King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity

correcting faulty numbers there, it was actually runs of 2,000 each, so they "only" cleared half a million in that time frame. still, imagine most artists would kill for those numbers.

enjoying some gizz at the office, great way to momentarily chase away bad vibes

what gizz did you go for?

definitely reckon the dripping tap would annihilate any badvibes

IDPLML

"mycelium" is low key the most positive song ever recorded

They're playing three sold out shows here. Assuming I can get in, I'm trying to figure out which of the three might be the most strategically appealing for a band with 25 albums that I've never seen live before. First show? Third show?

have they announced any themes for the three shows?

Ooh, I never even thought about that. I did a quick google and I think word is they are not going to repeat any songs over the course of the three nights, so ... roll a dice?

I’m going on the 13th.

they've done metal shows, garage shows, etc, before. they're also REALLY GREAT at pacing and planning their setlists - the show i took my then-8yo to a couple of months ago began with a bunch of their thrash jams, then eased into some Nonagon Infinity stuff, and then slipped into a bunch of Butterfly 3000 stuff, and it all worked together so well.

I'll be there tonight, no idea what to expect. I'll be the one looking old and confused and (checks weather) possibly damp.

My only advice as a fellow old is if it is general admission, be careful about standing in the middle of the crowd. I made that mistake when I saw them and almost got crushed as soon as they started playing.

all metal so far!!!!

now stoner krautrock boogie

now space prog

hope you're having a blast these guys sound like a lot of fun

a little too phishy for me at times, but they are all over the place in a good way

This sounds a lot like the show I saw a few years ago. Started off super heavy but after a while shifted into more of a mellow jam mood that I found less engaging.

it's gone back and forth tonight. two hours straight, thought it'd be longer, maybe because of the rain.

the "stoner krautrock boogie" segment/medley was the peak for me, especially the flute song (maybe not coincidentally, this is also when the rain finally stopped). the metal stuff is fun but feels pastichey imo.

Talked to a dude who flew in from Seattle. This was his 15th show this tour, and he said it was a great set. But I get the feeling they don't really do "bad" sets, just always a hodgepodge of their styles.

My buddy, a recovering Phish guy, was impressed. On one hand, he said, there were moments that reminded him of peak 1995 Phish (I trust him), but he also said there was also lots of other stuff that Phish could never authentically pull off, like the metal or krautrock/psych. Maybe Ween could do that, I dunno, I've never really listened to Ween. (I did see a few Ween shirts, but I also saw a kid wearing a Rites of Spring shirt.)

Anyway, it was fun, not really my scene, so a change of pace.

i saw someone wearing a green velvet cape with a fur collar and a ween logo on the back

I know that before they did the metal albums they were anxious that they wouldn't seem like dilletantes, that it wouldn't seem like pastiche. I know Stu's favourite era of metal is that moment when prog hits thrash - And Justice For All-era Metallica - and I think they make a fine fist of that noise. Certainly Gaia is one of the finest metal songs I've heard in years - that groove, those changes.

I like metal KG, but I'm also definitely a metal dilettante

Ha! Me too tbh...

Sounds like a pretty good show! I have to admit I haven't heard much Phish in their stuff just yet, but I haven't seen them live and haven't caught up with any of the recent recordings. I could see them hitting on some similar jam vibes though.

we couldn't really figure out how much jamming was happening - i'm guessing some of the solos were improvised but there would also be sudden shifts in tempo/rhythm that seemed like they had to be planned, so structurally it didn't seem as jammy

Apparently the band has only recently started exploring the Dead. I found this illustrative interview in (of course) Relix (I corrected the typos, lol):

https://relix.com/articles/detail/king-gizzard-the-lizard-wizard-a-beautiful-mind-fuzz/

During that five-album span, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard also exploded on the live-music circuit, headlining amphitheaters in the U.S. for the first time and aging into the rare torch-receiving act to simultaneously draw in hipster tastemakers, hard-edged metal fans and off-season Phishheads at any given show. It was a long time coming: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have been gradually expanding their own Gizzverse for just over a decade and their rise through the ranks has been singular and organic. In that time, they’ve learned how to make their fans happy—though the group has long staked their claim to one of the more adventurous corners of the jam-scene, recently they have started thinking of themselves as more of a “jamband” than “a band who jams.”

