King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard copped a fair bit of flack after taking home the ARIA for Best Hard Rock/Heavy Metal Album last year – but there’s little contesting that the enigmatic rockers are one of the hardest working bands in the game at the moment.
Case in point; King Gizz are planning on releasing four albums this year, the first of which; Flying Microtonal Banana will be available in full next week.
While the very notion of four albums in a calendar year from these guys is a bloody mouth-watering prospect in itself, it turns out that recently a group of eager Gizz-loving redditors have come up with their very own fan theory about the interconnectedness of all of King Gizzard’s albums. Essentially it proposes that all nine of the band’s albums, as well as those yet to be released, fit in as part of a narrative about the end of the world.
Speaking on triple j yesterday, King Gizz confirmed that there is indeed a parrallel Gizzverse. “They all exist in this parallel universe and they maybe from different times and different places but they all can co-exist in a meaningful way,” said guitarist Stu Mackenzie. “They’re being more and more connected and the second album we’re going to put out this year links some things too, and is the most narrative-driven record that we’ve ever made.”
“Before we started a band we knew what the last album was gonna be and what the first album was gonna be. They’re all connected,” added drummer Eric Moore.”
During the chat, the band delved into the whole idea behind exploring microtonal scales on their new album. “We just wanted to experiment with some notes in-between notes,” the band explained. “It gets kinda geeky but I like getting geeky but the vibe is: we’re so attuned to a certain set of musical notes and musical scale; there’s many other possibilities and there’s nothing that’s mathematically sacred about the notes that we choose.”
They revealed that the idea for microtonal exploration was born when Stu found a bağlama in Turkey (a lute-style instrument), which led to a friend of the band building him a custom microtonal electric guitar with a yellow, flying V shape – and thats how the flying microtonal banana was born.
Check out the banana axe in the video for ‘Rattlesnake’ below.
Watch: King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – ‘Rattlesnake’
