More ‘Strobo Trip’

 

Clocking-in at 6 hours, I figured that The Flaming Lips’ song, “I Found A Star On The Ground” is so mind-bogglingly long it warranted slightly longer consideration.

 

I’m picking up on the track from where I left off last night, after being forced to retire. I mean, who, these days, has the potential to devote six consecutive hours of their life to listen to one song? Kids with a few tabs of acid and no commitments, that’s who.

 

Nine years back, The Flaming Lips flirted with the mainstream when they scored a hit with, “Do You Realize??” from their wonderfully titled, ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’. It lured the listener in with it’s opening line, “Do you realize, that you have the most beautiful face”, before revealing a truth nobody likes to entertain. “Do you realize, that everyone you know, someday, will die.”

The Flaming Lips, it would seem, like messing with our heads.

 

Around a decade earlier, they were a hot ticket in the (alleged), Alternative scene, with a peculiar single called, “She Don’t Use Jelly”.

 

The Flaming Lips are a contemporary image of what The Grateful Dead represented in the 60s, around the time they recast the image of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury as the world’s Hippie heartland.

 

They’ve released their share of melodic Stoner-Pop over the years, but its their equally shared aspirations to musique concrete that are given free reign on their latest EP. Lest one forget, The Flaming Lips have, for many years, been viewed with Keith Richards-like awe, vis-à-vis their appetite for various chemical entertainment devices. Or, to put it another way, Wayne Coyne does for Acid what Sam Kekovich does for Australian Lamb.

 

If there were any doubt, the band’s recent, “The Flaming Lips With Lightning Bolt EP”, released in July, offered songs like, “I’m Working At NASA On Acid” and “I Want To Get High But I Don’t Want Brain Damage”.

 

The new, ‘Strobo-Trip EP’ is more of the same in some respects. Its inclusion of the world’s first 6-hour Stoner Rock epic notwithstanding, ‘Strobo-Trip’ is a marketing coup in its employment of multi-media. We live in a world where marketing music is made more difficult by the ease of digital duplication. The record alone is barely enough anymore.

 

So, with the remaining synapses that do connect, The Flaming Lips conceived a device called the ‘Strobo-Trip Light Phase Illusion Toy’. It’s a chicken and egg debate as to which is meant to be more important, the toy, or the accompanying EP. One is intended to compliment the other, after all.

 

Earlier this week, Wayne Coyne introduced the toy to a handful of shoppers at a record store in Portland, Oregon, selling the packages for $45. There will be more of this limited edition on the way but the entire project reeks of exclusivity. Small wonder, people are prepared to part with their money.   

 

The package contains a strobe light and a small disc, which you are supposed to set spinning. The disc, according to Coyne, in a recent interview (with a big magazine), “has these little animations on it that kind of come to life when you put this strobe light on it.” And the music? Well, that’s what you listen to for the, presumably, endless hours of fun you derive from the toy.

 

Not included in the package but equally important to it’s enjoyment is the LSD. In the same interview (with the big magazine), Coyne further explained the band’s M.O.: “You know, that’s kind of our intention, so that people will buy it at, like, a festival, and then go back their parents’ and take some acid and play with it all night.”

 

Doubtless, Wayne is lobbying to be the pin-up boy for parents, everywhere.

 

As I mentioned earlier, the key track on the ‘Strobo Trip EP’ is, “I Found A Star On The Ground”, and thus far, it’s only claim to notoriety is it’s astonishing duration. But, is it any good? You know as well as I, the answer is entirely subjective. In six hours you will hear passages of sounds not unlike the 2 minutes of white noise Zappa used on the track, ‘Weasels Ripped My Flesh’. You will hear passages not unlike the industrial cacophony of Lou Reed’s ‘Metal Machine Music’. You will hear passages where a list of names are recited and where the song’s title, is invoked as a mantra, over a clash of instruments all playing in conflicting time signatures. And you will hear it rise and ebb for 6 continuous hours.

 

Like Eno’s Ambient soundscapes, this music is for the purpose of enhancing one’s environment. Think of it then, as a Dissonant soundscape. You don’t dance to this music (if you’re tripping, maybe), and neither is it conducive to meditation.

 

Is it Art? Most certainly, and whilst not without it’s rewards, “I Found A Star On The Ground” presents a marathon, and a challenging one.

 

Remember when you first heard “Revolution No.9” and you thought The Beatles had finally lost it? And how you still forensically studied it, searching for the clues confirming the death of Paul McCartney? Discovering “I Found A Star On The Ground” is a bit like that.

 

Interestingly, a guest collaborator on the piece turns out to be Sean Lennon. As a musician, Sean has never impressed me as anything more than a noodler. In the company of The Flaming Lips, he has been afforded a canvas of self-indulgence so large it must even impress his famous, multi-media mother.

And reflecting on the precursory influence of, “Revolution No.9”, I’m guessing, his dad would be extremely proud as well.

 

Whether “I Found A Star On The Ground” is deemed by critics to be good, terrible, or otherwise, is irrelevant. What makes “I Found A Star On The Ground” stand out as Art, is the bodacious grandiosity of its scale and its innovative use of a virtually limitless digital medium. The technological limits of vinyl, tape and CD formats have been swept away in the tide of progress. The potential for new innovations in both the way music is made and the perceived limits of its duration are up all for grabs, and pointing the way, is a weird little strobe light.

 

Advertisement