“I didn’t understand the Grateful Dead— they weren’t a cultural phenomenon here like they were in the States,” Mackenzie says, while sitting for a 9 a.m. Zoom at his studio, his two-year-old daughter already awake for the day. “So, early on, when we said we were a jamband, we meant that we had no fucking idea what we were doing. We would just get up there and improvise. The vocabulary wasn’t learned from jambands. But, as soon as we started coming to the States, we noticed that some people would come to every show on the tour. We would always think, ‘I feel so bad for these people. They’re coming to watch the exact same show every night.’ I didn’t realize that they saw this seed of improvisation within our music. I didn’t have access to the cultural understanding of what touring with a band meant. But spending a lot of time in the States opened us up to playing different, unique shows every night and improvising a lot more. And I love that—it makes us feel like we are musicians rather than performers.”

The Gizzard leader says that he will often look back on the group’s past setlists before they return to any given city, in order to offer a unique show. He’s also found himself going down a deep Grateful Dead rabbit hole in recent years.

“As soon as I realized that there were hundreds of versions of the same songs that were all amazing and different, I was like, ‘OK, I get it,’” Mackenzie—who sings and provides guitar, keyboards, flute and a range of other instruments in Gizzard— admits. “When I find a Dead song I like, instead of listening to it over and over again—which is what I do when I find a band that I’m quite obsessive about—I’ll listen to the same song from different years. I said to myself: ‘I understand how this is life for people.’”

I don't really know much about Phish except I've never liked what I've heard, but this Gizzard song (making its live debut last night?) captures what I've always thought Phish sometimes sounds like (at least in my head):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON2YIIPCJr0

btw I'm kinda wondering which records to get, I've got Nonagon and Ice, Death, Planets etc. and I like both of those. I'm more into the band's krautrocky/proggy side than I am the metal stuff

Flying Microtonal Banana

laminated denim very kraut/prog, only 30 minutes but better for it i think.

Omnium Gatherum is a great grab-bag of everything. Polygonwanaland has Crumbling Castle, their great krautprog anthem. KG and LW are great subsequent volumes of their Turkish psych stuff.

cool thanks, I know my local shop has at least one of those

listening to Ice, Death, Planets etc. and I kinda get how they can do so much so fast - it's song based but I suspect like 2/3rds of it is improv. or at least began as improv. that's kinda what Can did I think.

I think their song writing has gotten more complex on recent albums, but yeah, this is basically true.

This is from the Ice Death press release, it's pretty interesting about the improv nature of that album, which was inspired itself by how impov'd a lot of The Dripping Tap was:

For this new album, however, the group wouldn’t be bringing in any pre-written songs or ideas; instead, they planned to cook up all the music together in the studio, on the spot.
Ambitious stuff, then. “All we had prepared as we walked into the studio were these seven song titles,” says Mackenzie. “I have a list on my phone of hundreds of possible song titles. I’ll never use most of them, but they’re words and phrases I feel could be digested into King Gizzard-world.” Mackenzie selected seven titles from his list that he felt “had a vibe”, and then attached a beats-per-minute value to each one. Each song would also follow one of the seven modes of the major scale: Ionian, Dorian, Phrygian, Lydian, Mixolydian, Aeolian and Locrian (“I’m not sure if many people will notice that,” says Mackenzie, “but any musical dorks will get it”).

Over seven days, the group recorded hours and hours of jams, dedicating a day to each mode and BPM. “Naturally, each day’s jams had a different flavour, because each day was in a different scale and a different BPM,” Mackenzie says. “We’d walk into the studio, set everything up, get a rough tempo going and just jam. No preconceived ideas at all, no concepts, no songs. We’d jam for maybe 45 minutes, and then all swap instruments and start again.”

The group ended each day with four-to-five hours of new jams in the can. Mackenzie auditioned those jams after the sessions were done, stitching them together into the songs that feature on the 21st studio album by King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava (the initials of the title, IDPLMAL, spell out a mnemonic for the modes). “I went through it all and cut it up,” he said, of the hours of new music he’d recorded to two-track tape, preferring to “commit to print” over the conveniences of modern digital production. “It was a huge editing job, actually. I edited each track down to ten-to-fifteen minutes of music drawn from that specific day’s recordings, trying to find narratives, arcs and loops within the jams. So the songs were actually written during this editing phase, which was something we’d never done before ‘The Dripping Tap’. The raw power, the real energy, was just a loose jam, and then we refined it and edited it in a way that felt very musical.”

