King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard’s Stu Mackenzie Talks Field Of Vision, ‘Phantom Island’ & More

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard held their inaugural Field of Vision Festival at Meadow Creek in Buena Vista, Colorado this past weekend. I was fortunate enough to sit down with the band’s Stu Mackenzie to chat about FOV and KGLW’s recent North American Phantom Island orchestra tour.

I caught up with Stu on Saturday afternoon at Buena Vista’s Surf Hotel where the band was staying. With FOV underway, Mackenzie used the word “surreal” to describe his experience. The festival was a culmination of an idea that was planted when the band were still teenagers, as they drew inspiration for FOV from Australia’s Meredith Music Festival, which takes place in Meredith, Victoria close to where the band grew up.

“I think the other thing that we’ve been talking about a lot is there is a festival near where we all grew up called Meredith Music Festival,” Stu recalled. “We would religiously go from when we were 15, 16 to in our mid-20s.

“We played there a couple times later on. I would still go there if I could get the weekend off or something. It’s a little bigger than [Field of Vision], but it’s not much bigger than this. And it’s like all of our favorite festivals that we ever really went to.

“I just want to pay my dues to that place because it feels like we learnt with [Field of Vision], the whole thing that we’ve been talking about is can we try really hard to make the festival something we would want to go to? It sounds obvious, but it’s a good touchstone to keep coming back to.”

King Gizzard also went on to hold their own annual GizzFest in Australia over several years, which evolved into a traveling event that hit cities such as Perth, Brisbane, Sydney, Adelaide and the band’s hometown of Melbourne. GizzFest went on hiatus in 2019 as the band’s international touring schedule became busier. But the idea of holding another festival always seemed to remain in their minds.

In 2024, when they had a day off from their two-day, three show run at Colorado’s Red Rocks, the band took a field trip to Buena Vista to check out the site,

“Michelle [Cable], our manager, who is the best, started looking for sites and this was a place that came recommended from some friends. We came out when we were here last year for Red Rocks.

“We had a day off and we drove out [to Buena Vista] and back on that day. As soon as we got here, we had some lunch and then we’re like, ‘what the fuck? Is this place real? It’s crazy here.’ Then we went out to the site and dipped our feet in the creek and just walked around. It’s honestly stunning.”

Field of Vision, however, wasn’t the only monumental thing King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard pulled off in 2025. Leading up to the festival, the band conducted the North American leg of their Phantom Island Tour, which saw them performing the album in full with local symphonies conducted by Sarah Hicks. I was on hand for the band's show in Colorado Springs, where they performed with the Colorado Symphony. As KGLW is a group that thrives on spontaneity, performing with an orchestra reading sheet music presented a new set of challenges, namely that there wasn’t much room for making major changes to the arrangements.

“The first thing that’s extremely different is working with sheet music,” Stu said. “We had to find a balance of keeping the feeling of what we do, which is unscripted for the most part, with having like 30 odd people there fully scripted.

“We did make some edits to scores along the tour. We had a roadcase for sheet music, that goes to the next band, then you take it over to the next band. It’s the same music sheets for each orchestra and even making a small change was challenging because there’s only so many things you can do.

“You can cut stuff out very easily. You can maybe say, ‘play this a tone up.’ You can probably change a lot of the dynamic control and stuff like that. But we had to sort of have this locked in. We had to have the sheets locked in before we played with an orchestra. We had the first rehearsal the day before the Philly show. We hadn’t done a show with an orchestra before. It was fucking sadistic honestly.”

There was an interesting cycle that led to King Gizzard’s orchestra album and concerts, much like the Earth’s rain cycle, where water evaporates to form clouds that then rain back down into bodies of water only to evaporate once again.

The “evaporation” stage for the orchestra album and shows began when KGLW played a concert at the Hollywood Bowl, a venue that was originally designed for symphonic performances and is the homebase of the L.A. Philharmonic and Hollywood Bowl Orchestra.

“It was a rock show,” Stu said of Bowl concert, “and then that led to some conversations about doing a show [at the Hollywood Bowl] with an orchestra. The idea was a one-off thing.”

