FUSE TV - Flaming Lips' Steven Drozd Planning New Prog Band

The Flaming Lips just dropped their 13th album, the "bleak" and "dark" The Terror, but of course the Oklahoma psych band are already looking to what's next. Frontman Wayne Coyne unveiled plans for a collabo LP with Ke$ha, aptly called Lip$ha, and now guitarist/multi-instrumentalist/musical mastermind Steven Drozd has yet another project on the horizon: a new prog band!

"We're trying to get a psych-prog band going," Drozd tells Fuse, adding that frontman Wayne Coyne envisioned Drozd playing in the mold of John McLaughlin, a famous jazz-fusion axeman who worked with the Rolling Stones and jazz greats like Miles Davis and Wayne Shorter.

"Wayne [Coyne] wanted me to be this weird John McLaughlin-style front guy playing guitar with a crack team of prog musicians. We're trying to get something going with that." 

But don't expect a classic, star-studded supergroup. Drozd says he'll be playing with lesser-known locals around OKC. "It'll probably just be guys from around here," he explains. "If I was trying to make it a supergroup, maybe there'd be some people I'd ask. But I think we'll just get dudes around here."

And the band could debut as soon as this summer. "If the Lips are playing festivals this summer, maybe this other group could play at 1 A.M. over at the dance tent," he says, laughing. "It's in the very early stages."

He adds, "I don't think Wayne ever wants me to have any free time, so he always has some new thing for me to do."

Drozd has yet another collabo in the works, and this one has a name: The Mutating Cell Ensemble, an "experimental" collabo with more than a dozen students at Oklahoma City's Academy of Contemporary Music at the University of Central Oklahoma. The group united for a one-off performance on Saturday, April 13, as part of the school's annual music festival.