1," "Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell" and "Fight Test" (the latter of which, following a settlement, now credits Cat Stevens as a co-writer, given its similarity to 1970's "Father and Son"). This experimentation spawned a handful of classics, including the processed, strummy singalongs "Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. Drozd and Fridmann, meanwhile, brought beats to the forefront, blending programmed sounds with loops and samples of the former's live drumming. The production was brighter and punchier, with Coyne - whose singing always relied more on charisma and emotion than technical ability - at his most confident and pitch-solid. "Wayne just brought in the latest stack of CDs he'd been listening to and said, 'OK, I like Bjork, I like Madonna, I like all these different elements of these different things,' and I had been of a similar mind that if we were going to start something, this seemed like as good a way as any other to try something new." "It wasn't really focused," Fridmann recalled in Jim DeRogatis' 2006 book Staring at Sound. Hear the Flaming Lips' 'Ego Tripping at the Gates of Hell' But even through the mess, a distinct sound started to emerge. The sessions took place at Fridmann's Tarbox Studios in Cassadaga, N.Y., unfolding concurrently with work on two lower-profile projects: a soundtrack to the Lips' warped, low-budget sci-fi movie, Christmas on Mars, and another for Bradley Beesley's hand-fishing documentary, Okie Noodling. But the group - by now the core unit of Coyne, multi-instrumentalist Steven Drozd, bassist Michael Ivins and longtime producer and engineer Dave Fridmann - got way more single-oriented with Yoshimi, dabbling in slick choruses and stylish computerized rhythms that borrowed from contemporary hip-hop and R&B. The Lips, launched in Oklahoma City 19 years earlier, had already taken massive strides toward accessibility, having evolved considerably from the scrappy psych-rock of their early days: Their ninth LP, 1999's The Soft Bulletin, was roundly labeled a masterpiece, recalling a darker and more blown-out version of the Beach Boys' wide-eyed symphonic pop circa Pet Sounds. 'Wouldn't that be interesting?' And it was!" "We would listen to things like Nelly Furtado and Madonna, and we would say, 'Why don't we try to do that to our music?' Wouldn't it be funny if" – not thinking we're making commercial-sounding music we're thinking we're gonna put these big beats and these funny, quirky sounds to our simple, little, funny songs about robots. "When we were going to make Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, to us we were experimenting with pop music," the band's frontman, co-writer and overall ringleader, Wayne Coyne, told Yahoo in 2017.
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