The Flaming Lips' September 12 spectacle in
Charlottesville, Virginia was one of those righteous shows
that should inform other area performances for months to
come. Amidst a snowstorm of confetti, sweat, and balloons
-- really, really fucking big ones -- bassist Michael Ivins
helped cobble together recreations of the tracks on "At War
With The Mystics" in an adventurous multi-sensory
experience that begs rather stubbornly for a less
dismissive term than merely "concert." One can only hope
that the other musicians in attendance were paying close
enough attention to leave inspired.

MC: What sorts of things motivated the songs on "At War
With The Mystics?"

MI: There was a bizarre murder-suicide that happened in the
Buffalo-Fredonia area, and it becomes all you talk about
for four days. Whatever song we're working on at the time,
it takes on a different spin. What's a little bit
different about this record in particular is that we're not
only explorering the outside world, but actually it's how
we actually live in the outside world. With the craziness
that's been going on, we actually explored some of that
stuff on the record.

MC: Are there political or social motives at work?

MI: I think it just adds to the dimensionality of it that
you can take it different ways; I don't think it was
intended any particular way. "Go tell Britney and go tell
Gwen" doesn't mean anything particularly against pop music.
Just for the purposes of the song, it happened to fit.

MC: Oklahoma is an unusual home base; do you ever want to
move elsewhere? Would California just get to be too much
for you?

MI: I think it ends up kind of like that in some places,
but places and things are just that -- places and things.
You make them what you will, because really it's all about
people.

MC: Your stage show is pretty elaborate. Do you ever get
the urge to apply that same grandeur across different
media?

MI: Wayne's usually a lot better about talking about high
art. I don't consider myself an Artist with a capital A.
I just figure that I'm in a band and have been doing this
for a long time and really enjoy it. I think if you take
an artist and what an artist is, it's really just a person
that's using whatever medium they're into. As a sidebar, I
think that's why the Flaming Lips as an entity are trying
to do so much stuff that we don't want to be limited to
just being a rock band and putting a record out. We can
have songs that wouldn't fit well in an actual release, but
would be great in a soundtrack. We write country style
music. We're setting ourselves up to have more outlets.

Interviewer: Vijith Assar

Photo Credit: Tom Daly

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