After taping a performance at Los Angeles’ Hollywood Bowl last Sunday, the Flaming Lips are halfway done with the first live album of their career. The rest of the material on the CD/DVD set will be drawn from an as-yet-unscheduled September show in the band’s Oklahoma City hometown.
“We’re hoping that by the time we’re actually doing it, we can put it out in whatever format, like the Blu Ray or HD DVD, [that] Warner Bros. is picking up on and be able to do high resolution, uncompressed audio this time around,” Flaming Lips bassist Michael Ivins tells Billboard.com. “Even [with] DVDs we’re putting out now, for Surround Sound, they still have to encode the video. People say it’s lost its compression but I’m not buying it.”
And while the Hollywood Bowl show went heavy on the Lips’ recent album “At War With the Mystics,” the plan is to dig out some older, more obscure material for the Oklahoma City date. The CD/DVD will most likely arrive early next year. “We never want to rush stuff out and say, ‘Hey, look, it’s out for Christmas’,” Ivins says.
The current tour does feature plenty of willing audience members on stage as dancers wearing Santa Clause and alien costumes, but there is one stage prop that has yet to be unveiled. “Perhaps you’ve heard about our UFO we’re trying to build for the stage,” Ivins says. “It’s not quite ready yet. We’re going to see if we can do it every show or just do it a few times a year.”
He admits, “That’s how we do a lot of stuff — we’ll think of something and then we’ll figure out how to do it afterwards.”
Also in the mix is a new version of the “Mystics” track “Free Radicals,” which will appear in the next “Sims” video game. Due out next year, it finds vocalist Wayne Coyne singing translated lyrics in the odd “Sims” language.
