Flaming Lips have made a rare early recording, entitled ‘2nd Casette Demo’, available to stream for free on Youtube. Scroll down to listen to both sides of the release.
The tapes, which were originally recorded in 1983, feature the band in an early, punk-indebted form of their sound and comprise just over 15 minutes of recordings in total.
Though largely unrecognisable from the likes of classics ‘Do You Realise?’ and ‘Yoshimi Battles The Pink Robots’, the recordings do feature almost underwater-sounding vocals and distorted, lo-fi recording techniques which give them a noticeably more experimental quality than more traditional punk music.
‘2nd Casette Demo’ was recently sold on vinyl as part of singer Wayne Coyne’s “record store tour” trip, during which he visited a host of US record shops and sold rarities from the band’s back catalogue. The statement issued under the recently-unveiled Youtube stream, meanwhile, reads as following: “Lips second demo tape is available now on limited-edition 7″ blue vinyl, signed by Wayne Coyne… This extremely rare cassette has been remastered by Kliph Scurlock for the 2000 pressings released this month. Recorded September 14, 1983, “it captures the group in a transition from its primitive shambolic drug-damaged punk-pop to the primitive shambolic drug-damaged hallucinogenic cosmic brother death rock heard on the 1st EP,” in the words of the press release.”
The tracklisting for ‘2nd Casette Demo’ is as follows:
Side A
‘The Flaming Lips Theme Song 1983’
‘The Future Is Gone’
Side B
‘Real Fast Words’
‘Underground Pharmacist’
The Flaming Lips, meanwhile, also recently released a Stone Roses covers album, covering the Manchester group’s seminal debut alongside the likes of Poliça, Foxygen’s Jonathan Rado and Peaking Lights. This isn’t the first time the seminal Oklahoma experimenters have covered material by other artists. In 2009, the band recorded a full cover of Pink Floyd’s ‘Dark Side of the Moon’, while tracks including Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ and Black Sabbath’s ‘War Pigs’ have become staples of the group’s live set.
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