Gizz Tapes Roundup: New Archival Sources
Gizz Tapes Round up Gizzard gator walking toward you wearing headphones and walkman (artwork by Jorclank)

Words by Jamie Downsworth, artwork by Jorclank

Over the course of May and into June, we’ve added a whopping 14 shows to Gizz Tapes; these are a mix of previously completely uncirculated recordings, newly spliced together full shows taken from multiple sources, as well as shows that were available online elsewhere already, but just weren't yet on Gizz Tapes.

The quality on these can be a little bit variable, but if you can handle less than perfect audio they're all certainly more than listenable, and I think there's something for everybody here: those of you who love garage rock Gizz, jam Gizz, metal Gizz... which is of course the real beauty of the live King Gizzard experience, the sheer breadth of material to hear, and of experiences to be had.

We hope you'll love these new shows. Give them a listen, and let us know what you think of these shows by rating and reviewing them at our main website, and discussing them on our forum!

Many thanks as always to all the tapers, without whom we wouldn't have these shows or indeed Gizz Tapes altogether.

If you want to keep an eye on our work to track down and archive past live Gizz recordings, we have an archival section on the Gizz Tapes website, which is on the front page immediately below the latest sections and also accessible directly via tapes.kglw.net/archival.

We're always working hard behind the scenes to uncover previously hidden recordings. If you have any recordings of any shows not currently available via Gizz Tapes, no matter the quality or completeness, please do let us know via [email protected]!

2023 London residency

I'm going chronological for most of this rundown, but I wanted to specifically start with these two shows, for a very special reason: they were my first two King Gizzard shows, and — quality of these recordings aside — I can't imagine a better introduction to live King Gizzard.

At the time, I hadn't listened to the band in a few years, since before the 2019 releases of Fishing for Fishies and Infest the Rats' Nest; I made the trek down to London for these two shows very simply on the basis of, "Hey, I remember those guys! They were cool!"

I was therefore entirely unprepared for the first night's show in the Great Hall of north London's Alexandra Palace, a grand old Victorian venue atop a hill overlooking all of central London: suddenly finding myself amidst a sea of 10,000 people moshing to a... metal song? From King Gizzard? The Australian garage rockers? What?!? The subsequent Nonagon suite brought me to some more familiar territory, but the second half featured some incredible jams, some poppier tunes, a rap song(!?!), and a real face-melter of a solo at the end of “Work This Time.”

I was much more prepared, then, for the second night at east London's 1930s Art Deco theatre, Troxy — not least of all because after the bruising I caught in the mosh pit I was entirely unprepared for, I was able to get a balcony seat with an excellent view of the band. The setlist seemed to mirror somewhat the previous night's: once again opening with two metal tracks, into some fan favourite classics, and ending with some Ice, Death, a rap song, and finally a real long jam. I think overall the first night at Ally Pally is my favourite of the two shows, but Troxy's “Am I In Heaven ?” is a real all-timer, and in my opinion unmissable.

I don't believe there are any other real standouts here for those of you old heads who have listened to plenty of live Gizz recordings already, but if this is your first time diving into Gizz Tapes' extensive archives, it's not a bad place to start. If nothing else, it got me hooked enough to see the band another 22 times since then!

2012

To start our chronological journey through the rest of these new archival uploads, we have a real early show from all the way back in 2012, several months after the release of Willoughby's Beach and several months before the release of 12 Bar Bruise. This show took place at the Goodgod Small Club, a now long-closed subterranean nightclub in central Sydney's Chinatown.

All things considered — all the audio comes from a pair of camcorders rather than 'real' audio gear, and there's a few cuts here and there between songs — it's a pretty good recording of a blistering show from early in the band's career. If anything, the somewhat raw sound really complements this purely garage rock set. It's typically short for the period, coming in at a mere 34 minutes — this young Gizz is a very long way off from performing the marathon shows of the last few years indeed.

This recording features the earliest known recordings of no fewer than five of the twelve songs here, with “Sea of Trees” being so early in its development as to remain untitled and have some alternate lyrics.

