Stu Mackenzie’s introduction to Turkish psychedelia: “I had this lightbulb moment”
When they emerged in the early 2010s, not many people were taking note of King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard‘s hyperactive approach to psych and garage rock, but their freewheeling nature and propensity for trying out wild concepts on their records soon caught the attention of a dedicated and rabid fanbase.
It should have been obvious to listeners earlier on in their catalogue that the Australian then-septet were a unique prospect that drew from a wide variety of influences, with records like I’m In Your Mind Fuzz presenting an unrelenting acid rock energy, Quarters! taking a more jam band approach with its four ten-minute compositions, and second album Eyes Like the Sky presenting itself as a fantasy story set to a spaghetti western soundtrack.
However, despite the success of their 2016 breakthrough record, Nonagon Infinity, it was the following year where the band truly excelled in demonstrating their prowess in a multitude of different genres, opting to release five distinctly different albums within the space of a single calendar year. While they’ve continued to be prolific in a multitude of styles, the claim that they’d achieve such a feat was laughed at initially, with many believing that the band weren’t capable of pulling off this ambitious undertaking.
Among those five records were forays into death metal, jazz, progressive rock and straightforward psychedelic pop, but the first of the offerings came in the shape of Flying Microtonal Banana, an album composed entirely using a 24-tone microtonal scale.
For this to be used in non-classical Western music, primarily using electric instruments typical of a conventional rock band setup, was a brave move for a band who had only just entered into the spotlight with their most commercially and critically acclaimed album. Given their announcement of releasing five albums in one year, many thought that the addition of an album of microtonal rock was just one additional layer of gimmick too far, and were perplexed by their decision.
The album itself, by some miracle, ended up being just as popular as its predecessor, and as a result, introduced audiences to the possibilities of incorporating Middle Eastern music techniques and theory into Western contemporary music. A large amount of this is thanks to King Gizzard frontman Stu Mackenzie’s long-standing fascination with Anatolian psychedelic music from the Asian section of Turkey, something which dates back to the earliest years of the band’s existence.
During a 2020 interview with Tape Op, Mackenzie revealed the origins of his obsession with Turkish psych and shared a handful of artists who inspired his ventures into exploring microtones with the band’s music. “There’s so much good music from the late ’60s and early ’70s,” he expressed. “It was a crazy musical period over there. Some of those people, like Selda Bagcan and Erkin Koray, are insanely famous in Turkey. They’re pop stars, even today, and their music is psychedelic as fuck. I was listening to that a lot, even before Gizz started.”
He later went on to reveal that he’d had an experience which led him to buy a baglama, which is a microtonally-fretted stringed instrument from the region, which in turn encouraged him to ask his luthier friend to build his own custom guitars with microtonal frets. “I had this lightbulb moment when I visited Turkey as a tourist, and I started thinking about all this music a lot again in 2014,” he added, revealing that the genesis of Flying Microtonal Banana goes back around three years prior to its release. “The music of their culture is so interesting in many different ways.”
Even though it may have been confusing to many listeners at first, the band’s journey into exploring microtones, as inspired by Mackenzie’s love of Anatolian psychedelic music, didn’t stop there, with the band having revisited it on multiple occasions throughout their now 27-album strong catalogue. It might seem a bizarre coupling, but the band are clearly more than capable of bringing this influence into their music with ease.
