Words by W.B.T.G. Slinger and AlteredBeef
Today we are electrified to acknowledge that KGLW.net was formed one year ago on October 19th 2022.
It all started over on the Phish Discord server, where King Gizzard fans had started to coalesce and wonder: why was there not yet a Gizz equivalent to Phish.net? For decades now the site has set the standard (seriously it was like the first band fan website ever) and provided crucial information and services that bring fans together.
It was only a small few King Gizzard fans with a big idea, but the opportunity was seized and within days KGLW.net went live.
Justin (AlteredBeef) is the primary instigator of KGLW.net, from initially financing the project, to utilizing his significant experience in volunteer organizations and academic career to find and manage the team. He is a highly dedicated and long-term fan of music including Phish and Bob Dylan, lover of the natural environment, and the only person who has had a hand in every single aspect of the site.
KGLW.net is a core part of the expression of his love for King Gizzard; having dabbled in the band as early as 2019, the Bonnaroo ‘22 recording is what turned him onto their live material. It wasn’t until preparing to catch them live for the first time in Gizztober that he realised he was going to be the one to set in motion this project that would satisfy what the weirdo swarm was missing.
For a short term, all we were was a static page with some placeholder text and this image:
But it was enough to get the ball rolling. Social media accounts and a collaborative development platform were launched, and the team immediately began to grow together figuring out how to get some functionality to the site as soon as possible, in a way that allowed for endless future expansion.
We started open source on Github, sourcing and scrubbing setlists (we now have over 450!) into our own format — and implementing our other features as we thought of them. It took the effort and advice of several amateur and experienced professional web developers, but none more so than Xander (Axe), whose development experience goes all the way back to the nineties when he launched his own domain and static website as a middle-schooler.
This launched his professional software architecture career, where he specializes in frontend websites, mobile apps, and many other skills. He is a very keen collaborator who offers a large amount of patience helping others learn the process of how websites are made. Axe is a big fan of weird music like Ween and Frank Zappa, and has been into Gizz since 2018, and even taped them twice in 2022 near his home in the Bay Area of California. He also runs http://almost-dead.net/ (as well as some other fun sites if you do some digging), and threw together kglw.today with our API.
With a team in action, and (almost) weekly team voice chats (still ongoing), by Christmas we had made a successful 1.0 release with a functional static site. Some of you have been following the site since then, and would have seen the subsequent meta updates: zero, one, two, three where you can track the chronology of our growth and features in detail.
But here is more of a peek behind the curtain of how the site is run:
Setlists
As the original main aim of the site, the team behind our setlists is the biggest and oldest. Referred to internally as the ‘Setlist Wizards’, typically one person will generate the notes you see on our setlist pages, then the rest listen back to any available recordings and suggest updates. To keep things consistent, we try to have one of the more experienced contributors ‘sign off’ on everything; and so a big shoutout goes to Shae, who initially spearheaded that task with a fervor that truly got the project off the ground.
Our current and longest serving expert is Drew, a Central California native with a long standing and extremely well-rounded taste in all music live, psychedelic, and jammy, from The Grateful Dead and Phish, to the huge wave of neo-psych that King Gizz are at the forefront of. With all this scene experience and as a guitar player himself, Drew has a very keen ear for the segues, teases, and quotes that have come to define King Gizzard's live show in recent years.
Media Archive
What started out simply as the first list of links to King Gizzard interviews, has since grown into the impossible task of preserving all media related to the band.
Two people have been particularly crucial in this task. One is Dan (Rattlerattlerattle), an old-school Deadhead, Phish fan, Zappa and Jazz aficionado whose experience as a writer and teacher has given him an extremely sharp attention to detail in editing almost all the text you see on the site (thanks for everything!). He is currently the main proprietor of the interview archive, but lends his highly considered input in many places including this touching piece he wrote in memoriam of Broderick Smith.
Another key setlist team member is Brent (Gizzhenge), who joined us as the creator of the King Gizzard Live Spreadsheet, the original aggregator of live King Gizzard performances on YouTube and archive.org. The spreadsheet has been critical for our team in reviewing the best available recordings when creating setlist notes and choosing audio and video to showcase at KGLW.net.
Social Media
Lucid is the youngest core team member, whose responsibilities are running the @KGLW_net Instagram account, creating art, and community outreach. Originally from New Orleans, Lucid can be found wherever Phish happens to be playing and otherwise listens to the Grateful Dead and various flavors of Post-Punk and Electronica.
