Songs > K.G.L.W. (Intro) > History


After a three year gap, King Gizzard presented the highly anticipated second installment of their “Explorations Into Microtonal Tuning” series. Having started with Flying Microtonal Banana, K.G. and its sister album L.W., aimed in a different, more stylistically diverse direction with both albums carrying elements over from one another to create a cohesive whole. Nothing sets this up better than the first track “K.G.L.W.,” often referred to as “K.G.L.W. (Intro).” Fading in from the sound of wind and zurnas, we’re given an instrumental track with a central motif, before leading us into the album’s first big song “Automation.” L.W. features another track called “K.G.L.W.” (referred to as “K.G.L.W. (Outro)”) that expands upon the motif and turns it into a raw, complicated and long metal closer for the pair.

A Consequence of Sound track by track rundown of K.G. said of the track “it’s always nice to start a story with a prelude.” To go deeper into it however, Stu’s appearance on the Tape Notes podcast says a lot about the track. “This was one of the last. It was the very last that came together for K.G., that’s for sure. This intro was. And the record needed a theme song, it honestly was as simple as that, and the gentle kind of, like, folk song thing was what was first but as soon as I kind of got this riff down and sent it around it was something that more than one person said, like, ‘we need to do this as a doom metal version.’” During that interview Stu played a number of demos recorded on his phone. The first is a rough draft of Stu trying to create the melody on an acoustic guitar over a drone note. The second version recorded two months later is on an unplugged electric guitar and features the main idea of the melody, though with a noticeably different structure and a new ending. A few months later again, he returned to the acoustic guitar and recorded the third demo, this time closer to the studio version. When it came time for the studio version, Stu started with two acoustic guitars panned left and right, with an additional two panned acoustics playing the lower octave. The rest is overdubbed on top of the guitars. He also notes that the title track of Flying Microtonal Banana is played in reverse at the start of the track.
Liner notes indicate that only Ambrose (harmonica) and Stu (guitar/percussion/bass/keyboards/flute/sitar) played on the track, making for the least amount of members on a K.G. song. The album was released on November 20th 2020.

“K.G.L.W. (Intro)” was first played on 2021-02-23 at the Croxton Park Hotel in Naarm (Melbourne), the band’s first post COVID-19 lockdown show and the start of their fully microtonal sets for the year. As one might expect, the song was the first in the set, with its companion piece being the finale (not including the encore). The song was played at most of the following microtonal shows, though sometimes preceded by the drum solo “Fury.” After these shows ended, however, it was a bit unclear if the song would appear again. Yet while songs like “The Hungry Wolf of Fate” would bite the dust, the intro stuck around. The track reappeared on 2022-04-17 on the Event Lawn at Virgin Hotels in Las Vegas to start the show yet again, this time introducing the microtonal set. At this show it was oddly not paired with “K.G.L.W. (Outro),” but that would change on 2022-4-20 at the Rialto Theatre in Tucson where the microtonal portion of the show was bookended with both parts.
This would be its role going forward, and the track made it to a number of 2022 shows before disappearing after 2022-10-05, another show where the outro was not played. It became common for the outro to be played without the intro, which would eventually be abandoned totally in favor of miscellaneous microtonal tunes.

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