soft Bulletin in 1999, the album that made people take them seriously. Zaireeka was not a detour; it was the road that led there. A DVD release of the album is unlikely because the original multi-track recordings were intentionally out of sync. The four discs all share the same track list, but the type and quality of each audio system can change how the discs relate to one another.