25th
Zaireeka Listening Party
There’s something about the Flaming Lips’ music that induces emotions of the ineffable variety: witness the shiny-happy afterglow that settled upon the crowd after their concert here last year, with people leaving the MBS exhibition hall holding hands and singing along to Louis Armstrong’s “What a Wonderful World”. That could only happen after the zany bacchanalian explosion of balloons, bears and psychedelic backdrop action which had accompanied the Lips’ loopy, unabashedly fun and sincere brand of music.
Before The Soft Bulletin was the more experimental, conceptual Zaireeka, a four-disc album which revolved around the idea of having all of the four discs played at the same time. Taking the album into the Substation theatre, artist Song-ming Ang, as part of Sonic Visions, hosted Singapore’s first public Zaireeka Listening Party. Utilising laptops, computer speakers and CD players, multiple copies of Zaireeka were passed out to members of the audience, and Ang became the de facto conductor. At the count of three, he instructed, we all had to hit the ‘play’ button. And thanks to minute incongruities between our different technological and nervous systems, nothing was perfectly synchronised, especially at first go, but somehow, after the stops and starts, the music swelled into something coherent and suddenly, we were immersed in scratchily blissful swathes of sound.
For the first few tracks, at Song-ming’s suggestion, the audience walked about haphazardly, following the ebb and flow of the music. While the party started off on a crazier, slightly carnivalesque note, in the course of the party, the audience became contemplative and almost serious, with a group from the audience standing still in the middle of the space in silence. Some closed their eyes, as if they wanted to concentrate on the sonic expansion that was swirling in their heads. The subsequent tracks had the audience seated on the floor with the lights of the theatre switched off. A certain almost reverent hush filled the room as we all took in the haunting sea of reverberations and echoes, of shimmering strings, voluminous mellotron and noise, sweet sweet noise.
I’m not quite sure what accounts for the general seriousness, but I can offer a personal explanation: in the collective movement, somewhere in the room were my own disparate memories of a seventeen year-old self lying on the stagefloor of the drama theatrette alongside others with lights on red wash pinning down our inanimate bodies and Portishead blasting moodily into the empty space; of friends seated in cross-legged position facing each other with eyes closed, reaching out their fingers towards each other without touching, exploring the magical space of energy between their fingertips while going deep into their respective inner worlds as sounds of electronica from a battered laptop played on. We’ve ceased to have these shared experiences opening us to different emotions and sensations, and the realisation of this somehow made me feel tender, listening in darkness the last remaining strains of the encore.
