"When we started there was this element of these experiments we were doing where we weren't really sure how the music would play out because the music was all on different players"
About this Quote
Coyne is describing uncertainty as a design choice, not a bug. The image of “the music… on different players” lands like a little manifesto for The Flaming Lips’ whole ethos: stop treating a song as a sealed object and start treating it as an event that can go sideways in public. In a world where music is engineered to be identical everywhere - the same stream, the same mix, the same “definitive” version - he’s pointing to a deliberately unstable setup where the outcome depends on sync, space, and human attention.
The intent is practical (they were literally running multiple devices), but the subtext is about authorship and control. If the track is distributed across separate sources, no single speaker “owns” the song at any moment; it’s assembled in the air. That makes the audience less of a passive recipient and more like a participant, even if they’re just standing there as the sound drifts in and out of alignment. The uncertainty becomes the point: you’re hearing possibility, not perfection.
Contextually, this sits in a late-90s/2000s indie culture that prized experimentation while consumer tech was multiplying listening surfaces - CD players, laptops, iPods, boomboxes. Coyne’s line quietly flips that fragmentation into a creative tool. Instead of mourning the loss of a unified listening experience, he weaponizes it, making the messiness of modern playback feel communal, psychedelic, and oddly intimate.
The intent is practical (they were literally running multiple devices), but the subtext is about authorship and control. If the track is distributed across separate sources, no single speaker “owns” the song at any moment; it’s assembled in the air. That makes the audience less of a passive recipient and more like a participant, even if they’re just standing there as the sound drifts in and out of alignment. The uncertainty becomes the point: you’re hearing possibility, not perfection.
Contextually, this sits in a late-90s/2000s indie culture that prized experimentation while consumer tech was multiplying listening surfaces - CD players, laptops, iPods, boomboxes. Coyne’s line quietly flips that fragmentation into a creative tool. Instead of mourning the loss of a unified listening experience, he weaponizes it, making the messiness of modern playback feel communal, psychedelic, and oddly intimate.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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