It's about as far away as you could get from the Ally Pally and Troxy shows — it's remarkable how much the band developed over the next few years alone, let alone the almost 11 years until those two London shows. Yet for me this is another highlight of this batch of uploads; an all too rare show from early in the band's career, and a really fun one to boot.

2016

April 2016 saw the release of Nonagon Infinity, for many Gizzheads the band's magnum opus, and over the next month they embarked on a whopping 26-date trek across North America. Accordingly, these next two shows are pretty Nonagon heavy (and with about an almost as heavy dose of Mind Fuzz, too). The show at the Independent has long been available as Live at San Francisco '16, so I'll not dwell on that one too much — chances are, if you're reading this, you've heard that one before.

The Baby's All Right show in Brooklyn, NY was the second of two shows played that day, as is briefly mentioned at the start of the show — earlier in the evening, they'd played another show at the Bowery Ballroom over in Manhattan. But there's no signs here they'd already performed one full set just a couple hours previously, or that this was an especially late show — the band are firing on all cylinders throughout this hour-long set.

It's not a great recording — being derived from the audio from multiple cameras around the venue, and accordingly often being a little thin and distorted. But again, this is a band that had just released an album that sounds like Nonagon Infinity, so it's somewhat fitting, and it's by no means unlistenable.

We start with a solid “Evil Death Roll,” but pivot away from Nonagon for the next eight songs; first, to “Danger $$$,” in its last performance for a year and a half and its last appearance as a regular fixture on the band's setlists, followed by the last “Hot Wax” until 2018-06-20 in Atlanta, GA, and the second-to-last “Hot Wax” until 2022-03-05, the Return of the Curse of Timeland. After the Mind Fuzz suite, we then have the last 'true' performance of “Vegemite” — unless you want to count 2024-09-14 — and a typically short for the era “Trapdoor.” "This will be terrible," announces Joey immediately before "Vegemite," but I have to disagree with him — it's a song I have a real soft spot for, admittedly, but this is a great performance in my opinion, and is much rawer than the studio recording. The second half of the show primarily comprises a Nonagon suite — the first half of the album in sequence, with a “Hot Water” in the middle — followed by an almost 12-minute long “Am I In Heaven?”.

It's hard not to see this as an end of an era for the band — as well as including the final performances of a few songs, it's also their final of 13 performances at Baby's All Right, the tiny Williamsburg bar where they had played their first New York shows two years prior. Almost a decade later, after playing “Hot Wax” at Forest Hills in 2024, Joey would say "we actually do have so much love for New York City, 'cause [...] it's like a weirdly spiritual homeland outside of Australia for King Gizzard,” with Stu following up, “New York City was the first place in the world that people started coming to our shows outside of Australia." Clearly their time in New York during this period left quite the impression on the band.

Our final 2016 show is the second show of Gizzfest 2016. A year and a half after the first, the second edition of Gizzfest spanned six cities across Australia, with this particular concert taking place at the Coburg Velodrome, a 5,000 capacity outdoor venue — a huge contrast to the venues the other 2016 shows in this roundup took place at, which have capacities in the hundreds. Now, I do need to issue one warning about this recording before we dive in: halfway through "The Lord of Lightning," the taper takes a bathroom break... bringing whatever they were using to record this with them, and never stopping recording.

Coming in at the end of the year, this show's setlist breaks free of the Mind Fuzz- and Nonagon-heavy mould, with three cuts from two of the following year's albums. After opening with “Gamma Knife” > “People-Vultures,” we segue into “The Reticent Raconteur” > “The Lord of Lightning,” which had become common fixtures in the band's setlists since the summer. After an incomplete Mind Fuzz suite — missing the final segment, “I'm In Your Mind Fuzz” — we go to the debuts of “Alter Me II” and “Altered Beast III." the first time any of that first act of Murder of the Universe was ever performed live. This then leads into a near full performance of the second side of Nonagon Infinity, minus “Mr. Beat” and with the first part of “The River” being played between “Invisible Face” and “Wah Wah”, and culminating in a now all too rare “Road Train” > “Robot Stop.” The show ends with the second ever performance of “Rattlesnake,” its debut having come the previous night in Brisbane.

