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Getting the four CD players into reach, then setting them off simultaneously is a nightmare, more so when there's only the one of you. Suprisingly, it is most definitely worth going to the trouble. Riding To Work In The Year 2025 and Thiry-Five Thousand Feet Of Despair would be two of my favourite Lips tracks regardless.
It's a strange experience, listening to the four CDs at once, and one that's quite difficult to describe. You feel disorientated a great deal of the time due to the way that the different players go out of time with each other. Coyne explains it pretty well in the liner notes:
So anyway... I got a couple of CD players together and played some tracks that I had on two separate CDs. You know, the same song but on two different discs, like say a track off an album and a track off a single... anyway - I played them together simple by pressing the play buttons at the same time. To my suprise they played relatively in synch for the first minute or so... but even more of a suprise was that they would wobble in and out of synch sort of arbitrarily. 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 or behind the other making it confusing. Sometimes one would start behind and catch up the other, other times the opposite. What I liked best about it was how different and out of whack an otherwise simple song could get... and with that in mind 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 rhthyms 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 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.
That format's still not as bizarre as the fact that Warner actually released it, natch.
I had a feeling that a couple of the singles off The Soft Bulletin had mixes of a couple of the Zaireeka tracks on them (CD singles, US releases, that is). |
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