Max (BV Bootleg) missed seeing the band in 2019, but made up for it by seeing them 10 times in 2022. The lack of a full recording of the Santa Barbara acoustic show propelled him to join our team to help with audio archiving efforts and to review setlists. Max has quickly become one of our most valuable team members. He runs the Reddit threads for live shows and the this day in Gizztory Instagram account. He also assists Lucid with our main Instagram account and Sam with the new Gizzlot page to celebrate and promote fan art. He has assisted with graphic designs and he even fostered our first t-shirt run into being, as well as our June ‘23 tour stickers. You might have received one at a Summer ‘23 fan meetup where Max ran a table with all his slaps and spread the word about our site. The Hollywood Bowl meetup was of his design, which required flexibility and quick thinking when venue staff caught wind of the weirdness assembling and blocked off the original location. With the help of head_wave and igloobudsdye, they pulled it off anyways.
We all really appreciate Max for his energy and dedication.
The Forum
Our newest major feature is also three months old today! Created partially in response to Reddit’s API change blackout, it could not have happened without Axe and a couple of new recruits. From Ireland, Phreakbrain is our first European team member, bringing his invaluable experience with Discourse, and Cwar, a backend developer who has proven enthusiastic and helpful in many aspects of the site development.
This old school style forum is where we run the KGLW.net Album Club and Music League; both are great opportunities to hear new music suggestions from fellow Gizzheads. But we have space for anything! Meetups, bootleg merch, live set discussions, new releases, and much more are on the forums, so less on that here is more for you to go and check out there.
Blog
Which brings it back to this blog, and to myself. I usually go by W.B.T.G. Slinger but my name is Wyatt and I’m from Gumbaynggirr country in NSW, Australia. I am sometimes referred to internally as ‘Editor-in-Chief’ of KGLW.net, but really I just like to have a hand in any King Gizzard writing and whatever else is going on in the team.
I was first aware of the band around the time of their debut album, but I didn’t get into them hardcore until late 2016. I had never experienced music fandom quite like following the insane rush of info and releases of 2017, and I was feeling a similar significance in what was going on throughout 2022.
So I decided to start a more easily updatable, expanded version of the flowchart that was often shared to aid newcomers parse through the ever-growing discography. I called it the Gizzverse Guide, and I’d only just published it when I found this project, and we realised the two were destined to merge.
Riding the high of Gizztober, it was an easy decision to make. In fact, I had been hoping for an opportunity like this as I knew I couldn’t produce my long-term vision for it alone.
This kind of collaboration and group ownership is something that has defined a key part of King Gizzard fandom for a long time. The ethos even goes back to the beginning of the band. Though they now have defined members, it has been said by Joey that there were potentially dozens of people in their circle who could have ended up in King Gizzard, and that the lineup we have now are just the people who happened to stick around with the right interest and attitude.
For years, the fun, DIY, and jammy music attracted fans who were into exactly those things — then in 2017 something changed. Not only did the band’s prolificacy dramatically increase, accelerating the whole process, but they decided to give something to the fans that they could truly have as their own: Polygondwanaland. With the Creative Commons Attribution license of this album, being a fan now had an enhanced purpose and part-ownership.
Amid the 2022 flurry of another five studio album releases, there was another special factor: King Gizzard was able to properly resume international live touring after two years off, supplemented by the approval and encouragement of audience recording and tape sharing.
This really put something in the air, and it's clear the fandom was going through another huge wave of creative expression. For example, no fewer than three other fan sites were launched in late 2022, some within days of our own.
While these other sites are now either inactive or have shifted focus, the fact that they all happened within such a specific time frame (after years of sparse interest in a fansite project) is significant. Of course it goes beyond website building, and this highly dedicated kind of expression can be found everywhere there are fans, most of all at the shows, where fans congregate to buy, sell, and barter stickers, shirts, food, and other delights in a scene reminiscent of a traditional jam-band Shakedown Street.
This is a beautiful opportunity to push ourselves further. For myself, it was the chance to conduct my first ever interview. Barry Hill, a professor who taught most of the band at uni, had recently uploaded a video of one of their assessments. We realised it was their first known performance (there were definitely earlier ones, we just know nothing about them), and all we wanted was to secure some details for the purpose of tracking it on our site. As well as fully satisfying this purpose, we made a fortuitous connection that has led to further opportunities that I continue to use to hone my interview abilities. This has totally elevated my music writing, allowing me to better realize bigger writing goals.
This is the gratifying work of creating the most up to date and accurate catalog of King Gizzard shows there is. It is always ongoing, and we have subsequently found many examples of inaccurate information or even full shows that are missing from more popular resources. One example is 2014-05-24, that was found by Brent and is now exclusively tracked on KGLW.net; just one little piece of what makes our data and team such a special thing to be part of.
Since we started tracking pageviews in January 2023, KGLW.net has been visited nearly 350,000 times. KGLW.net has been an incredibly rewarding experience, and the connections and capabilities that have arisen out of the project continue to surprise. In many ways it feels like it has already been much longer than a year, but in many others we are still figuring out how to get started.
