Necks

The Necks, an Australian instrumental combo, were formed by three veteran jazz musicians: Chris Abrahams (piano), Tony Buck (drums) and Lloyd Swanton (bass), a former member of the Bernie McGann Trio.
Abrahams had also released three solo piano albums, and played with such distinguished avant-jazz musicians as John Zorn, Tom Cora, Phil Minton, Peter Brotzmann, Hans Reichel, Han Bennink, Shelley Hirsch, Wayne Horvitz.
Lloyd Swanton also led the Catholics, a more overtly jazz combo, who released several albums, starting with The Catholics (1992) and Simple (1994).

Necks' albums contain lengthy, trancey jams anchored to simple melodic lines and propelled by swinging, funky grooves. The insistent repetition of harmonic elements recalls minimalism while the fluid and atmospheric instrumental interplay recalls jazz-rock.

The trio first proved its worth on the 56-minute composition that fills the album Sex (Fish Of Milk, 1989 - Private Music, 1995). The subdued rhythm and slightly syncopated tempo create a delicate texture for the intermittent patterns of neoclassical piano and sensual trumpet wails. The cascading piano notes coalesce in a hypnotic stream of casual tones. But then the music begins to warp, and dissonances and harsh tones appear. The way Abrahams caresses the piano is unique, both abstract, exotic and romantic.

Next (june 1990 - Fish Of Milk, 1990) contains six pieces that try different avenues.

Aquatic (Fish Of Milk, 1994 - Carpet Bomb, 1999) featured Stevie Wishart on hurdy-gurdy and introduced an ethnic flavor. If Next Had Tried to differentiate their art in six different directions, Aquatic serves the same purpose but in a continuum rather than a set of discrete pieces.

Necks went back to the original format to achieve their classical sound. The double-CD Silent Night (september 1995 - Fish Of Milk, 1996) contained just two meditations, the sample-driven Black and especially the slow, fragile, colloquial interplay of White.

Piano Bass Drums (Fish Of Milk, 1998) was recorded live.

The Boys (Fish Of Milk, 1998 - ReR, 2004) is a film soundtrack. It suffers from being a fragmented work, the opposite of their favorite format.

Hanging Gardens (Fish Of Milk, 1999 - ReR, 2001) is a 60-minute composition that summarizes their minimalistic technique. Frantic hi-hat work and ominous bass lines surround and underpin haunting keyboard noises. The mood is cryptic if not gothic. The music gets more frantic, stormier, funkier and more psychedelic. Ten minutes into the piece, the piano, by repeating a pattern of five notes, creates an atmosphere of suspense, akin to Peter Green's End of the Game. The playing begins to reveal its jazz roots and, twenty minutes into the piece, the five-note pattern resurfaces at a higher octave and the jamming fires up. When it dies out, a phase of quiet abstract counterpoint takes over. Forty minutes into the piece, the music picks up energy again, unleashing a rocking, Nice/Colosseum-style organ-driven tumult, eventually leading to the five-note piano pattern again, this time in a more claustrophobic setting.

The Neck's ambient minimalist jazz-rock reaches its zenith on Aether (Fish Of Milk, 2001 - ReR, 2002), where a simple chord is repeated like a mantra to elicit consonant vibrations from the other instruments, like evoking one by one all the subtle hues of one fundamental color. Eventually nirvana appears, in the form of a cosmic drone that leads the music into an ecstatic crescendo of counterpoint. It is probably the most ethereal of their works.

Athenaeum (Fish of Milk, 2003) is a 4-CD live set.

Photosynthetic (Long Arms, 2003) was recorded live in Moscow in 2002.

