Music In The News: Flaming Lips, Jack White, Cirque du Soleil

Eat yer heart out

If you’ve ever seen a video of open-heart surgery being performed and thought “you know, that would look pretty good encased in chocolate…” You are incredibly weird. Luckily for you, so are The Flaming Lips. In honor of Valentine’s Day, the group is releasing its new Songs of Love mix on a USB key housed inside an anatomically-correct chocolate heart. The group partnered with Dallas-based company Dude, Sweet Chocolate to make the cardio confections, which are “72% South American dark chocolate studded with hazelnut mini whoppers and waffle cone crunch,” and sell for $60 apiece. Before you go rushing to their website to pick one up for that special someone in your life, you should know that the hearts have already sold out.

American History / X-rays

Jack White’s obsession with all things vinyl is only deepening, having announced plans to re-issue more than 25,000 old blues records through his own label for no profit. “It’s very important to American history and also to the history of the world,” White told BBC 6. He also explained how he first fell in love with the recordings when he encountered them at a young age. “I had been looking for Blues records when I was a teenager and the older ones seemed to have been kinda swallowed up,” he said. “At one point in Detroit a whole Blues collection was dropped off at this vintage record store, so that’s when I first bought a whole batch of Document records—Tommy Johnson, Ishman Bracey, Roosevelt Sykes … I’d never seen those records on vinyl before.”
One of White’s other projects will also dig up the past and put it on vinyl, though in a much more literal sense. For the next installment of Third Man Records’ ‘Blue’ series, some of the 7” records will be printed on old medical x-rays. If that’s something you’re interested in, best buy your tickets to SXSW now; the limited pressing “Flex-Ray discs” will only be available at the Austin festival in March.

Scary Monsters and Clown Tights

Cirque du Soleil has turned many an artist’s catalogue into a successful enterprise. To date, they’ve covered Elvis, the Beatles and Michael Jackson. So it might come as a bit of a surprise to hear that the next iconic musician to be welcomed under the proverbial big top is none other than Dubstep artist Skrillex. The DJ is one of several to have signed residency deals with the Cirque’s new Vegas club LIGHT. As part of the deal, each DJ will be able to use Cirque du Soleil’s resources to create their own distinct show. “The LIGHT Skrillex show is gonna be only in Vegas,” he said. “I want it be distinct to the LIGHT club because the configuration is so customizable, it’s fucking crazy. That’s the thing about the club, too: they can do anything, so it’s how you maximize the dynamic of a great show with all their fucking bells and whistles and all of their budgets and resources to do anything.” LIGHT opens on April 26th, though the start date for each DJ’s residency has yet to be announced.

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