Polygondwanaland (2017)

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Stu Mackenzie · 2017 · 43 min

The fourth of the five albums King Gizzard put out in 2017, and the one they gave away — not "pay what you want" but free, "free as in, free", with the master tapes and the artwork files posted for anyone who wanted to press their own. Hundreds of people did: over three hundred editions exist, on vinyl of every colour, cassette, minidisc, reel-to-reel and floppy disc, from labels that did not exist the week before, and the band's Official Bootlegger programme grew out of the experiment. It is the rare famous album whose distribution model is part of the work.

The record itself is a forty-three-minute prog suite that never stops — Crumbling Castle runs ten minutes and shifts time signatures like a nervous drummer, the title track's melody keeps surfacing in later songs, and the whole thing resolves in The Fourth Colour as if it had been one piece all along. Polyrhythms, flute, a spoken-word interlude from Leah Senior, and the band's usual refusal to pick a genre. The most-bootlegged album of the century, by design.

Chosen copy: Internet Archive item king-gizzard-the-lizard-wizard-polygondwanaland-2017 — 10 FLAC files, one per track, contiguously numbered (01 - Crumbling Castle.flac … 10 - The Fourth Colour.flac), 321 MB, 43 min, with the cover art.

This is a listener's upload of the band's freely released masters, not a band upload; that is the point of the album — the band published the masters precisely so that copies like this would exist. Checked against the ten-track listing: no gaps, no duplicates, running order correct once sorted. A 128 kbps MP3 set (polygondwanaland, the band's own credits in its description) is the collection's other copy and was passed over for the lossless one.

One layer, the band's own release terms:

• The licence. Released 2017-11-17 with the band's statement that the record is "free as in, free — free to download and, if you wish, free to make copies", the masters and art posted for anyone to press; the release is documented as Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives (KGLW.net and the album's published record). Yours to download, keep, seed, share — and, unusually for this shelf, to press and sell unchanged copies, which is exactly what the band invited. What the licence withholds is derivatives: no remixes or re-edits for distribution without the band's say-so (they have permitted fan remixes case by case).
• Provenance. The masters are the band's; this copy is a lossless encode of them made by a listener under the invitation above. If the band ever withdraws the invitation, that changes nothing already given.

King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard, Polygondwanaland (2017), released free under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives