The Flaming Lips and Nobukazu Takemura
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22 June 1999
The Flaming Lips
The Soft Bulletin
When guitar whiz Ronald Jones abruptly left the Flaming Lips in 1996, he left the band in a creative lurch. Along with drummer Steven Drozd, Jones was responsible for the band’s second coming, the one that saw the Lips transition from classic rock punks to avant-garde pop pranksters. Jones’s eccentric style perfectly encapsulated the whimsical sound of the band captured on 1993’s Transmission from the Satellite Heart and 1995’s Clouds Taste Metallic… and now they were left without a plan.
The Lips responded by being even more experimental, conducting the Parking Lot Experiments (a symphony of cars playing prerecorded tracks as concerts) and then releasing Zaireeka, an album consisting of four CDs to be played simultaneously. And, when the time came to make an album proper, they decided to forego replacing Jones in favor of having the all-around musical virtuoso Drozd step out from behind the drums to take over the keys and guitars.
The result was The Soft Bulletin, an album so different from the Lips’ previous albums that it sounded like the work of an entirely different band. Gone were the crunchy guitars, and in their place were layers of strings and textures. The Lips had dabbled in classic rock and punk, but now they were blending retro pop and progressive rock. If Phil Spector had produced ELP, he might have ended up with The Soft Bulletin.
The music, however, wasn’t the only drastic change. Previously content with singing about the absurd—aliens, waterbugs, giraffes—frontman Wayne Coyne suddenly tackled the big issues with a proximity and poetic eye previously unseen. “Waitin’ for a Superman” dared to ask if God were too feeble to save mankind, while “The Gash” encouraged everyone to push forward nonetheless, ultimately concluding that we have to make the change we desire. Yes, lyrical irony and detachment had ruled the decade, but Coyne dared to put on a suit and sing without hipster sarcasm, inspiring many others to follow. True, it’s impossible to pinpoint when ‘90s lyrical distance transformed into unabashed emotionality, but Coyne definitely played a role. Coldplay, after all, are Lips devotees, and Chris Martin might benefit from some lyrical detachment.
And consider this: earlier in the decade, Butch Vig had to lure Kurt Cobain into double-tracking his vocals by telling him that John Lennon had done the same on Beatles albums—such was the disdain for studio wizardy. Not even a decade later, The Soft Bulletin made the studio a respectable instrument in itself. Combined with the panoramic spectacle of the Lips’ live show, the album proved that bands with relatively modest but loyal followings could dare to think grand. Rock, thankfully, has never recovered. 
Michael Franco
22 June 1999
Nobukazu Takemura
Scope
In the not-too-distant future, CD skips and fast-forward skims will be quaint fodder for textural dressing, just as warbled cassette tapes and vinyl scratches are today. The natural sounds of wear and imperfection are dissipating in the digital age (though I still hear the occasional MP3 burp every now and again), and there has been a markedly reactionary movement to reclaim them in the experimental ‘00s from the early decade’s glitch to the latter portion’s hauntology.
Japanese sound wizard Nobukazu Takemura wasn’t the first to play confused lasers skipping on optical discs as his instrument (see the cut-ups of Markus Popp, Todd Edwards, et al.), but with Scope he harnessed the process into an act of jaw-dropping beauty by making gigantic longform ever-looping meditations with broken sound that gave Terry Riley a run for his mandala. His fragmented sounds (waveforms truncated abruptly and left with pops, clicks, warts and all) helped make the case for digital as a genuine competitor the analogue throne. A track like “Icefall”—which sounds like Tomita’s more ebullient but similarly-named “Snowflakes Are Dancing” remixed into zeroes and ones and beamed into space—exudes a warmth and emotional resonance that is undeniable.
“Taw” and its slightly tedious, squirmy, granulized rhythmic noise crunches is not entirely dissimilar to what’s coming out of Editions Mego and Raster Norton these days, though with far less distortion. “On a Balloon” is a lush 22-minute odyssey that’s discordant like a jigsaw puzzle put together wrongly, but actually more pretty and more telling in its discontinuity. Scope‘s scope is vast and showcases that technology need not only plot our nightmares, it can digitize our dreams as well. Timothy Gabriele
