King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard - Nonagon Infinity

Fuck this is good

gonna guess no

it iz it izz

https://vimeo.com/157973501

Guess again
Xpost

I liked Papier Mache Dream Balloon (or w/e it was called) well enough

normally don't trust much from this city, but they're mostly good.

It might be good. I don't regret looking at this thread.

Paper Mache Dream Balloon sounds like 90s Of Montreal, and I love it. Don't understand the drastic change in sound. They want to sound tougher I guess.

Wasn't PMDB the stylistic diversion?

New one is maybe my 2nd favorite album of the year after Black Star.

Spotify really wants me to listen to this

You should, it rules.

Turned up in Pitchfork's overlooked music list about a week ago:

http://pitchfork.com/features/lists-and-guides/9910-overlooked-albums-2016/

Wasn't PMDB the stylistic diversion?

yes. nonagon infinity just doubles down on the fidgety, high-energy, garage punk that's their primary through-line so far. one of my 2016 favorites, and i'm surprised it hasn't caught on with fans of tongue-in-cheek prog oddity.

yeah this is great. never listened to any of their other albums

finally listening to this, great! they really got psychedelic ants in their pants

based on this i feel like they'd be really fun live

yeah def seem "high energy"

global have you heard General Baby (local band), has a bit of this vibe but more lo-fi zappa

(it's from that whole larry wish & his guys house show axis that i don't really fully understand)

never heard of em!

General Baby don't even have a web presence, really

oops i guess they used to be fortified five that's why it's hard to find

https://fortifiedfive.bandcamp.com/album/a-brief-demonstration-on-baby-talkin

Ilx doesn't love the gizzards and that's a fact.the last album is very good though.

most recent one (polygondwanaland) is super-proggy and totally rules. these aussie freaks own 2017 imho

this is one of the best bands going rn

I like them

especially their microtonal/weird tuning stuff, a lot of stuff on that Banana record sounds great.

not so keen on the new one with narration, it seems extraneous

Yeah i meant polygondwa above as their best record of the year. I wish they werent as repetitive melody wise though. Like back in the Fill Your Lungs days..

they seem like they're excellent live too- the main guy definitely borrows some john dwyer moves tho

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGHgpVU3UuU

https://youtu.be/_Eg3OUQPayk

Gold

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDnOJkrRv3g

Who can report on the new one ?

bit of a psychedelic soul vibe. mellower stuff, a la paper mache dream balloon and sketches of brunswick east

Sounds like mediocre b-sides for all previous 4, except for one surprising and great doom metal/Uncle Acid style song (Great Chain Of Being)

"muddy water" sounds like a victory lap

"barefoot desert" is dope. 1 year, 64 songs. damn!

destroying all that will keep us heading for a meta-thesis

\m/

chill band

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

I only need to see nardwuar once every 5 years or so but that is good servietting

Friend last night: "have you heard ... they're called like ... Daniel Strudel and the Noodle Doodle?"

Omg actual lol

ILM don't care about Gizzard and you may be right at this point.Used to be great though.

ok i listened to the latest i was erm not expecting straight 86 speed metally thrash. Its not terrible i guess.

It made me think of HNIA’s different smart-ass visitation to metalfrom 2016, which was like, sunshine prog-metal(?). HNIA’s album was actually much more interesting imo.

lot of young aussie bro's really really like these dudes (and possibly drugs??)

because i'm slightly interested in what they're on about, repeated listens haven't been bad, also the guit style is more thrash than beedleybeedleybeedlebeedely. i guess ecoconscious thrash shit is closer fit for olds who are more garage or postpunk maybe. 'i have gone insane-o i lust for volcano pee with molten lava give me my nirvana' and 'auto-cremate! self-immolate!'

Taking my son to see them in a few weeks, he's a big fan. Trying to get caught up on their endless catalog. They seem like great musicians, very creative and intense, but the sheer repetition of their approach wears me down.

Which ones should I listen to if I want to hear them mix it up more? So far I've liked Flying Microtonal Banana the most, but I've barely scratched the surface.

nonagon infinity is the most accessible to early olds imo, it's relentless and stirring.

i love the first one that was my intro, which is very psych- can't remember the name, it has Head On/Pill?

