Over the ensuing months, similar edits of increasingly elaborate jams - now featuring bassist Michael Ivins and new Lips drummer Kliph Scurlock - were worked on, though by this time Fridmann had developed a way to process this purposely raw material. We were all sort of staring around, thinking, 'Can we turn this into something?' And once we've turned this into something… is this what we're really gonna do? But we liked it, so we said, 'Fuck it, let's do it.'” This is the foundation for the song, this totally distorted crazy thing. "It was literally one mic sitting in between a double stack of bass amps, some keyboard PA and a drum kit, all going at full blast. "You can't even imagine how ridiculous this thing sounded,” he says. Drozd, he says, used only one mic - his Shure KSM44 through a Universal Audio 6176 direct into Pro Tools - and the result was almost ludicrously distorted. The artistic intent was to - as Wayne Coyne put it - meld "low‑fi distortion jams with hi‑fi computer overdubs”.īut Fridmann laughs when recalling how the original snippet from the jam actually sounded. Drozd captured the jams in Pro Tools, cutting out a 30‑second snatch from one and bringing it to Fridmann, resulting in Embryonic's motorik opening track 'Convinced Of The Hex'. Free to make as much noise as they wanted, Drozd and Coyne cranked up the volume, the former crashing away on drums while the latter played simple, repetitive bass riffs. Preliminary sessions for Embryonic began in summer 2008 in Oklahoma City, where the band's former drummer‑turned‑multi‑instrumentalist Steven Drozd began indulging in loose jam sessions with singer Wayne Coyne in the empty house that the former was at the time unsuccessfully attempting to sell. From left: Kliph Scurlock, Michael Ivins, Steven Drozd and Wayne Coyne, here using a conventional close mic for scratch vocals. The Flaming Lips lay down a take at Tarbox road. But the foundation of this one was the unknown right from the get‑go.” In Embyro "We always left room for the unknown in the other records. "In the past, we'd always build it up from some pre‑existing thing,” Fridmann says. Above all was their initial decision to edit down sections of extended freeform jams to form the foundations of the tracks, as opposed to their previous modus operandi of working up Pro Tools demos of songs brought in by the band. Unsurprisingly, then, Embryonic found Fridmann and the Flaming Lips employing a variety of radical recording methods to achieve their slightly warped aims. It gave us the opportunity to just sort of expand and know that we weren't gonna worry about making these songs sound like something you could hear on the radio.” "So we've known for quite a while we were heading toward some other new, weird area. "Since we made the last one, we've been talking about this one,” he explains. The producer says it was always the plan for the Flaming Lips to take an extreme, wholly experimental change in direction, even if it might prove to be a less commercial one. We looked at all these other double records and it was like, 'Y'know, well I don't always listen to that track, but I'm glad it's on there.” "It runs the gamut… all the things we looked at and all the different possibilities that existed. "Everything from Led Zeppelin to the Beatles to Frampton Comes Alive,” Fridmann laughs. Together, the band and their producer began looking back at the classic double albums of the past. Right from the beginning, says Fridmann, the Flaming Lips conceived Embryonic as a double album. A double album freak-out that favours murky, hypnotic jams over obvious melody, while remaining as gripping and groundbreaking as ever, it serves as a reminder that the band were once purveyors of acid‑fried head music as opposed to spectral pop. His current roster of clients includes his former band Mercury Rev (which he quit in 1993 to concentrate on his recording career), alongside MGMT, Sparklehorse, Low, Mogwai and, perhaps most famously, the Flaming Lips, in an association stretching back 20 years.įridmann's penchant for the strange certainly served him well in the making of the Flaming Lips' 12th studio album, Embryonic. For the past two decades, the upstate New York‑based producer has been responsible for some of the most influential, genre‑blurring, sonically innovative - not to mention, frequently, weird - alternative rock music on the planet. The fact that his favourite word is "weird” perhaps tells you everything you need to know about the music Dave Fridmann produces. Following their unlikely breakthrough into the mainstream, Flaming Lips made a conscious return to the outer limits with their recent album Embryonic.
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