King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's Path to World Domination

The Greek philosopher Heraclitus wrote that "no man steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river, and he's not the same man." Essentially, change is fundamental to life. And no musician or band has reflected this as much as King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard.

The six-piece is known for its quicksilver style, and for the last couple of years, frontman Stu Mackenzie's brain has been preoccupied by a hierarchy of three things: his wife, his kids and Eurorack.

He admits he's become obsessed with the modal production equipment, which the band has been employing at live shows for intermittent rave sets. "It's just so deeply addictive and dense and endless, it is an absolute ocean with what you can do with that stuff," he says. "I still love guitar, but it reminds me of how I felt about playing guitar when I first started playing as a teenager. It just feels so brand-new...and we're definitely doing things that I don't think Eurorack was designed to do."

This is one of the latest musical innovations the prolific group has tackled, after establishing a reputation for exploring multiple genres through an impressive oeuvre of 27 studio albums since forming in 2010.

But it doesn't stop there. It never does with this band. King Gizz is now on a tour through the U.S. in which each performance is a collaboration with an entire orchestra from the respective cities, including a stop at the Ford Amphitheater with the Colorado Symphony on Friday, August 8. The tour is for the group's latest album, Phantom Island, which sees an expansion of sound with atmospheric, dreamy forays, and Colorado gets a special addendum: King Gizzard's only stateside rock shows will happen in Buena Vista at Field of Vision, a three-day camping festival at Meadow Creek that includes several other psych-rock bands.
When we catch up with Mackenzie, he's on the bus with his bandmates after performing the tour's first tour stop in Philadelphia. "We're on some giant bridge," the Australian native says. "We're staying in Brooklyn tonight. There's a big  body of water...I don't know if we're in Manhattan or something."

Before landing in the U.S., King Gizz had been on a tour through Europe that saw performances at unique venues, from the Lycabettus Theatre in Athens, Greece, to the Lukiškės Prison 2.0, a prison-turned-arts-community in Vilnius, Lithuania. According to Mackenzie, it was "truly a very special tour that I think we will talk about for a long time and look back on forever." In a particularly memorable moment during the Vilnius run, the band brought a fan onstage to play guitar in "Dragon," a metal track that Mackenzie notes is "not an easy song to play."

Mackenzie says the group — which includes Ambrose Smith, Michael Cavanagh, Cook Craig, Lucas Harwood and Joey Walker — will occasionally see people in the crowd holding signs asking to join the band on stage.  At Lukiškės, "we noticed that this particular guy was at the front row for all three nights; he's just right there with the sign, so eager, so keen," Mackenzie adds. "And I think on the third night, we were just like, 'Oh, this guy he's so keen, we've got to bring him up.' ... He just killed it. And it was very beautiful and cool for us to be a part of that."

Now imagine what the fan himself thought!
Those who couldn't make it to those European shows were still able to get in on the fun: King Gizzard livestreams its concerts on YouTube for free — at least, when a venue allows it to. "It's actually a ton of work," Mackenzie says of the livestreams. "It takes quite a lot of people to make that happen, and it's not necessarily cheap to put on, either. And a lot of people have said to us, 'That is the worst idea you've ever had,' and some of the venues freak out, too, actually, because they're like, 'Well, if you're going to stream for free, then people aren't going to buy tickets.'"

But King Gizzard makes it work: This band goes all out for its fans. "My personal sort of equation, I guess, to the whole thing is, well, we sell enough tickets to pay the bills and everything like that, so let's put a little bit of that aside and stream the show so more people can tune in and just be involved in it. Let's make this kind of feel like big family," Mackenzie explains.

"It feels so deeply worth it to me; so, so worth it," he says. "I do know that we are privileged to be able to actually sell enough tickets to pay the bills to make that whole thing work. It's a pretty big operation going on behind the scenes to make those happen with that quality as well, and the guys who run it just do an amazing job. We have a great synergy with them now."
In planning live sets, it "depends on how everybody wakes up in the morning; it's pretty last minute," Mackenzie says. The members will try to only play songs they've never done at the particular city before, although "we have more songs than we can store in our brain," he adds with a laugh. "We'll write the setlist proper after soundcheck."

With so many albums, King Gizzard definitely has a deep well to pull from. From early microtonal albums to spaghetti Westerns and blues and now its symphonic work, "it's a test-kitchen mentality," according to Mackenzie.

"That's generally the way we've made music. Other times, it's about exploring something that's felt more from within. And this can spread across multiple albums," he says. "Definitely Phantom Island and Flight B741 have been about passing the mic and everyone in the band is singing. It's been about exploring what we can get away with. Both of those records don't have choruses, they don't have any repeating lyrical structures. They're quite stream of consciousness, but with passing the mic around to other people.  And we wanted to see what we could get away with in that world."
Gizz then carries the lessons learned through these explorations to push new work that always stands apart from the past. It's rare to see a musical group evolve its sound so much between albums while still maintaining a cohesion that identifies the work as unique to the same band. But King Gizzard has accomplished that. "You end up with something quite different just by the nature of being different people and seeing different things in the world and having made different music in between," Mackenzie says.

For Phantom Island, "the original idea was just to do a show with an orchestra, which was proposed to us as a one-off," he says. "And then we thought, 'Well, hang on, if we're doing a show, we may as well make some new music.' It was quite a serendipitous set of events that led to Phantom Island. Happy we landed on it — it's one of my favorite things we've done."
Colorado will soon get to experience it live at the Ford, before the band heads down to Buena Vista for Field of Vision from August 15-17. "I love Colorado," Mackenzie says. "It's obviously incredibly beautiful, and it's funny — as an Australian, I feel quite at home there. It's weird because we don't have the mountains like you do, but I think we share an outdoorsyness. There's a synergy there where I've always felt very at home in Colorado."

King Gizz played some marathon sets at Red Rocks over the last few years, which people traveled from around the world to catch. Mackenzie says the venue is "next level. It's incredible. There's a lot of people, but it feels very intimate. When we're in a place where we feel inspired, the music is different, the energy is different. It's nice to play those places where you feel that as much as you can."

No doubt the band will feel something special at Field of Vision, too. Mackenzie says they visited Meadow Creek last year to look at the site for the festival, and that members were overcome by the beauty. "I had a bit of a spiritual moment out there," he adds. "I felt very connected."

Of course, that area of Colorado is also known for its paranormal activity. Mackenzie laughs at this.

"Well, maybe I felt something paranormal," he says. "Maybe I also was just really hungover."

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, 7 p.m. Friday, August 8, Ford Amphitheater, 95 Spectrum Loop, Colorado Springs; tickets are available via AXS. Field of Vision is Friday, August 15, to Sunday, August 17, Meadow Creek, 15264 County Road 350 bx 5246, Buena Vista; tickets are available at meadowcreekco.com.