King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard have subverted music industry convention today by releasing their new single ‘Automation,’ as a bundle of raw files on their website along with a collection of video footage with which they are encouraging fans to remix and make their one videos for the song. The most interesting thing about this release is that the single is not available on any streaming platforms whatsoever, effectively becoming the most effective direct to fan marketing stunt since Radiohead’s ‘In Rainbows.’
This goes further even than Radiohead, however, in making the much coveted raw files available for free to all their fans they have effectively broken down the fourth wall which prevents many so called amateur musicians and producers from getting creative and reworking their favourite songs to make something new and exiting. Remixes have in recent years become almost as an elitist pursuit as music making itself with only the big names in electronic music getting access to the top artist’s materials to make their own statements. It is a very exiting precedent to see a band giving being so generous with their work and allowing absolutely anyone to have a go at making something.
According to NME, ‘the band tipped their hat to Grimes for the idea,’ of releasing the stems and video files with the single as the singer did the same thing when she released ‘You’ll Miss Me When I’m Not There,’ during lockdown this year. The singer said that the decision to release stem files was based on lacking the usual freedom to record in depth videos and the adoption of a green screen approach. Seeing the possibilities available in post production given a short collection of source material, Grimes says in the description of her Youtube video that she felt that ‘because we’re all in lockdown we thought if people are bored and wanna learn new things, we could release the raw components of one of these for anyone who wants to try making stuff using our footage.’
Where Grimes stopped short, however, is on the full scale boycott of streaming platforms which is the approach that King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard (KGATLW) seems to have taken on this release. While Grime’s ‘Miss Anthropocene,’ is available on all platforms from downloads on her label 4AD’s website or itunes to premium streaming on Spotify, Amazon Music, Apple Music and even Soundcloud. The difference in perspective may be due to the content of KGATLW’s single which, called ‘Automation,’ deals with the thorny issue of artificial intelligence, a technology which already has its claws deep in the music industry through the algorithms which are used by streaming platforms like Spotify.
Unfortunately due to coronavirus the band have no shows scheduled in the UK for the time being, however the band have played a great deal of gigs in the country and were performing in British cities right up until October 2019 when they played at London’s Alexandria Palace. Other UK dates they performed last year include cities such as Manchester, Leeds, Glasgow and Nottingham.
