Tell me about the context behind your latest album Omnium Gatherum.
We had just finished our last record, Butterfly 3000, and we’re still navigating the pandemic all over the world. So, we’d go to our studio everyday to keep our minds occupied. And in that sense we just wanted to start experimenting with a whole bunch of different directions in terms of where to take the album conceptually, exploring genres, exploring sounds and vibes. Honestly, we just couldn’t settle on anything at all and then we decided to forget the concept and create this huge collection of miscellaneous pieces, and that’s it. Once we freed ourselves of that pressure, it all came together very quickly. We found that we had so much music in us and this deep creative vein, and in the end we were just ready to give something really fun and it was just an amazing album to make.
Where does Omnium Gatherum stand in the rich lore of King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard?
I feel like it’s a really satisfying and enjoyable listen to me. The scale of it is so big as well, and every time I hear it, I think it’s full of surprises and nice little Easter eggs.
You’ve got so much material, do you often place Easter eggs within your albums?
There are a lot of fans that find Easter eggs and things, and I feel like there’s a spectrum of how hard the fans look. There are some very passionate fans looking very deep, and to be honest, the Easter eggs may or may not actually be there, but it speaks to the deep mythology of this thing we have created. It’s still part of the plan, it’s part of a tapestry, some of the albums will have a stronger depth to them, where the patchwork of the big picture is more obvious, and some not so much. But, there’s always some kind of meta that we’re trying to throw down.
When we settled on putting a bunch of random shit together. That really liberated the project
Do you have a sense of what that big picture looks like?
We don’t really even think about it in a calculated sense. It sounds cliché, but we just let it flow out of us. I like that you could listen to our work and drop in and out of it, or you can choose to join the dots in any way that makes sense to you as a listener. It’s a great element to our fanbase which we’re very fortunate to have, people that are so kind and passionate and invested in this weird thing that we do. In terms of the big picture, I guess you could say that there’s some lyrical content and reappearing characters and ideas that are definitely peppered throughout the discography and the arc of Gizz. I don’t really know. It’s intangible in a sense, but maybe it’s tangible to some kind of like spiritual chemistry that I feel like we can all tap into. We don’t have to have the vocabulary to decipher it, but I kind of see it as these different clusters of galaxies coming together. You can take different paths and the significance of anything can change at any moment.
Omnium Gatherum is an album of many reinterpretations. Ideas that hadn’t quite worked before suddenly found their place. How did you find that narrative?
When we settled on the concept of putting a bunch of random shit together. That really liberated the project. Ideas that just hadn’t worked for other albums suddenly found their place and that’s when you find those reinterpretations and get a version of it together that finally works. There were a couple of songs that were made in that way. ‘Dripping Tap’ was something that we tried to record in 2019, and it is really the product of a jam, but it was so vastly different to the way it appears on this record. It was just waiting to be made in this iteration, you know. The majority of the songs on Omnium Gatherum were actively made for the album, but it’s interesting when some things may not fit for one idea but a version of it is still going to need significant changes before it feels like it has the potential to go on another record.
We’re a fucking weird band, and we say that to each other all the time.
King Gizzard are often defined by sheer musical output. Does that label of productivity do justice to the music itself?
It’s a natural by-product of the fact that we just operate differently in terms of the frequency of what we put out. That works for our fans. But I’d be certain that there are people who like our band who just tap in and out of albums. Like, “oh, fuck, they put out three albums and I didn’t even notice” and they catch up or they don’t.
Personally, I think it’s just a way for some people to justify what’s unique about us. I don’t know what it is, but it is a kind of reality. We are very prolific, but we’re lucky enough to be in a position to have a space where we can write and jam and record and stuff and do music full-time. We go to our studio almost full-time, and honestly, all we do is make music and the by-product of that is just having a lot of music. It’s going to be interesting to see where it all goes though, moving forward, in terms of the trajectory, like, is this going to keep on coming or what?
With sold-out world tours, King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard are probably the biggest band right now to be playing what would normally be considered a niche sound. Does that success surprise you?
Yeah, I’m as surprised as the next person: the scale it’s at right now and the fact that it kind of seems like it’s still going up – hopefully it continues. I think it’s just that thing of us operating on our own and following our own compass and instincts. Part of it is what we see about what’s wrong with the status quo, how music is put out and how music is consumed. We’ve been in a band for over 10 years now and it’s such an incremental thing: all these little things that we kept adding to Gizz until we found our our identity as it is now. But yeah, it’s bizarre, we’re a fucking weird band, and we say that to each other all the time.
- King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard Tempodrom Jun 14
