Musically speaking, The Flaming Lips are quite possibly the most experimental band on the planet. They really are peerless. The Butthole Surfers and Sonic Youth come mighty close, but both are too conventionally hard rock to be considered anywhere near as adventurous or versatile.

Equally at home with a distortion box as with a glockenspiel, The Flaming Lips come across like a group of circus clowns who discovered the joys of playing punk rock while huffing elephant manure after the carnival. Their loopy, catchy and incredibly textured songs are their stock and trade, but The Lips have also been known to mix it up with longer, totally wacked-out concept pieces that defy any and all categorization. As anyone who's ever listened to "The Long Annoying Song" or "Hell's Angel's Cracker Factory" can attest, these guys not only know how to test the limits of the listener's patience, but also how to make you question your own ideas about what music really is. Their concert at The Wetlands on Sunday, September 27, 1998, pushed this quest for sonic alchemy to the hilt with a two-hour musical experiment that was unlike anything I had ever heard before.

Promoting their unwieldy CD box set Zaireeka (4 separate CDs intended to be played simultaneously on four separate CD players), The Lips were in the house not to play their instruments, but rather to "press play" on the 40 boom boxes they'd jammed up on the stage. At the start of the show, volunteers were brought up from the audience to actually become part of the show and each was given a different cassette tape and their very own boom box (each of which, we were informed had been hand picked from pawn shops in and around the band's home town of Oklahoma City). After a series of slightly irksome sound checks to calibrate all of the tape decks, there was an anxious countdown and then the volunteers were told to start their boom boxes in unison. A few seconds of synchronized blank air followed, but then the room slowly began to fill with the lilting sounds of violins. Soon, each of the machines was playing the exact same note to a crescendo, but as the boom boxes fell in and out of sync with each other, their wavelengths reverberated off the walls, until the warbling final product sounded like the London Philharmonic playing 10,000 leagues under the sea.

Then, almost imperceptibly, guitar noise began to filter through the classical arrangement. As the volume gradually rose, the whole piece seemed to hover between a huge humming mess and an exhilarating wall of noise. It seemed like something straight outta Glenn Branca, except for the sudden addition of blaring police sirens that jerked everyone's head to attention. Then, just when it seemed that the tapes couldn't take the room any higher, the music skidded to a stop.

Everyone on stage was instructed to change their tapes, and a new "song" was off and running. This one started off with sweeping gusts of ethereal guitar that would do My Bloody Valentine proud. Then Lips frontman Wayne Coyne and drummer Steven Drozd took center stage and began to conduct the orchestra of boom boxes. As they raised and lowered their hands, the box operators raised and lowered their volume knobs, resulting in chunks of dueling guitar dissonance. The effect was spectacularly strange, particularly when both conductors thrust their hands in the air and the din sounded like a field of bug zappers being sprayed with a garden hose. After a 5-minute barrage of this, pounding drums filtered in for a moment and it finally ended with the sound of pig grunts. At first there was just one or two pigs audible, but then every box began cranking out the exact same oink, until it sounded as if you were in the middle of a stampede of wild boar.

Several more songs followed. Each a multi-textured (like old fly paper), mini-soundscape that confuzzed the hell out of everyone, but in a very, very good way. Vast choruses of random noise blared away as tiny bits and pieces of unfinished songs struggled to be heard through the cacophony, like salmon swimming up stream. Often times, when all of the boom boxes played along with the exact same sound or riff, it reminded me of a campfire sing along of "Row Your Boat." With different groups starting at different times, this song can be a beautiful work of symmetrical harmony or it can turn into a runaway train wreck. More often than not, this music combined the best of both possible worlds, creating a beautiful train wreck, for lack of a better analogy.

By far, the weirdest song of the night was their last one. It began with a woman's loud orgasmic moans playing for a hilariously uncomfortable amount of time and then some creepy synth cello and a techno bass loop kicked in. Rolled up all together they sounded amazingly sinister, like the soundtrack to a porno horror movie or a European snuff film starring George Hamilton. As the final moans blared across the club's speakers and the crowd shuffled out, I was left to finish my beer and marvel at what I had just heard.

How to describe it all, though? A 3-D, surround sound experiment? Transcendental noise? Quadraphonic confusion?

Much like a recipe for an atomic bomb or really good potato salad, Zaireeka takes a bunch of innocent ingredients and turns them into something so much more than the sum of their parts. Guttural screeching, caterwauls of static, unstrung string arrangements, clashing rhythms and jarring guitars are all mixed together to produce something incredibly, but indescribably satisfying. It upsets your musical equilibrium and you become so lost in music, you almost never wanna get found.

October 1998