By now, the trio (spread around the world) played together only a couple of times a year. Drive By (ReR, 2003), yet another one hour-long slowly-unfolding chamber piece that relies on both minimalist repetition and jazz improvisation for its dreamy ambience and fluent dynamics. If Hanging Gardens was lively and virulent, and Aether was pure understated bliss, Drive By can be said to be the perfect encounter of Miles Davis, Terry Riley and Brian Eno. With a stronger sense of the groove than its predecessor (and a touch of African polyrhythm), the amalgam of Tony Buck's tribal drums, Lloyd Swanton's repetitive bass lines and Chris Abrahams' wavering piano meditations is a classic of casual conversation. It almost sounds like the counterpart to Soft Machine's sixth album, which, starting from similar premises, accomplished much more austere and geometric structures. The keyboards are absolute protagonists, yielding the totality of the piece's diversity, with occasional peaks of pathos. As usual, the meaning is as cryptic as a summer breeze. Halfway into the track (at 27 minutes), children are heard playing in the background, and the delicate timbres of the piano seem to engage in some kind of counterpoint (while a distorted organ whines on top of it); and at 48 minutes the music is invaded by a loud buzzing sound, as of thousands of bees, and other animal-sounding noises, while the tempo gets funkier, until the music dissolves and only chirping birds are left.
The only drawback compared with its predecessor is that somehow the textures do not achieve the same sense of otherworldiness. The process is, in a sense, too obvious for the spectator to be hypnotized by the clockwork.

The double-CD Mosquito/ See Through (ReR, 2005) contains two hypnotic streams of consciousness. Mosquito opens with disjointed percussion sounds. A stubborn piano note is joined for a minute by light drumming (for the first time about 14 minutes into the piece, then a few more times). That is all the excitement for the first half. In the second part the drums are a bit more prominent, but the piano note is still hypnotically (although not mechanically) repeated and the center of action remains with the percussion.
See Through, one of their formal peaks, opens with smooth, half-whispered, jazzy piano phrases dropping on a fibrillating noise of cymbals. For seven minutes, it sounds like a jam between Pharoah Sanders and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This is a slow dance between a sexy piano and ominous cymbals. The piano phrases relent as soon as they accelerate, relax as soon as they hit harder. Chris Abrahams is a master of breaking the suspense before it acquires the slightest dramatic overtone. His keys float weightless in the air, rarely encountering an obstacle or a detour. His fugues are colorful as much as his silences are cryptic. This piece is his personal showcase. After about 50 minutes of cascading tones and sudden pauses, the piano is finally engaged by the drums (not just the cymbals) and the last ten minutes are a crescendo of frantic drumming.

Chemist (ReR, 2006) was unusual for the Necks because it contained three mid-length tracks instead of the usual hour-long monolith. Steady drumming, echoing bass chords, tiny dissonances, hypnotic and jazzy keyboard runs build up the eerie, raga-like atmosphere of Fatal, reminiscent of early Pink Floyd and of Miles Davis' jazz-rock via his underrated rock disciple Peter Green. The progression of the playing mirrors the increasingly feverish reaction to an ecstatic vision, driven by intensely fibrillating piano a` la Terry Riley and harsher distortions. A puntillistic exercise for deep listeners, Buoyant weaves a fragile tapestry of disjointed notes, held together by the thinnest of musical pretexts. Abillera disentangles itself from a facsimile of the cryptic pulsing cacophony of Riley's In C to soar in an intricate mandala-like pattern of frantic piano notes.

The live album Townsville (february 2007 - ReR, 2007) is representative of their method. A bass-line is used to set the tone for the improvisation. The other instruments build sounds around it, notably the piano with cascading meditations that shift from a new-age mood to a forceful free-jazz attack. All the way the cymbals sound more like light rain than rhythm. While time brings more structure and emphasis to it, there is no question that their music remains in a permanent state of suspension.

Tony Buck recorded Invisible Cinema (november 2007) with Jean-Luc Guionnet (alto sax), Axel Dorner (trumpet) and Clayton Thomas (double bass).

Swanson was still also playing in the Catholics besides various jazz ensembles.

Abrahams was a member of the improvising trio Roil, that debuted with Meaning (2008).

