The adventurous spirit of The Flaming Lips extends to both music and words.
The 15th album from the American psychedelic rockers is titled Oczy Mlody (pronounced "Oxlee Melody"), a Polish phrase chosen after frontman Wayne Coyne found it in a second-hand book he bought because he liked the cover. He didn't care that the book, Blisko Domu (Almost Home), was in a language he does not speak.
Enamoured by the way the words sounded, Coyne keyed them into an online translation programme and out popped the phrase “Eyes of the Young”.
“We would not like to call one of our albums Eyes of the Young,” says Coyne.
“But we liked the idea this other cool-sounding word could mean that.”
The title could be both a timely and apt reference to Coyne himself. The album was released on January 13, the 56th birthday of this man who refuses to grow up.
The Flaming Lips are renowned for their joyful, childlike innocence, with Coyne wearing extravagant outfits on stage, alongside people dressed in animal costumes, and walking over the heads of the crowd in a giant inflatable bubble.
Recently, he has been making headlines for his collaborations with 24-year-old pop sensation Miley Cyrus in Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz, and re-recording famous albums – including The Beatles' Sgt Pepper's Lonely Heart Club Band – in The Flaming Lips' psychedelic-rock style.
While these projects were driven by the spirits of friendship, with Cyrus, and homage, in the case of The Beatles, Coyne says Oczy Mlody is its own thing.
“I don’t think there is any particular driving force for the new album,” he says. Spending so much time with Cyrus in the past few years did, however, influence the song-writing process of the three-time Grammy-award winners.
“We would start to have an admiration for the way that she’s presented with tracks,” says Coyne. “Every producer in the world is making a couple of tracks a week, sending them to her and saying: ‘You want to sing on this? Take this groove I’ve got and turn it into a song?’ And I was saying: ‘Man, I wish someone would do this for me’.”
So the group decided to replicate that process.
“We’ll make a track, and once we have the track, I’ll present it to myself as a singer,” Coyne says. “Oh, what can I do now? So, a lot of what we did on this record was like that – we would just be messing around, find this cool groove and make some chord changes and be like: ‘Oh, that could be something’.”
As a result, Oczy Mlody is more upbeat than previous album The Terror (2013), a gloomy affair reflecting Coyne's relationship break-up, and main co-writer Steven Drozy's brief drugs relapse.
"The very first track on the album is the instrumental called Oczy Mlody, and when we stumbled upon that sound, we started to think that's a cool mood or vibe, or whatever you call it," says Coyne. "I think Steven and I both thought, let's see what it would be like to make a record like that."
Coyne says the songwriting process for the new album initially came with tight parameters.
“I would start working on it and I would tell the engineer: ‘We can only do four tracks,’” he says. “It would end up being 50 tracks, but you know, in the beginning, I’m like: ‘It’s only going to be four’. But it’s impossible to know what’s going to turn you on.”
This approach is largely responsible for Oczy Mlody's progressive spirit. Coyne cites the 10th song on the 12-track album, The Castle, as an example of how the sound kept changing.
“In the beginning it felt like kind of a normal song to us, and we kept stripping it down to just this clunk piano and this ridiculous beat,” he says. “And we had a good amount of delay and reverb on my voice. We had this bigger arrangement that we thought it was, putting all this drama and emotion into it, and the more that we took stuff out, the sadder it got.”
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UAE currency: the story behind the money in your pockets
Paatal Lok season two
Directors: Avinash Arun, Prosit Roy
Stars: Jaideep Ahlawat, Ishwak Singh, Lc Sekhose, Merenla Imsong
Rating: 4.5/5
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- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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First Job: Abu Dhabi Department of Petroleum in 1974
Current role: Chairperson of Al Maskari Holding since 2008
Career high: Regularly cited on Forbes list of 100 most powerful Arab Businesswomen
Achievement: Helped establish Al Maskari Medical Centre in 1969 in Abu Dhabi’s Western Region
Future plan: Will now concentrate on her charitable work
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Nepotism is the name of the game
Salman Khan’s father, Salim Khan, is one of Bollywood’s most legendary screenwriters. Through his partnership with co-writer Javed Akhtar, Salim is credited with having paved the path for the Indian film industry’s blockbuster format in the 1970s. Something his son now rules the roost of. More importantly, the Salim-Javed duo also created the persona of the “angry young man” for Bollywood megastar Amitabh Bachchan in the 1970s, reflecting the angst of the average Indian. In choosing to be the ordinary man’s “hero” as opposed to a thespian in new Bollywood, Salman Khan remains tightly linked to his father’s oeuvre. Thanks dad.
The Sand Castle
Director: Matty Brown
Stars: Nadine Labaki, Ziad Bakri, Zain Al Rafeea, Riman Al Rafeea
Rating: 2.5/5
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Founders: Alhaan Ahmed, Alyina Ahmed and Maximo Tettamanzi
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