I'm in Your Mindfuzz is pretty strong imo.

I was meh on Fishing For Fishies which is working that sound conceit so hard, or maybe not the sound I wanted. The recent is really fun, but it's way chewing gummy to me. Still the more I listen, there more I am charmed by it.

I can't remember Polygondwanaland, so...

I was half-hoping the new one would be even more thrashy, which is kind of a funny thing — they're constantly churning out so many records in so many different veins that you wind up with a fairly loose attachment to any of them sounding particularly Gizzardy. Or maybe it's just the nature of thrash that once you blend a little of it into what you're doing, it starts feeling like you might as well thrash all the way; it's kind of an extremist genre!

At some point they should release a detailed guide to their working methods, like a productivity self-help book for rock musicians. At this point I'm just curious how they divide up their time.

Minimize chord progressions, tempo changes, syncopation, and vocal melodies seems to be part of it, at least for the straightforward rock LPs.

gonna guess no

― some men just want to watch the world Bern (Noodle Vague), Wednesday, May 4, 2016 5:06 PM (three years ago)

this is definitive

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

Dripping Tap is their best track I reckon, no shade on their wealth of other brilliant music. It's like this glorious waterslide constructed from motorik jams.

it was certainly a very very persuasive way to open the set

One thing that has been helpful in wading through the massive discography is that it's so diverse that if you're looking for a particular sound, you can narrow it down somewhat. I'm far from comprehensive in my knowledge but this thread's namesake album is a good next step from the Dripping Tap.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3jnsD-fEHdY

new album is their synth album and comes in two versions - one with all the tracks under 5 minutes (but they seem to segue together judging by the three-song suite they've released) and one with all the tracks extended into 10+ minute jams for their longest album yet.

sounds quite promising

lol I just listened to their last album (which was straight up metal) so this is kind of a shock. I mean you know that's what they do but still. very interested in this one

out today. oh god uhh this sounds incredible.

Yeah I played some of the extended version and it was great. Probably just gonna wait for an LP release, it’s not like there’s a shortage of King Gizz records I haven’t heard

the short version is great but i'm a little disappointed the tracks don't quite all segue together

first one of the extended versions is wonderful

some of these extended versions are transcendent and some do not justify their length at all

I agree with that, but I'm still having a blast. When that one track ("Set"?) busts out a Freedom Williams-esque rap verse I cracked up.

Actually, there's a lot of stadium house/KLF coursing through a lot of this. But also nods to drum and bass, acid, etc.

Lol at this line in the allmusic review: "... giving the listener more time to wonder why the band chose to go down this route." Like, of all the bands that would make you ask "why," this band is not one of them.

this is excellent running music.

^hugely looking forward to running to this.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QHZR9SA5pOg

Before the album came out I saw a few references to Giorgio Moroder, and of course they've done Krautrock (sort of), so I was not expecting the Eurodance jock-jam vibe.

me neither but everything they do is a bit silly so it's not exactly out of character. I think this is what's so endearing about them, for example I'm not really a metal guy but I dug Petrodragonic Apocalypse because it wasn't afraid to be dumb in a real fun way. I mean "Gila Monster" is one of the few metal tracks I've heard that really made me laugh.

I know better than to get hung up on just one particular album from these guys and this made for a fun listen (esp the extended version), but I don't know, this whole album and rollout feels to me like they are leaning way too hard into pleasing the reddit fanbase or something. It just seems too intentionally meme ready and winking, or something. I dunno, it's hard to put into words how I'm feeling about it, but I guess this is where I think the silliness outstrips the quality of the music and I've never really felt that way before.

I enjoyed the euro techno jock jam esp because i was rollerskiing. at least they good at what they do.

found a copy of Polygondwanaland today and wow this is just up my alley. real progressive and kind of electrofunky. genuinely nuts that this is was one of FIVE albums they did that year. with most modern prog acts you're lucky if you get an album like this every 4 years.