Past examples include I’m In Your Mind Fuzz, Paper Mâché Dream Balloon and even their most recent LP, April’s endlessly looping Nonagon Infinity. With the announcement of their ninth album, however, it seemed as though the Gizz had truly outdone themselves with the mouthful that is Flying Microtonal Banana. Just try saying that three times fast.
Still, as Stu Mackenzie – the band’s primary vocalist and one of its three guitarists – attests, there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this very unexpected name.
“My friend Zach very generously built a guitar for me,” he says. “We worked together on the design, and he masterminded the whole thing. It was inspired by the Gibson Flying V in terms of its shape, and it was yellow – so, naturally, it earned the nickname of the Flying Banana.
“Part way through making the guitar, I told Zach that I wanted to put microtones in the frets of the guitar. That involves adding extra frets that aren’t usually there on the board – it’s like accessing secret notes of guitar, the tones in between your regular frets. It’s a concept that I had wanted to look into further for quite a while, and this album seemed like the right place to explore it. That’s how the Flying Banana became Flying Microtonal Banana.”
The first taste of Banana came in the form of its seven-and-a-half-minute lead single Rattlesnake. While leaning on several of the band’s favourite motifs – the pulsing double drums, the layered vocals, the flange-heavy guitar – it also incorporates unconventional sounds, due to finding those in-between notes and implementing them into the structure of the song. According to Mackenzie, the interest stemmed from wanting to learn more instruments (he had famously never played the flute prior to learning it for Dream Balloon).
“I got this bağlama, which is a stringed Turkish instrument,” he says. “It’s shaped like a lute, with seven strings and a long, thin neck. It has movable frets, which you can hear if you listen to Turkish folk music. There’s a lot of sounds that can be found in between the notes you’re accustomed to hearing. I came up with the arrangement of the microtones on the Flying Banana based off the bağlama. It went from being something that I was messing around with to something that I was basing an entire album around.”
Flying Microtonal Banana is the first of five albums that King Gizzard plan to release in 2017. Although being rapidly prolific is nothing new – the band has averaged two LPs a year for nearly its entire existence – the prospect of five full-length records is unprecedented, even for Mackenzie and his bandmates. They’re already recording – “It’s all kind of going on all at once,” he says.
“At this point, we have a record that we’re recording with Mild High Club,” Mackenzie says. “That’s going to be a pretty chill, jazzy, groove record. We’ve started doing some demos for that, and that’ll probably be the loosest record. We have two records that are kind of linked – one more or less leads on from Nonagon, although it’s a little moodier and isn’t as relentless. The other one is different again – we’re getting into territory that we’ve never even thought of before.
“We still haven’t decided on what the fifth album is going to be,” he says. “We’ve got plenty of time to come up with something.”
Fans will get their first listen of new material at the band’s second annual Gizzfest. It’s a huge project – especially in the midst of making five albums – but Mackenzie is unfazed.
“It’s definitely been a gradual process,” he says. “There’s a fair bit of thought that goes into it. Luckily, we were able to put together a lineup of bands that we’ve either toured with or become really good buddies with. We started out by just hitting up our friends, and gradually built it up from there. There’s a lot that’s gone into making it, there’s still stuff we’re finalising now. It’s a really exciting thing for us. We’re really keen to hang out with this particular crew that we’ve assembled.”
By David James Young
