In a cooked experiment for the social sciences, triple j Music News producer Al Newstead has made his colleague Angus listen to the entire, 15-album King Gizzard and The Lizard Wizard catalogue in one sitting.
Angus had never listened to a full album by the Melbourne-based garage-psych metalheads before. “I don’t think even King Gizzard has done this before, so maybe I’ll be like an honorary member by the end of it,” Angus quoted around the 5 hour mark. “It could also make me never want to listen to music again.”
Would you go mad listening to every King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard record, back to back? Thankfully someone else has done it in your place.
The experiment reportedly first started as a lighthearted office joke between Angus and Al. Things then turned very serious, very fast. With the band’s upcoming live album and concert movie, triple j thought it would be sacrilegious to let their employee go any longer without a proper King Gizz education. Enter 13 hours of non-stop madness.
Starting from the very beginning with the band’s 2011 debut album Willoughby’s Beach, Angus was prepped and ready for battle. “Look, I’m not leaving the house. I have no excuses,” Angus he reported back to his captors. “We’re all doing crazy stuff in isolation.”
The ABC denomination had released a few hypotheses by this point. Would he become “a certified Gizzhead through a trial of attrition?” Or will this test “explore the furthest reaches of…Angus’ sanity?” …ah yes, classic workplace banter.
By the halfway point, or 5 hours and 18 minutes in to be exact, the clutches of Nonagon Infinity were starting to get to poor Angus. “I am getting very familiar with the individual dust particles on my coffee table,” he reports. The experiment was even straining his relationship with his housemates, “I was trying to get my cat involved because I was getting lonely, and she scratched me and ran away.”
Is this a sign of boredom? Or the beginnings on a downwards spiral? We may never know.
The finish line does appear, and by that point Angus has hit a King Gizz revelation! “There was a moment where something clicked and I was like ‘sick, I get this now’. There hasn’t been a big guitar rock phase for me for a while, but I’m loving what they’re doing,” he reports, as he is released from his headphone prison.
“They’re music nerds who are cool…like pop-up stores: ‘This album is our thrash album’, ‘This is our heavy metal album’, folk, boogie, narration. I love that they pick a theme and they execute it…They’re not just churning out another record.”
“…there were moments where my own physical endurance and mental attention were waning. I’ve spent 13 hours with these guys, I haven’t even spent 13 hours with a lot of relatives in the last decade…”
So what have we learnt from this unnecessary test of human capability? Angus is a living legend, and we should all live in fear of the power of triple j and the lengths that they are willing to go to to spread the good word of King Gizz.
Watch ABC’s footage from the experiment below.
