The long, strange trip of Oklahoma psychedelic troopers the Flaming Lips appeared to have reached a fresh threshold with the nearly concurrent late 2009 releases of Embryonic and the band's complete reworking of Pink Floyd's The Dark Side of the Moon. Both albums fundamentally dealt with the relative nature of madness and paranoia, and, in a variety of blatant and subtle ways, they reflect the Lips' long-standing debts to incarnations of Floyd all the way back to Syd Barrett's tenure. Still, the appropriately titled Embryonic served as something of a rejuvenation for the Lips, who cultivated a raw, swirling spirit on the album that seemed to organically ebb and flow from noisy, raucous rock to spatial drifts laced with ethereal pulses and stray snippets of sonic punctuation. The Lips' homage to Floyd's Moon, meanwhile, is relatively straightforward, albeit with plenty of quirky Lips service, plus contributions from Henry Rollins and Peaches.
Turns out, though, another threshold is on the horizon: Recently, frontman Wayne Coyne announced plans to release the band's next crop of material in a one-song-a-month fashion. Among the songs fans can likely expect is a possible Neon Indian collaboration Coyne recently teased on Twitter.
Fitting, then, that the same synth-adoring Dallas product will join the Lips on this bill. So will another local electronic act, New Fumes, which was recently signed to Dallas' own Good Records Recordings.