In the not too distant future, music business courses will include a unit on King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard. To put it frankly, they’ve done just about everything right, from building a community around their band, to working their butts off.
The band recently unveiled their eagerly anticipated eighth album, the ambitious infinite record Nonagon Infinity, and have so far accompanied the release with two music videos, including most recently, a clip for ‘People Vultures’.
Released not long after Radiohead unveiled their own contender for best music video of the year with ‘Burn The Witch’, King Gizzard’s ‘People Vultures’ was a direct continuation of their ‘Gamma Knife’ clip, featuring the same Jodorowsky-inspired cinematography and bizarre fantasy sequences.
As co-directors Danny Cohen and Jason Galea told Dangerous Minds, the different characters the titular vulture fights in the clip, whose look was inspired by Japanese tokusatsu shows, are all “plucked from the tracks on Nonagon Infinity“.
“With the vulture fully assembled and all the band members inside, it weighed over a tonne and was difficult to move safely across the rough terrain without breaking or toppling over,” they told Dangerous Minds.
“[Frontman] Stu [Mackenzie] had the daunting job of being inside the vulture’s neck and head with only a small railing to battle the vertigo and bumps as the vulture slowly moved.” Indeed, the filming of the most bizarre music video of 2016 was labour intense.
According to NME, Cohen and Galea’s production team for ‘People Vultures’ was comprised of almost thirty people. Filming took place in a quarry outside of Geelong in Victoria in order to replicate the scenery of tokusatsu TV shows like Ultraman and Kamen Rider.
“What a crazy day. 18 hours in a mammoth 20-foot avian Frankenstein monster made of cardboard, pine and latex,” Mackenzie told NME. “13 people inside the beast at any one time – seven Gizzards, one stabilising my head, two puppeteering the wings and three to push our friend along the rocky terrain.”
“I think I permanently injured my spine wearing that awkward, bulky burdensome head on a backpack and every night since, I’ve had nightmares about that claustrophobic cavity.”
“Everyone is severely traumatised by the ordeal – Joe has been left mentally scarred and Ambrose sadly passed away. We buried him at the You Yangs. RIP my friend.” The Nonagon Infinity album movie, due out later this year, will presumably be dedicated to Ambrose.
