GOSSIP HOTLINE

Wayne Coyne Talks Vagina/Skull Gummy, Halloween House Party, More Collabs As ever, the Flaming Lips are doing strange things that no other band would even think of in their oddest dreams. They just released a six-hour song called "I Found a Star on the Ground". They've got a 24-hour song (!) called "7 Skies H3" that will start streaming at flaminglipstwentyfourhoursong.com on midnight CDT this Halloween. The day-long tune will also be available on a hard drive encased inside an actual human skull topped with chrome drips. This super-exclusive item (only 13 have been made) runs for $5,000 and is out October 31 as well. Plus, as Lips leader Wayne Coyne told us earlier this week, there are a couple more freakish gummy items in the works, including an acid-trip-themed frog and a "skull that has an actual vaginal fucking thing stuck to the back of it-- you have to reach into it to get the USB." The band is also working on even more collaborations. Coyne said he plans to release an EP with Deerhoof in December, and that the Lips are currently passing files back and forth with Nick Cave, No Age, Stars, and Death Cab for Cutie, too. (A limited-edition release that compiles all of their recent team ups and a couple new ones is tentatively set for next year's Record Store Day in April.) And, just because they can, the Flaming Lips will play an old-fashioned house party (!) in the third-largest city in West Virginia, Parkersburg, this Sunday night. Yes, there's more: The seven-years-in-the-making Flaming Lips musical headed by director/producer Des McAnuff (Jersey Boys) is currently in the money-raising stage, according to Coyne, who hopes to start getting the production off the ground next year. And the band will pay tribute to Steve Jobs by performing the Beatles' "Revolution" on iPads on MTV's web-based O Music Awards this Monday. Coyne spoke with us about most of the above, as well as the perils of eating too much gummy. Pitchfork: What sort of new odd products do you have in the works? Wayne Coyne: The guy we know who has the gummy factory is so insane. We have an edible, psychedelic frog coming out. It's a clear frog that you can pour psychedelic dust on and then lick it-- it's going to be a pretty good one. And we're going to make a skull that has an actual vaginal fucking thing stuck to the back of it-- you have to reach into it to get the USB. Pitchfork: You can sell that at a sex shop. WC: Well, I don't want it to be too tied up with dicks and dildos and stuff but, I mean, yeah! Everything is possible. Pitchfork: Have you heard from anyone who ate one of these huge gummy skulls too quickly and got sick? WC: Yeah. Nothing too bad, though. But once they start to eat the gummy skull, they realize how good it is and they eat the whole thing. It's not meant to be eaten by one person. It's actually 9,000 calories if you eat it all in one sitting. It's a lot of fucking gummy. And it sits in your gut for the next couple of days. It's kind of uncomfortable. I've eaten quite a bit of gummy since we've been fucking with all this, but sacrifices have to be made. [laughs] Pitchfork: I know you take Halloween seriously. Any special plans this year? WC: We're actually playing a house party Sunday night before we go home for Halloween. A girl from Parkersburg, West Viginia wrote to us on Twitter, like, "You guys should stop by my house and play!" So I wrote back: "OK, we'll try." We're going to do it. I think she's 17. All of her friends are going to come over. We're going to play "Halloween" by the Dream Syndicate and then do one or two Flaming Lips songs before the police show up to shut the thing down. I'm going to let her be the one who decides how many people are gonna come. There's always an element of "let's make it outrageous!" but I don't want every idiot in town to show up drunk at this girl's house. Pitchfork: What's the deal with this 24-hour song inside of a human skull? WC: It's a pretty exotic art object. This guy in Oklahoma City has a place called Skulls Unlimited where you can actually buy human skulls-- there are real human heads in there with the skin getting taken off of them. It's absurd. So we're putting the hard drive inside these human skulls that we're going to sell on Halloween. Only 13 of them are being made and they're $5,000 a piece. Pitchfork: Do you have any more collaborations with other bands coming up? WC: We just got some good music from Deerhoof, Nick Cave, No Age, Stars, and Death Cab for Cutie, but we don't know really what will come of it because we haven't been able to do too much with their stuff just yet. I'm thinking the next one is going to be a four-song EP with Deerhoof that comes out in December. We've done a couple of things with Nick Cave, but he's on tour right now so it won't be until after November that he's able to do more. But I think we'll get a good Nick Cave collection of songs with the Flaming Lips. We already have one really good one, so that seems like it'll work out. Even weird people like Lykke Li, I love the way she sings. We're trying to do something with her, and she seems interested. I wanna do something with Ke$ha, even. I'm up for anything. We run into people everywhere. We're possibly going to run into Brian Eno over the weekend at the Moogfest, so you never know. He might say, "Sure, I've got some shit laying around." Pitchfork: And these collaborations are done over email, right? Just sending things back and forth? WC: Yeah. A lot of artists, ourselves included, wouldn't really want to sit there face to face and have to create music. It's a lot easier and less stressful and less confrontational when you don't have to do that. Pitchfork: How do you imagine people will actually listen to your new six-hour song? WC: Our producer Dave Fridmann's son is the perfect candidate. He's 17, he's in high school, and he just listened to the whole thing on headphones while he did his homework. It's meant to be played while you're doing something else, which is the way that a lot of people listen to music anyway. Six hours is a long time for a song to play, but it's not a lot of time to be living your life. This music is not meant to be an immediate thing that you just listen to on your way to work. This is for people who like to be immersed in things. Pitchfork: What about the 24-hour song, then? WC: That's more of a commitment. I would suggest that people don't have to listen to the whole thing at one time, but I think some will. It's like a rite of passage. [laughs] I could imagine a group people getting some mushrooms, going to a hotel room, listening to it and then coming out the other side, like, "This changed us." Pitchfork: Do you have dreams of doing a week-long song now? WC: We were debating if we could do a song that would last a month. But you quickly get into the mechanisms by which you can play these things. Just by coincidence, the longest unbroken piece of sound that ProTools can do lasts six hours. There are very few mechanisms by which you can deliver a 24-hour song. We've discovered them, but you run into limits of, like, "How would anybody ever be able to hear it?" A song that would play for more than a couple of days would really just have to be coming out of a device that is playing music over and over and over, and we weren't really into that. Brian Eno has a song that plays for 30 years, but we don't just want a computer generating sounds. Pitchfork: After doing all this crazy stuff for the past year, are you itching to do a more traditional album yet? WC: You go back and forth. The minute we get immersed in something that's a complete mind-fuck, we want to go back to something that's normal and about music and notes and expression. When we were doing Zaireeka back in 1997, we were totally immersed in this thing that bombarded you from four sides, and then we went on to do things that became The Soft Bulletin. One experience makes you long for the other. source