The 67-minute suite of Silverwater (Fish of Milk, 2009 - ReR, 2009) starts out with one of their most unnerving sequences: sinister galactic organ drones a` la Sun Ra create a sticky lattice in which sparse piano notes and erratic metallic noises create tiny ripples. A multitude of percussion instruments takes center stage in the second segment, (notably a repetitive ticking sound halfway between a clock and a swarm of insects) with scattered bass chords following suit. They all disappear leaving only a repetitive pattern of cascading drum rolls. The organ drones return, but the tone is now majestic and imperious, and a steady beat of cymbals accompanies the increasingly mystical swirls. It is already about 30 minutes into the piece when simpler and warmer guitar chords and a more vibrant rhythm lift the mood. At this point the piano intones a childish motif that (unfortunately) breaks with everything that has been going on before: the music is now tentative and aimless, with jazzy propulsive interludes derailed by spaced-out pauses all the way to the final crescendo of guitar. For the first 30 minutes Silverwater is the most surreal and most otherworldly yet of their suites. Their hypnotic method finally unveils a metaphysical purpose, although the final meaning of their endless ceremonies still remains cryptic.

Mindset (ReR, 2011) contains two 21-minute jams. Rum Jungle starts out suddenly with propulsive drums and stormy dissonant piano notes and from those foundations weaves intricate and violent patterns, losing momentum only towards the end, when fatigue and uncertainty seem to derail the trip. Daylights is a very slow crescendo, from a swarm of liquid keyboard notes floating in the glitchy silence of the quantum vacuum to a suspense-filled tide of Indian-tinged drones and frenzied cymbals.

Chris Abrahams released Thrown (recorded 2004), Play Scar (recorded 2008-2010) Memory Night (Room40, 2013), Instead Of The Sun (2016 - january 2015), a collaboration with Burkhard Beins, and Fluid To The Influence (Room40, 2016), increasingly electronic works.

The Necks established a reputation for music that is not figurative, narrative, emotional, conceptual or anything else. It inhabits a sort of aphasic and autistic dimension, or at least so it appears to those who live in the material dimension. Their lengthy minimalist trances evoke an immutable imperturbable reality, hidden behind a cryptic harmonious geometry, impenetrable even to the deepest form of listening. Open (Northern Spy, 2013) breaks with that convention. It is by far their most narrative and emotional work. Instead of a largely stable continuum it unfurls in a series of stages, each emanating from the previous one but also significantly altering the course of events. At the beginning is a gentle murmur of dulcimer and bells, setting the tone for zen-like transcendence. This is the closest they have come to the mood of Brian Eno's Music for Airports and Harold Budd's Pavilion Of Dreams. But the tender piano that flow out of it are soon buried in ominous sub-bass lines. The music plunges into a mostly silent phase with erratic cymbals, skitting drumbeats, barely audible electronic noise and sparse sub-bass burps. This is as disjointed and discordant the trio has ever been. Martial piano lines take control, leading to a sea of celestial piano figures, but these too are destabilized by gritty organ drones. The music implodes again, this time into chaotic percussion and orchestration. Nightmarish tension arises, peaking with a monster rumble. Pounding throbbing rhythm regains control and self-propels towards a more typical section of raga-like and minimalist repetition. But this too is short-lived, and another confused dysfunctional section follows, unable to crystallize in a collective process. This is as "free" as their jazz has ever been. The instruments don't seem to play together anymore, as each indulges in secret pleasures independently of the others. The ending comes almost abruptly, unexplained, incidental. The Necks clearly wanted to experiment with new timbres and dynamics. By their standards, this feels like a collage of different materials, different ages, different... bands.

Neck's drummer Tony Buck also played on the live performances documented on Skein by the sextet of reedist Frank Gratkowski.

The 44-minute piece of Vertigo (Northern Spy, 2015), steering away from their classic ambient ruminations, highlights the band's limited cinematic and dramatic qualities. The beginning is focused pathos (collapsing piano clusters in a percussion-less void) but the development soon takes the music all over the place: percussive cacophony, sub-bass suspense, gentle impressionistic piano, spiraling synth lines, free-jazz chaos, new-age stillness, dissonant counterpoint, quasi-psychedelic distortion, quasi-concrete metallic droning, and the closing scratching noise. Sometimes clumsy or simplistic, and frequently vain (in the way the players indulge in sound effects), the journey is not about a destination but about its own relentless metamorphosis. There are moments of affecting pathos and moments of surreal eccentricity, but also long intervals of sonic doodling, and no build-up to an emotional core, to a leitmotiv, to a grand achievement. More than a journey, this piece evokes a shipwreck.

