Some albums are considered tough to listen to, but Zaireeka by The Flaming Lips might just be the most challenging of the lot.
While Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music assaults your ears with jagged shards of noise, and Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica often sounds like a work of musical absurdity, Zaireeka is a logistical challenge first and a sonic one second.
Originally released in 1997, Zaireeka is the kind of exercise in wilful experimentation that only a band as eccentric as The Flaming Lips could get away with: it comes split across four discs that you must listen to simultaneously to hear the songs fully.
At the time, and for many years afterwards, wrangling four separate hi-fi systems into the same room in order to listen to Zaireeka as intended just wasn’t practical for most people.
When I bought my copy as a skint but pretentious student in 2005, I had no idea how I was going to play it. I considered it more of a musical investment for the future.
As the popularity of iPods and speaker docks grew, listening to Zaireeka became more feasible, but I still only ever owned one of each at a time. And while the advent of multi-room music systems removed most of the technological barriers, logistical and financial ones still remained.
When the Sonos Play was launched earlier this year I decided the time had finally come. Could four of these wireless speakers allow me to realise a 20-year-old dream and listen to Zaireeka for the first time?
Not suitable for children
So why the Sonos Play? Technically any four Sonos speakers would do the job because they all allow you to play a different track on each one simultaneously. But while using the top-of-the-range Era 300 might seem like the obvious choice for my little sonic experiment, the Play made most sense for more practical reasons.
Before The Flaming Lips recorded Zaireeka, the band conducted a proof-of-concept experiment that involved playing up to 50 unique cassette tapes on the stereos of as many parked cars, giving them complete freedom over the positioning of each giant four-wheeled speaker. I needed the same flexibility just on a much smaller scale, so the battery-powered Play meant I wouldn’t be limited by my plug sockets when placing each one.
The Play is also compact enough that I can easily accommodate four of them in what an estate agent would euphemistically call my ‘cosy’ living room, but with three Class H amps, two tweeters, a mid-woofer driver, and dual passive radiators inside each one, they still punch above their weight (which, at 1.3kg, is fairly heavy for a portable speaker).
The most difficult part of the setup process was getting Sonos’s Mac app to recognise my laptop’s music library, which includes MP3 versions of Zaireeka’s four discs, but with the help of a very useful YouTube video I eventually had it ready to go.
(The album is on Spotify but unless you have four separate accounts, plus four separate devices to log into them on, you’ll only be able to play one ‘disc’ at a time.)
Zaireeka’s artwork includes a warning: “This recording contains frequencies not normally heard on commercial recordings and on rare occasion has caused the listener to become disoriented. These extremely high and low frequencies can cause a person to become disoriented, confused or nauseated. DO NOT listen repeatedly at high volume. Make sure infants are out of listening range. Zaireeka should not be listened to while driving.”
Having removed all newborns from the vicinity and made sure I was at home rather than behind the wheel of a Ford Fiesta, I placed a speaker at each corner of my living-room rug and parked myself in the middle.
Sonos’s smartphone app isn’t the most intuitive but it didn’t take long to get the first track of each disc cued-up on a different speaker, and the volume on each one set to the same level.
Ideally you want to start them all at exactly the same time, but the app only offers that function for grouped speakers that are playing the same song, so I staggered the start points slightly, hit play on each one from the Your System screen, and a couple of seconds later my quartet of wireless speakers burst into life.
A hi-fi seance
There is no ‘correct’ way to listen to Zaireeka, no ‘correct’ way to organise the speakers, and no ‘correct’ place to position yourself among them, but it quickly became clear that disc one was where most of what could be considered lead vocals and drums would be coming from, so I decided to rearrange the speakers slightly.
I positioned one at each of the four main points of a compass and sat facing ‘musical north’. To the uninitiated it would've looked like I was taking part in some sort of hi-fi seance, but it gave the whole thing a focal point that seemed to work pretty well for a first listen.
Over the next 45 minutes Zaireeka envelops me in an ever-changing sonic cocoon. Ghostly vocals swell from all sides during Okay I'll Admit That I Really Don't Understand; on Riding to Work in the Year 2025 (Your Invisible Now) the bass moves from one speaker to another like a game of pass the parcel; at the start of Thirty-Five Thousand Feet of Despair a rocket takes flight and I feel like I might ascend into the sky with it; a quartet of organs tessellate beautifully towards the end of The Train Runs Over the Camel, But Is Derailed by the Gnat; and at one point during A Machine In India I’m completely engulfed by the sound of a buzzing swarm of insects.
When track six, How Will We Know? (Futuristic Crashendos), comes around, I finally understand what that warning on the front cover was all about. The song includes sounds so high-pitched that I almost start to wonder whether the noise is actually coming from inside my brain. I’ve never heard anything like it on any other record, probably because it’s genuinely unpleasant.
The final track is the closest thing on Zaireeka to a conventional song, but in every other sense it’s still pretty bonkers. A spoken-word vocal tells an odd little story about pet dogs and giant plastic insects, before it bursts into a whole chorus of Wayne Coynes singing the song’s title, The Big Ol’ Bug Is the New Baby Now, from all four speakers at once.
The slight differences in timing give it the feeling of a mass crowd singalong, before the album ends by trapping you in the middle of a pack of ferociously barking dogs.
Hard of hearing
Over the following few days I listened to Zaireeka about half a dozen more times, experimenting with different speaker layouts and listening positions, including placing them at different heights and moving around the room as it played. One time I didn’t synchronise the discs particularly well and some parts sounded a bit wonky, but these choices and variations are all part of the reason this album exists in the first place.
In the liner notes Wayne Coyne says his intention was to make songs that would sound different every time you played them. “I wanted to abandon song structure but not abandon the song,” he writes – and Zaireeka succeeds in doing that pretty well.
The tracks on it are more abstract than the band’s most famous songs; there’s nothing here as immediate as Do You Realize? or Race for the Prize. But I haven’t paid attention to an album like I did with this one in a long time. Everything about it requires some element of active participation rather than just passive consumption.
It’s still not exactly easy to listen to. My quartet of Play speakers removed most of the previous obstacles, but if I hadn’t been able to borrow them from Sonos in order to write this feature, a financial one would still remain. To buy them would have cost me £1136 in total – that's a lot of money for playing just one album.
But this is a one-off musical proposition that I waited over two decades to experience. Sure, some of the tracks from the record can be heard as standard stereo mixes on The Soft Bulletin Companion, but that completely misses the point.
Listening to Zaireeka is supposed to be more difficult than the other albums in your collection – and that’s exactly what makes it so uniquely unforgettable.
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