Special Thanks
Birds sends rockets into space for his job, and he played a vital role in launching this site. He’s helped keep us flying true from day one. When our team has faced big decisions, Birds has been there to guide us. His experience in high-intensity collaborative environments has made him a reasonable and passionate voice for the progress we’ve made. He’s also managed our development platform and created processes to help us track our work.
Adam Scheinberg is the owner of Songfish, our site’s setlist engine and platform. He has been an incredibly responsive and helpful collaborator, and we can’t thank him enough for that. He rivals Stu in productivity when you look at the frequency of the updates he makes to our platform, and he’s made possible our dreams for KGLW.net even when they didn’t fit his original vision. On top of this, Adam has been willing to share his extensive experience developing Phish.net as a website, but also as a social process of gathering passionate volunteers to create something valuable together. We’ve learned a lot from Adam, and we look forward to another year on Songfish.
d00knation is our vessel. He’s a graphic designer living in the D.C. area whose mark has been made on our website and in our hearts. d00k is a passionate and generous collaborator who makes the process of designing imagery engaging and fun. With joy and weirdness, he’s contributed our site’s Han-Tyumi graphic, our Planet B t-shirt and sticker design, as well as many other graphics to site banners and elsewhere around KGLW.net.
Michelle Cable with Panache, you have only been professional and patient with our enquiries and your positive feedback has been a strong motivating factor.
P. Duthie is the talented (and extremely busy) artist who created our site's butterfly logo, many thanks for catering to everyone's input and nailing our vision in such detail.
Cwar is all about automation. He joined us with skills as a developer and a long list of ideas for our site. We’re working on some and hope to start on the rest of those big ideas soon. He’s helped us take important steps towards refining our processes and defines the technical side of our site clearly and helpfully. We will soon launch @kglw.net email addresses thanks to him, which will hopefully empower his ambition to create Han Tyumi for real.
InblEric came to us from another site that hosts Gizz setlists and has been a tremendous help listening along when Gizz plays live and updating our site. He’s a big contributor to our Setlist team and writes some great show notes. We’re glad you’re one of us. We also have to preview that Eric is creating a very cool site using our API that will help us finally figure out the best version of The River (among other things).
David K. wrote a true showcase of our website in his piece on Anamnesis in the Gizzverse. Not only has he contributed his stellar writing, he’s also been a helpful, supportive, and kind person to discuss any aspect of our site. We look forward to his future contributions to our blog, and we know he has plenty in the works.
Professor Barry Hill, not least for your part in setting the band on their trajectory, but also for your time and invaluable archival efforts.
Shae is the KG to our LW. He started our Setlist Wizard process with precision, reason, and the heart we needed to believe we could actually review every Gizzard show in existence. He’s now taken on the task of writing up notes for every notable version of The Dripping Tap, which he claims is unequivocally Gizz’s best song ever.
Catmoleman played an important role in the early development of our site as we imagined what was possible. He’s had a hand in many developments of the jamband scene, even in the early days of etree.org. He helped guide our team from the static site we started, to what we’ve become today.
Atom deserves our deep gratitude for his role in bringing many people to our team and helping spread the word about our site shortly after launch. Not only this, Atom developed the song lyrics that we host on our site and facilitated our first contact with the band’s management.
JamintheStream is a professional journalist and music blogger who shined an early spotlight on our site in his post, “KGLW.net strives to be site of record for King Gizz”. He also wrote a tour recap on our blog after extensive touring with the band. Beef was lucky enough to meet him in Chicago, and hopes they meet again soon.
Spid has deep knowledge of King Gizz, especially their early days. He has been invaluable in the process of unearthing the history of this band that we’re helping to preserve. Spid also runs a YouTube channel with the fruits of his forays into Gizzard history.
Rowdygizzfan joined us with his "Anatomy of a King Gizzard Show" blog post and he's been a generous contributor to the planning and development of our site ever since. We look forward to what comes next.
Grey_locke created our 404 image and our amazing anniversary gif. Thank you! We love the playful style you bring to our site.
Streamus is not a member of our team, but we have heaps of gratitude for his dedication to Live Gizz. His live streams have enabled us to update our setlists in real time and his recordings at Altered Beast Broadcasting are sometimes the only record we have of performances. Not only has Streamus managed to navigate European and American tours, the real feat is holding that camera up so steadily show after show.
Gerdbot created our Lil Giza mascot and was introduced to us by Maynard, a great supporter of our site. We thank them both for their contributions.
Special Gratitude for their various contributions goes to... Sport, 28rebounds, Nate, AmicusCur8s, mera, NoBody, polygond, r0s3sarefrəë, SiennaSnap1, Swampmatic, vom-IT-coffin, Tower Jam, saffron, ezra, mg98302, Ashley, TimelandisWacky, chase, and to those we might have missed. Much love and many thanks to all of you.