Having assembled full working instrumentals from these jams, Mackenzie and his bandmates began overdubbing flute, organ, percussion and extra guitar over the top. The lyrics, meanwhile, were a group effort. “We had an editable Google Sheet that we were all working on,” says Mackenzie. “Most of the guys in the band wrote a lot of the lyrics, and it was my job to arrange it all and piece it together.”

The result of this radical, experimental creative process is one of the densest, most unpredictable statements from a band whose work always rockets in from unexpected angles accompanied by a wealth of subtext and theorems. But you don’t even need even a passing understanding of those Ancient Greek musical modes to appreciate this adventurous new music. Highlights include ‘Lava’, a suite of pure fire music that swings between spiritual jazz and new age visions, powered by psychedelic saxophones, shimmering cymbals and McCoy Tyner-esque pianos, and the wormhole-riding prog-folk excursions of ‘Magma’, which leads unsuspecting listeners into unfamiliar realms via the siren call of Mackenzie’s flute, while ‘Ice V’ delivers apocalyptic funk with a cool hand at the controls, ‘Hell’s Itch’ hypnotises with its coiling guitar lines, hard honking harmonica and polymorphic basslines, and the ever-shifting ‘Iron Lung’ follows the choppy grooves of its happy/sad songcraft through unexpected twists and turns, a vision of pop refracted through a house of mirrors. Sinister closer Gliese 710, meanwhile, pushes ever onwards into the darkness, its lumbering-but-lithe heaviosity enough to get corpses to nod their heads.

Listen close and you can hear the electric interaction between the members of King Gizzard, the pure, distilled instrumental fire at their disposal, the simpatico musical conversations between these friends. Pull back and you’ll marvel at how their lightning-in-a-bottle improvisations yield songs of such craft, such laser-guided focus. This freeform creative process – chasing the moment in the jam, then selecting flashpoints and highlights afterwards – is one Mackenzie can see the family Gizzard returning to in the future. “We’re already jamming a lot more onstage,” he says. “I guess bands like Can made records this way before, but it’s new to us, and it was a really, really fun experience.”

Ice, Death, Planets, Lungs, Mushrooms And Lava is already one of Mackenzie’s favourite Gizzard records to date. “It’s like we were able to escape song structures,” he says. “It felt ‘far out’ for us – we took heaps of risks and did heaps of different new things on this one. It wasn’t just about one concept – there’s stacks embedded in this one.”

Petro D operates along similar lines - all 7 tracks were written from improvs, each track written and recorded in a single day, each day of improv starting from scratch but following a loose idea of the "story" that track was supposed to "tell".

I’m not sure which is cooler, if that pr is true, or if it is just totally false—SIKE!

i like both possibilities but it seems v specific

they were on Office Hours with Tim Heidecker this week. wonder if those fanbases cross over much, both King Gizzard and On Cinema are great things to get into if you have hundreds of hours to spare

I'm digging PetroDragonic Apocalypse, I like them in thrash metal mode and this has a bit of that non-stop Nonagon Infinity energy as well.

I've quickly grown to appreciate a lot of what this band is up to, but I don't think I would have made the effort without the metal stuff.

Yeah, i find that I connect with them more in lava/death mode than in mushroom/planets mode (which is opposite of what I expected going in).

I think what makes them fun is they have both those sides.

They played Tennessee in drag. Kings.
https://www.instagram.com/p/CujMAKjR863/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igshid=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==

like a month ago, right?

Yup, but just shared on their instagram this morning

Gila Gila Gila!
WOO!

They just put out a 40-track official (but still already much bootlegged) compilation of all three Chicago nights.

After a pretty traditional journey (put off by name; people persuade me they're actually pretty good; attempt to listen but immediately give up when confronted by SO MANY albums) I saw them at the End of the Road festival, found them huge huge fun and now I just listen to The Dripping Tap all day.

\o/

sticking it on right now