Enter Chad Kelly, who can be thought of as the Sun in our rain cycle analogy, causing the water to evaporate and form clouds, or billowing ideas if you will. Mackenzie talked about how Kelly came to collaborate with the band.

“I called Chad when I got home [from tour]. Chad’s a friend of mine. I know him because he had married one of my wife’s friends from school. I remember meeting Chad originally at some dinner parties and stuff like that.

“The thing that we’re similar about is we’re very passionate and we talk about music. We have these very passionate discussions about microtonality and all these really dorky things. But we come from such opposite worlds. I think Chad would say that same thing about me. Maybe I’m speaking out of turn, but I think we were quite fascinated with each other in a way.

“I always had a sense that I would do something with Chad eventually. But it was hard to figure out what it would be. But anyway, when we got back from this tour, [the band] had some of these conversations about the Hollywood Bowl and stuff.

“I called Chad to get his take on it. I just wanted to get his advice on that world and things like that, and so that was really helpful. And then he called me back the next day. He’s like, ‘Hey, I just want you to know if you want to do some stuff with me, I’m in.’

“And I’m like, ‘sick.’ That was it. So then from there we sort of put together an album that we could work on with Chad. And that’s what Phantom Island became.

“But it’s serendipity. You’re sort of open to, you open to the universe a little bit. And then you just let things play out and try not to be afraid of failing, try not to be afraid of some things maybe not working, but just go for it.”

So now our idea clouds are full blown thunderheads billowing into the atmosphere and darkening, swelling with rain. The falling rain is King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard and their Phantom Island Tour, where two more key collaborators come into play.

Conductor and arranger Sean O’Loughlin brings the Phantom rain cycle full circle. O’Loughlin has worked extensively at the Hollywood Bowl (KGLW played the penultimate show of their North American orchestra tour at the Bowl), where the cycle began. Sean arranged the scores for the tour, which as Stu noted kicked off in Philadelphia on July 28. Think of Sean as gravity pulling the rain back to Earth

Keeping with the storm analogy, Sarah Hicks and the orchestra are the thunder and lightning. Hicks conducted every show on the Phantom Island Tour with a different local orchestra in each city. Stu raved about working with Sarah.

“I had no idea how awesome she would be,” Stu said. “I knew that her job was important, obviously, but she was tying everything together. Because she’s tuned into us and she’s also tuned into every individual person in the orchestra.

“It’s not an easy job. It’s a seriously tough, tough job. I felt very grateful for her.”

I likened Sarah Hicks and the orchestra to thunder and lightning in the storm analogy because I think thunder and lightning are apt metaphors for an orchestra in its vast range of pitch and sounds. From the get-in-your-bones lows of a double bass or cello to the piercing flashes of a horn section. Maybe a more apt analogy for Sarah would be of some kind of storm goddess orchestrating these things.

Watching Sarah Hicks in Colorado Springs, she seemed to me to be an electric conductor. Mackenzie, however, noted a balance between the performative aspect of conducting and the functional one.

“It’s a performance. You know, she’s got the stick. But when you’re a musician, you’re watching body language. It’s a huge part of it. It is a full body performance because it’s actually helpful for the orchestra to see so that they’re doing the best job. It’s actually less performative than you think. It’s actually helpful for everybody.”

“Helpful for everybody” is also a great way to describe King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard themselves. Not only is their music eclectic and transcendent, they use it to try and make the world a better place. A lot of the things going on in the world right now don’t make sense, and some of the band’s music carries dire warnings of what may come to pass if we don’t regain our sense of human decency and a stewardship for the planet. But sometimes when you listen to KGLW, especially in a live setting, for those few precious moments, there’s a feeling that maybe one day we will.

King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard will kick off the European leg of the Phantom Island Tour on Halloween in Manchester, England. Mackenzie also noted that Phantom’s original arranger, Chad Kelly, will conduct the orchestras on the UK/Europe trek as well as on the band’s return to Australia in December.

Scroll down for KGLW’s complete tour routing and ticket info.