King Gizzard's Stu Mackenzie & Joey Walker Turn a Pasadena Record Shop Into a Rave
Some shows you plan for months. Others you find out about hours before they happen and drop everything anyway. That was the scene outside Sibylline Records in Pasadena this week, when King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard's Stu Mackenzie and Joey Walker announced a surprise pop-up DJ set on Instagram, and by the time the “needle” dropped, the sidewalk on El Molino Avenue was as packed as the shop itself.
Word moved fast, the way it tends to when King Gizzard is involved. Fans started lining up hours before doors, and by the time Mackenzie and Walker set up behind the decks, Sibylline was full to the walls, with a second crowd forming outside just to be near it. What followed was two hours of entirely improvised, homemade electronic music, the two longtime bandmates trading control of the booth and building the set on the fly rather than working off a pre-loaded playlist. No safety net, no repeat performances, just two musicians who clearly love this stuff, chasing a groove wherever it wanted to go.
And where it went was deep. The set leaned into rolling techno and acid house textures, all warm analog squelch and four-on-the-floor pulse, before Mackenzie and Walker would pull the rug out with a hypnotic breakdown and let a track rebuild itself from nothing. Those drops were the highlight of the night. A packed record shop full of strangers suddenly moved as one body. It's the same electronic language the band has been speaking since The Silver Cord, but sharpened and pushed further underground, which tracks: this set arrives just ahead of Alien Metal, King Gizzard's twenty-eighth studio album and their most club-focused record yet, a full dive into techno, hardcore, ravey house and jungle due out via p(doom) Records this August. We are SO EXCITED!
There was no stage, no lighting rig, no production beyond a folding table and a pair of speakers — and it didn't need any of it. Sibylline is a small, artist-owned shop, a place with crates worth digging through and a dog wandering the aisles on a normal afternoon, and for two hours it became something closer to a basement rave. The energy in the room stayed locked in from the first track to the last, bodies packed between the bins, everyone grooving in that loose, unselfconscious way that only happens when a crowd trusts the people behind the decks completely.
What made the night, though, was what happened after the music stopped. Rather than slipping out a back door, Mackenzie and Walker came back out to the sidewalk to meet the fans who never made it inside, signing records and posing for photos with anyone who'd been standing out there all afternoon. It's a small gesture, but it's the kind that turns a great show into a great memory. We got our Paper Mache Dream Balloon vinyl signed!
Anyway, if Alien Metal is a preview of where the band is headed next, consider this pop-up the trailer. Keep an eye on Sibylline Records and any record shop King Gizzard rolls through from here. Field of Vision Festival is this weekend and we’ve got a strong feeling fans are going to be treated to a rave set just like this one.
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