The double LP Unfold (Ideologic Organ, 2016) contains four intriguing improvisations that straddle the border between their old ambient frescoes and their new cinematic ambitions. Rise (15:35) is disjointed paradisiac music that sounds like a quiet snowstorm of notes. Overhear (16:18) opens with frantic stone percussion over an oscillating drone and an acid circular keyboard melody. Its propulsion evokes hysterical Hindu and Sufi rituals. Blue Mountain (20:59) sounds like a metaphysical parable: the music never coalesces, each instrument seeming to pursue its own strategy while being part of the same unfulfilled manic surge, and eventually the piano subsides, delivering the only humane notes of the 21 minutes, as if surrendering to the impossibility of the mission. Timepiece (21:47) evokes the tinkling and chiming of a myriad clocks, an anarchic carnival of asynchronous dancing patterns in a maze of mirrors; evokes the giant clockwork controlling the whole universe.

The Necks' drummer Tony Buck debuted solo with the 51-minute piece of Unearth (Room40, 2017).

The Necks' Body (ReR Megacorp, 2018) returned to the old format of the hour-long composition/improvisation, but with a catch. A repetitive (and slightly tedious) 16-minute section fades out to a heartbeat, and then a new repetitive pattern emerges. Even more surprising is that, at about the 25-minute mark, the music changes completely, erupting into a loud boogie as if the Rolling Stones or Bruce Springsteen were about to take the stage. This lasts for a while, then the music settles into a gentle chiming cosmic mode leading to a coda of evanescent drones. Overall, this experiment in contrasts is a minor entry in the band's canon.

Three (Northern Spy, 2020) contains three compositions. The 21-minute Bloom is a hyper-kinetic piece propelled by Tony Buck's African-tinged dense polyrhythm, and fronted as usual by the austere meditations of the piano. The 23-minute Lovelock indulges in an oneiric, free-form, electronic soundscape where the instruments abandon their traditional role and become mere abstractions, Tony Buck's dense and frantic percussion is again the protagonist in the 21-minute Further, this time with a more promiment presence of Swanton's bass, while the piano intones a romantic sonata. The real shocker is Lovelock, their most significant contribution to the ambient genre yet.

Buck launched numerous side projects, notably Transmit with bassist James Welcburn, documented on Project Transmit (Vitamin, 2008) and Radiation (2015).

Chris Abrahams' Appearance (Room40, 2020) contains two lengthy piano improvisations: As A Vehicle The Dream and Surface Level recorded in november 2019.

The 19th album by the Necks, Travel (Northern Spy, 2023), contains four 20-minute improvisations by Chris Abrahams on piano and Hammond organ, Tony Buck (drums, percussion) and Lloyd Swanton (bass). Abrahams weaves his meditative web over the dense polyrhythmic drumming of Signal. The loose percussion of Imprinting evokes a shamanic ritual. Bloodstream (the only piece that truly deserved to be released) opens with magniloquent church-organ chords, drifts in a flurry of jazzy piano sparkles and hissing noise, and fades away with gothic organ notes.

Tony Buck collaborated with Italian bassist Massimo Pupillo on Unseen (august 2017), which contains the 22-minute Psithurism and the 46-minute Entrainment, and Time Being (august 2017). Buck also released Ask The Axes (november 2017), which documents two improvisations with David Watson, Eternal Triangle (may 2019), with Toshinori Kondo (trumpet) and Massimo Pupillo (bass and electronics), Mythographer (january 2022), with Australian pianist Alister Spence, Environmental Studies (august 2023), featuring a 110-minute piece, originally a collaboration with Brazilian artist Marina Cyrino, Mongrels (Relative Pitch, 2023), on which he played electric & acoustic guitars, bass, monochord, waterphone, zulu-bells and prepared instruments, with Mark Nauseef on bells & gongs, including the 29-minute As Far As We Don't Know.