Most remarkably, almost all of this show is performed in one long continuous chain of songs, with the band only stopping before “Rattlesnake,” a feat only ever exceeded a couple times such as at the Meredith Music Festival a couple weeks later and the KEXP Murder of the Universe session. This is still possibly the longest unbroken block of music ever performed by Gizz outside of rave shows (and the Athens drum machine shows — an unusual pair of shows which are favourites of mine, definitely check them out if you're not familiar: 2022-05-31, 2022-06-01).

2018

After an incredibly productive 2017 for the band, in which five new albums were released, 2018’s shows had some very different setlists to the 2016 shows, albeit they were still broadly the same night-to-night at this point in the band's history.

Our first of three new 2018 tapes, recorded by Mutineer at Boston's Royale, is certainly not the most pristine recording you'll ever hear, yet it's one of my favourites in this roundup. When I'm recording a show myself, I generally want to minimise audience noise as much as possible, but here the audience is very audible, and it really works in the tape's favour for me. You definitely get a sense of what it was like to be in the middle of this crowd which was clearly having a great time, and was completely into everything the band was doing at this show, from the heavy psych of the opening Murder of the Universe segment, to the polyrhythmic prog of the subsequent Polygondwanaland suite, and through some Gumboot Soup, Nonagon Infinity and Flying Microtonal Banana sections. It’s a fun show that’s really elevated for me by having such an engaged crowd.

Next is another audience recording, this time from Joe Burns/Markit Aneight at Philadelphia's Union Transfer, which is a much better recording technically. We have a broadly similar setlist, albeit reordered with the microtonal section coming almost immediately after the opening MOTU segment, with an “Evil Death Roll” in between. This lacks the audience participation of the Boston show, but I can see that being a positive to many listeners.

Finally, we have a festival set from two months later, Germany's Haldern Pop Festival, held in a rural area close to the Dutch border. This is the shortest set of the three at a mere 70 minutes, but they still manage to fit in 18 songs, once again spanning across four of the five albums released in the previous year plus Nonagon Infinity, and it's another really solid performance. Being a soundboard recording, this is technically the cleanest recording of the three.

Other than the unfortunate absence of any tracks from Sketches of Brunswick East, these shows are great recaps of a period that was for many a particularly high point in the band's history as songwriters. The setlists being broadly equal and the jamming kept to a minimum here, it's hard to recommend all three to anyone but the completists; rather, I think it has to come down to what kind of recording appeals best to you — an audience recording from in the middle of the crowd, an audience recording with minimal crowd noise, or a soundboard recording respectively. For me, it's absolutely the first.

2021

This was the band's second show following a long break from touring during the Covid pandemic, as well as their second show without Eric Moore, their former drummer, after his departure in August 2020. The previous night's show at the same venue featured the live debuts of no fewer than 15 songs, primarily from the albums KG and LW, the former having been released a few months earlier and the latter remaining unreleased until a few days after these shows. This left a mere two debuts for this show, which heavily took its songs from both those new albums along with the first microtonal Gizz album, Flying Microtonal Banana.

As with the first night, this second show at Croxton Park Hotel has a really great audience recording courtesy of Christopher Jacques. Other than some technical issues during “Pleura” which forced the band to stop, it’s a very solid show, although perhaps not a particularly exceptional one beyond the setlist.

If microtonal Gizz is your jam, all the shows in the first half of 2021 are entirely or almost entirely microtonal, and are definitely worth exploring — this show makes four now available on Gizz Tapes. Murder of the Universe fans will also want to check out these first two 2021 shows, as both shows closed with “The Reticent Raconteur” > “The Lord of Lightning” with Leah Senior providing live narration.

2022

This show — our first Mexican show to arrive on Gizz Tapes! — is unfortunately incomplete, but the 50 minutes we do have are well worth checking out nonetheless. The three tracks we have are all over 15 minutes long: “Lonely Steel Sheet Flyer," in its first appearance since 2017 and with Ambrose on sax; “The Dripping Tap”; and “The Bitter Boogie”, with Ambrose again on sax and some Marvin Gaye quotes. This feels like a real hidden gem for jam fans. “The Bitter Boogie” is my personal favourite here, but then I'm always a sucker for blues Gizz.

