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10:00 · 1,625 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The pace is the premise: eight albums in about five years from the 2012 debut, then a public promise of five more inside 2017.
▶ 00:00:22
- Stu Mackenzie's credits run to guitar, vocals, flute, keyboard, clarinet, sitar, double bass, bass guitar and zurna, alongside most of the conceptual ideas.
▶ 00:00:43
- They carry two drummers, which the video defends on the simple grounds of what two kits sound like at once.
▶ 00:01:14
- One member founded Flightless Records, effectively their own label, which they also use to release their friends' music while touring and recording constantly.
▶ 00:01:51
- The debut has a garage rock sound with its title track recorded on iPhones, and the follow-up abandoned that entirely for a narrated western audiobook.
▶ 00:02:26
- The recommended entry point is I'm in Your Mind Fuzz, where the song-into-song blending that defines the later records first appears.
▶ 00:03:16
- Nonagon Infinity loops end to start so the record never finishes, which is where most listeners, including the host, first encountered them.
▶ 00:04:23
- The five-albums-in-a-year idea is not unprecedented, with Frank Zappa, James Brown and Elvis Presley all having done it, just rare now.
▶ 00:05:03
- Flying Microtonal Banana required modifying their instruments, adding frets so they could play the notes between notes that western music usually skips.
▶ 00:05:59
- Polygondwanaland was released free with the band stating they do not own the record, which led fans and small labels to crowdsource their own vinyl pressings, some for charity.
▶ 00:07:26