Picture this: it’s late 1997 in North Yorkshire, UK. The air’s a bit heavy — Princess Diana had died just weeks before, on August 31, 1997. I remember it vividly; that was the day I lost my virginity. And just a little while later, the Flaming Lips dropped Zaireeka, their most audacious album yet. It was rare, it was expensive, and of course, I had to have it. I managed to get my hands on the four-CD conceptual behemoth and set out to experience the madness it promised.
For the uninitiated, the Flaming Lips are a psychedelic rock band from Oklahoma known for their experimental, often bizarre approach to music and art. Led by frontman Wayne Coyne, they’ve made a career out of pushing the boundaries of what music could (or should) be, and Zaireeka, released on October 28, 1997, was no exception.
The album itself is a bit of an audio puzzle — a four-CD set meant to be played simultaneously on separate systems. Imagine herding cats, but with CD players. The idea was that by syncing all four discs at the same time, you’d get a layered, immersive sound experience. But due to the variances in the playback devices, every listen could be slightly different. Some folks have tried to optimize the experience, as detailed in a comprehensive Zaireeka post on Reddit . One fan even documented attempts at using different combinations of playback devices — portable CD players, boomboxes, car stereos — to capture the true, chaotic spirit of the album.
Some of the more interesting factoids about Zaireeka include its infamous difficulty in achieving proper synchronization; even if you did manage to press play simultaneously, players could still drift off-sync, resulting in unpredictable sonic chaos. According to the Reddit post, one fan suggested using timers or synced audio systems to maximize the album’s impact . The unpredictability was part of the charm, but also, perhaps, its biggest flaw — Zaireeka is as much a logistical challenge as it is a musical one.
Now, back in North Yorkshire, pulling this off wasn’t easy. My schoolmate James Brown (yes, that James Brown, formerly of Pulled Apart By Horses) had a decent enough setup. We decided to have a little Zaireeka party with his sister and a few others. We got some low-quality hash resin — typical for those days — and settled into JamBro’s bedroom.
Syncing up the four CD players was a nightmare. The quality differences between devices were painfully obvious; portable CD players sounded like they were chewing the tracks compared to the hi-fi ones. This was especially annoying during track 7, the song entitled March of the Rotting Vegetables, which features an epic drum solo. For me this is the best bit of the CD, and it actually does still sound pretty good to me years later. Of course at that inaugural party in 1997, it ended up coming out of the shittiest speaker, raining weakly on what should have been the highlight of the whole album.
When it was all over, we agreed it was kind of cool, but definitely not life-changing. Zaireeka was more of a logistical headache than a mind-blowing experience. I even tried listening to it alone once, pressing play with my toes and fingers like some kind of CD-player octopus. Good job there weren’t five CDs, or I’d have had to get… creative with that last play button! But it just wasn’t the same — probably because it’s never meant to be a solo experience.
Years later, when MP3s and streaming were taking over, I was digitizing my entire music collection for my Plex server. (If you don’t have Plex and you’ve got a hard drive and an old laptop lying around, you should really look into it — more on that in another article.) I figured I could cheat Zaireeka by splicing all the tracks together. The ultimate four-track, all in sync, all on my headphones. Wouldn’t that be the modern solution? But, of course, it would also defeat the whole point of the album. And, if we’re being honest, it was a pretty stupid point anyway.
After stitching together about three tracks, I realized two things: one, this was time-consuming; and two, I just didn’t care. Since the first day at heard it at JamBro’s bedroom, I’d never been that invested in Zaireeka to begin with, nor, for that matter, the Flaming Lips. They weren’t heavy enough for me then, and they’re not mellow enough for me now. I thought about why I was wasting my time back then, and why I was wasting my time again now.
Funny little extra twist of pointlessness; turns out someone else had already done it. You can actually find the whole Zaireeka experience spliced together on YouTube now. Someone uploaded it all nice and neat — just search for it, like the one uploaded by Mortacci here. So, if you ever feel like experiencing this ‘immersive’ concept from the comfort of your headphones, you can (be bothered).
So, here we are, 27 years later — almost to the day — and Zaireeka still remains an odd relic of its time: a concept that’s cool in theory, but ultimately not that great in practice. You might as well just splice the tracks together or ignore it altogether. Either way, you won’t be missing much. The whole thing was a nice idea but pretty pointless… kind of like this essay.
