Australia’s King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard have decided that 2017 is the year for excessive experimentation. With plans of releasing no less than 5 full albums of difficult music before the year is out they have chosen the field of microtonal music as their first foray with Flying Microtonal Banana Volume 1 – Explorations Into Microtonal Tuning. By definition a microtone is a musical interval that is smaller than a semitone. Microtonal music may also including any music using intervals not found in the standard Western tuning of twelve equal intervals per octave. Traditional Indian music as well as Thai, Burmese, Indonesian and African music which relies on intonation and other alternative tunings may also be considered microtonal music. Achieving this sonic authenticity required the Lizard lads to customize their instruments to play in 24-TET tuning, a modern Arab system of musical tuning based on the division of the octave into twenty-four equal parts rather than the customary twelve. And the verdict? 42 minutes of groovy trance inducing electric ragas spread out over nine tracks where music class and the dance floor meet and merge into one.
Rating: 8.5/10
