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Although I attended Flaming Lips parking lot and boombox experiments in the late nineties, I still regret not attending the Zaireeka midnight release party at Norman's late, lamented Shadowplay records. It was probably my best chance to listen to the album the way it was meant to heard, with all four discs playing at the same time.

That is, until now. I just saw that the Alamo Drafthouse is staging an outdoor "screening" of the audio project later this month. The Web site says the folks from the downtown theater are "setting up a massive quadraphonic sound system with which to broadcast the album." I know this is splitting hairs, but if the album has four discs, doesn't it have eight channels of audio? Shouldn't that be an octophonic soundsystem? Perhaps they're mixing down each disc into a single channel.

A few years back, I kept hearing rumors that the Lips were working on a 5.1 mix of Zaireeka, which seems to be a much better format for home listening. Of course the idea of playing four CD players at home simultaneously is a little preposterous. However, I don't know whatever came of that project.