the-flaming-lips
Latest
Fantasia's full set list includes Gaga, Jimi Hendrix, Flaming Lips
You won't know exactly what Fantasia: Music Evolved's set list will sound like once you put your own twist on it, but at least now you know what you'll be working with: Harmonix shared the remainder of Fantasia's tracks at PAX Prime today, with the final portion including Jimi Hendrix's "Fire," Lady Gaga's "Applause," The Flaming Lips' "Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots, Pt. 1" and contributions from Imagine Dragons, J.S. Bach, New Order, Liszt, Inon Zur and Missy Elliot. Yup, the sampling is still all over the place. You can remind yourself of Fantasia's previously-announced songs with a full bulletpoint set list after the break, but if you want more than the base offering, placing a pre-order will earn you three more songs: OneRepublic's "Counting Stars," Demi Lovato's take on Frozen's "Let It Go" and Avicii's "Lay Me Down." [Image: Harmonix]
The art of the gimmick: an interview with the Flaming Lips' Wayne Coyne
The Flaming Lips have never done anything small, from the "Parking Lot Experiments" of the mid-90s to this year's Record Store Day album, "The Flaming Lips and Heady Fwends." Set for an April 21st release, the limited edition vinyl record features an odd cast of characters, including Bon Iver, Erykah Badu, Neon Indian, Nick Cave and Ke$ha, many of whom have lent their actual blood to the record. "That is totally a gimmick," Wayne Coyne answers with great relish. "It's a beautiful gimmick. I think all things that we marvel over are based in gimmicks." He's on the phone for a day of back-to-back interviews, a trapping of the job that would cause lesser, more jaded men to roll their eyes and submit with dragged heels, particularly those who've been playing the game through 30 years and 13 LPs. But Coyne, much to his credit, dives into everything he does headfirst with the manner of childlike wonder that's come to be established with the vast majority of the Flaming Lips' catalog. At the beginning of our conversation, he lets it be known that he's slightly distracted. His wife is photographing him. And he's in his underwear. He didn't bother putting anything else on, knowing that he'd be running a marathon of phone interviews all day. Maximum comfort is important. It's a hard image to erase from my mind as Coyne settles in to explain the band's decision to embrace Siri on a recent web-only track called "Now I Understand."
New Flaming Lips song features Siri on vocals
Siri has been getting around lately. When she's not guest starring on popular sitcoms, she's apparently lending her vocal talents to the music scene. The Flaming Lips have produced an experimental song (embedded below) called "Now I Understand," which features both Siri and Erykah Badu as vocalists. This isn't the first time Siri has been part of a musical collaboration. Just a few days after the iPhone 4S launched, musician Jonathan Mann (perhaps most famous to Apple watchers for the Antennagate song that Steve Jobs actually played at a press conference) posted his own duet with Siri. To my ears, all these musical experiments show is how far we have to go yet before computerized voices sound truly human. Siri does a much better job than the Mac voices of the mid-1990s did on songs like Radiohead's "Fitter, Happier," but the voicing still sounds very artificial in a musical context. We're still a long way from the vibrant, natural tones of 2001: A Space Odyssey's HAL 9000 and his rendition of "Daisy, Daisy." Then again, with so many human singers over-utilizing autotune and starting to sound more and more robotic themselves, perhaps all we're seeing with Siri is the next step in a weird human/machine convergence in the music world. [via Electronista]
