Flying Microtonal Banana, The Album That Started Me On the Road To Microtonal Music

Flying Microtonal Banana gets off to a strange and exhilarating start. The first track, “Rattlesnake”, opens with this very intense wind noise, and then the guitar intro comes in. There is nothing unusual about the tone of the guitar, an electric through overdrive, not too unusual, but the actual notes the guitar is playing are notes that are very rarely played in the world of western rock music, perhaps a Turkish folk rock band sure, but to hear such modes and scales from an Austrailian band is quite unexpected.

Most of the music you have ever heard in your life uses what’s called the 12 tone equal temperament system of tuning, or 12- TET. But all of Flying Microtonal Banana uses what is called the 24 tone equal temperament system, or 24-TET. Basically it consists of musical notes that, for the most part, don’t exist in Western music. Most bands who would consider getting into 24-TET would quickly give up thinking about what’s involved, but most bands aren’t Australia’s King Gizzard and the Wizard Lizard.

King Gizzard (I’m not typing out their entire name every time!) had been making a name for themselves over the past few years with a very unusual blend of psychedelic rock, progressive rock, and for doing quite a lot of concept albums. When most people describe a band as using a lot of odd time signatures, they are often talking about a band that still, for the most part, plays in 4/4, but for King Gizzard 7/4 is the new 4/4. They were also getting well known for their unusually high output, it seemed to be just record an album, tour, record an album, tour, repeat, nobody could understand how they were getting any sleep. In fact Flying Microtonal Banana is one of five albums they released in 2017. Some bands get lazy and never really change their sound. Some bands get more adventurous and change their sound every three albums. But King Gizzard often change their sound into something completely new with every album. So if somebody was going to take on the challenge of playing 24-TET music, it’s hardly surprising that it was these guys.

This was a complicated process involving attaching extra frets to already existing guitars, a guitar you buy in a shop simply isn’t designed for 24-TET. The same was done with the bass guitar, and they used microtonal keyboards, and there is even microtonal harmonica featured on this album!

But all of this messing with tuning systems would have been for nothing if it didn’t produce some really good music, so let’s talk about the songs!

1.Rattlesnake

Rattlesnake is 7:48 minutes of an F# Major chord. Wait, don’t run away! It’s a strange and wonderful song that simultaneously makes you so calm and peaceful that you could go to sleep for 12 hours and yet so energetic that you could cycle 30 miles on the bike in ten minutes.

2. Melting

Guys, we need to stop destroying the planet, and King Gizz are not shy about telling you that. The album opens with some really trippy polyrhythmic drum pattern (King Gizzard had 2 drummers at the time.) Throughout it features a really groovy microtonal organ. This is neither the first nor the last King Gizzard song that calls for urgent action on climate change, and the fact that they always push for more to be done to save our planet is something I really admire about them.

3. Open Water

A song about one of the most terrifying things imaginable, being lost in the middle of the ocean. This song has a really solid funk groove, but instead of making you feel jovial it sounds really urgent and terrified, insistently demonstrating how scared you would feel if you were ever unfortunate enough to find yourself in this situation.

4. Sleep Drifter

So we’ve had, a poisonous animal, the fact that our planet is being killed, and being lost at sea. Time for something more happy sounding maybe? Sleep Drifter is really happy and cheerful, with singer Stu Mackenzie singing in a really peaceful head voiced tone. It’s about one of the best feelings in the world, calmly drifting in and out of sleep.

5. Billabong Valley

While Stu MacKenzie is the band’s usual lead singer, Ambrose Kenny-Smith is no stranger to taking on the duty of lead vocalist, and on Billabong Valley he sings a song that if you were only half listening to you would think describes the Wild West, but actually describes the life of Dan Morgan, or “Mad Dog Morgan” as he was called in the 1976 film starring Dennis Hopper. This song is a treat to listen to, a wonderful blend of American folk music, Australian history, and ,as always, those beautiful microtonal modes.

6. Anoxia

This one uses the tried and tested “quiet loud dynamic”, popularized by the likes of Nirvana to great effect. The verses are super funky but the choruses have big overdriven guitars, really cool.

7. Doom City

While Anoxia uses the quiet loud dynamic to great effect, Doom City uses the eh, fast slow dynamic if that’s what it’s called to great effect. Most of the verses are quite fast paced, but every now and then it throws you off with sections that are super slow. The contrast of moods is really effective.

8. Nuclear Fusion

A slow groove, but what really grabs me about this one is the sounds, the tone of the guitars and the organ are absolutely heavenly.

9. Flying Microtonal Banana

The album closes with the album’s only instrumental, the title track. And on a very Eastern album, it’s the album’s most Eastern sounding, complete with a Turkish wind instrument called a zurna and it’s in 7/4 time. A great way to finish the album. And it ends with the wind noise heard at the start of Rattlesnake, bringing it full circle.

And now I’m about to tell you about how this album changed my life man, there is no escape!

Microtonal music in all its forms always left my bamboozled, like I always wanted to play it, but I didn’t know where to even begin. But Flying Microtonal Banana somehow gave me a path towards this type of music, by presenting microtonality in a prog rock and psychedelic rock context, types of music I was already familiar with. And the entire album is 24-TET, by far the easiest type of microtonal music for somebody used to western 12-TET to understand.

I investigated the possibility of buying a microtonal guitar just like what they use on this album, and finding them very hard to come by, I instead bought an electric saz, an instrument that uses the 24-TET tuning system and the guitars on Flying Microtonal Banana were set up to be similar to a saz. I started listening to more and more microtonal music, especially the 24-TET type, and, just over a year after hearing Flying Microtonal Banana, I had already put out my own 24-TET album called Argentavis Magnificens. I think the music I play myself is better and less limited for having been properly introduced to 24-TET music, and it all started with Flying Microtonal Banana.