2023

Our first new 2023 show is from Lausanne in Switzerland, with a much jammier set than any so far in this blogpost — Gizz being firmly into their jam band era at this point — and a mostly pretty good recording from Streamus, with a few small dropouts here and there due to this having been a livestream.

We open with a great jam that alternates between “Head On/Pill” and “Sea of Trees,” with several teases throughout as well as improvised lyrics about animals in Australia (which recurred throughout the tour, including at the aforementioned Troxy show) and an embryonic “Grow Wings and Fly” segment. This transitions into “Presumptuous,” rather an underplayed song in my opinion — this is its first of four appearances in 2023, and it hasn't been played at all since 2023-08-24; maybe one for your Field of Vision bingo cards?

The other highlight for me here is the final half hour — a 15-minute “Slow Jam 1” jam-packed with teases and quotes, followed by a 14-minute “Gaia” with a monster drum solo from Cavs.

Now for something completely different: Gizz's set from the public memorial service for Ambrose's dad (and Eyes Like The Sky narrator, among other Gizz collaborations), Broderick Smith. It's only four songs, but each is longer than the last, with closer “Boogieman Sam” coming in at just shy of 24 minutes. Being, as mentioned previously, a sucker for blues Gizz, this was a real treat for me, which I'd honestly never known about before at all. “Boogieman Sam” also featured two additional musicians, long time collaborators of Broderick’s Shannon Bourne and Richard Tankard on guitar and keyboard respectively.

As I listened to it, I read through our own Dan Rzicznek's (Rattle) write-up about the memorial service, posted previously on our blog back in June 2023, and if you'd like to do so too — I highly recommend it, it's a wonderful eulogy and a fascinating read as someone who knew admittedly very little about the man previously — that's available here.

2024

Our final new recording comes from a 2024 show at London's Wide Awake festival via another Streamus livestream recording. Following an introduction by Cheryl Waters of KEXP fame, attendees at south London’s Brockwell Park enjoyed a particularly heavy 90-minute set, with the synth table remaining absent following the rain in Hamburg a few days previously, and the microtonal guitars not making any appearances here either.

After an opening two-song metal segment of “Planet B” and “Organ Farmer,” things stay heavy through a series of segues: “This Thing,” into a particularly short “The Reticent Raconteur” > “The Lord of Lightning,” then finally into a great 11-minute “Evil Death Roll” featuring a series of “Motor Spirit” and “The Silver Cord” quotes.

We return to metal for another three songs, “Supercell,” “Witchcraft” and “Motor Spirit,” before finishing with a 35-minute long jam, with “Sad Pilot” sandwiched between two 15-minute slices of “Head On/Pill.” This is another recording where the audience's enthusiasm really comes across beautifully, with the crowd singing along to the melody from “Head On/Pill” throughout the first minutes, chanting "hey!" when the song kicks into overdrive around the four-minute mark, spontaneously quoting “The Dripping Tap” together around seven minutes in, and then chanting "KGL! W!" out of nowhere halfway through the second slice of “Head On/Pill,” leading a bemused Joey to ask, "What the fuck is that?"

There's a ton of quotes and teases from the band themselves here too; the first “Head On/Pill” slice has a “Hypertension” jam toward the end, and the second contains “Chang'e (Extended)” and “Witchcraft” jams with lyrics, and “Sea of Trees,” “Witchcraft,” “Motor Spirit,” and “Am I In Heaven?” teases and quotes. It's an incredibly fun ride, and was a fantastic half hour (and show!) to end this listening odyssey on.

Bonus: 2026

These don't count as archival uploads at all, of course, but I still felt they were worth mentioning briefly at the end here for anyone who hasn't spotted these in Gizz Tapes yet.

For those of you not in the know: Stu has been performing a series of two-hour improvised electronic sets at Candy, a small café in suburban Melbourne, for the past few weeks. Recordings of the first two are already up on Gizz Tapes, with recordings of the next three to follow as soon as possible. Rave Gizz isn't to everybody's tastes, but for those of us who can't get enough, these are a treat, and something of a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes, with Nathan stripped back to just Stu’s segment on these two shows.

posted by RattleRattleRattle in the General category on 2026-06-27 07:07:35