Necks mergiturThe listening chronicle

Reviews 01.07.2021

For almost 35 years, The Necks, a group of virtuoso improvisers from Australia, has been insubmersibly trying to take the canonical form of the jazz trio (piano/double bass/drums) to unsuspected horizons, close to repetitive music as much as to post-rock. While waiting to see this now cult band on stage in Europe, here is an attempt to exhaust an atypical piece.

It was thanks to an article by Pierre-Yves Macé for the magazine Mouvement , somewhere around 2005-2006, that I discovered The Necks, a trio formed in 1987 in Australia by Chris Abrahams (piano, Hammond organ), Tony Buck (drums, percussion, electric guitar) and Lloyd Swanton (double bass, bass guitar), all three of whom were born at the beginning of the 1960s and were already seasoned jazzmen.
And it was shortly afterwards, thanks to this piece, Abillera, that I really got into this enchanting music, "on the borders of jazz, kraut and post-rock, repetitive music and ambient" (Pierre-Yves Macé ).
Abillera, third and last track of the Chemist CD (2006), is undoubtedly an atypical piece in the discography of The Necks (we'll come back to it); it remains, for me, one of the most epic rides in the world of electricity, harmonics and sound - a kind of sonic rollercoaster (after the rollercoaster, the Australian peaks), a psychoacoustic maelstrom - that I've ever heard. Let's start with that: listening.

Attempt at exhaustion (spoiler alert; you may also prefer to listen directly to the song below): 

Abillera (1) begins with a double bass solo lasting more than three minutes; an abrupt, abstract solo, a repetitive, interminable, slow and hieratic loop of low notes in pizzicato, the presence of which will take some time to understand, so much so that it contrasts with what follows; a solo which ends up gradually melting into silence... from which immediately afterwards, and no less gradually, emerges a flow of sound made up of layers (and loops) of piano and electric guitar that thicken and interweave in such a way as to forge a gear of resonances in perpetual movement.
One thinks of Steve Reich, a sort of polyphonic and psychedelic application of his technique of phase shifting. Little by little, the sound materials clump together and merge, forming a lava that finally breaks out at 7'00'' with the sudden entry of the drums, relentless yet clamorous, whose rapid tempo and odd metre are as disconcerting as they are galvanising. From polyphonic and psychedelic, the atmosphere becomes repetitive and hypnotic, the successive collisions of instruments and timbres, multiplied tenfold by the studio effects (reverb, panoramic, etc.) creating powerful (psycho)acoustic phenomena, even if it is the electric guitar which has, it is true, the main role.

At least until 10'00'' when it falls silent, not without having exposed a series of motifs (riffs) that we will find again later.
It is only then that we realise the presence of the double bass (which in reality had already been there for a long time, appeared at the same time as the drums). And that we understand this introduction, these first three minutes of the piece, this bass motif played solo was just a way of exposing beforehand part of the skeleton of the piece, a loop which here, taken not in isolation but among the others (the drum loop, the Hammond organ loop), takes on a different relief (and makes us want to put the piece back to the beginning to accompany this solitary double bass, to play over it, mentally or by striking the rhythm on its knees, the still inaudible sequences which will later set it in motion).

At 11'04'', Abillera suddenly takes on a new dimension, undergoes a new metamorphosis: it's a rock explosion that erupts in multiple jolts, over the course of which, for four minutes, all the instruments will unroll their motifs/loops in a polyphonic mass that is increasingly dense, increasingly charged. In the loudspeakers and the ears, the timbres spread and respond to each other, intertwining and merging: heroic guitars are literally echoed by a piano that diffracts and accelerates in liquid and repetitive arpeggios. Soon joined by a ghostly organ, while Tony Buck progressively weighs up his strike in an impalpable but implacable crescendo. Thus, shortly before 15'00'' the piece reaches (again!) its climax, with the arrival of a metronomic bass guitar that amplifies the powerful effect of the guitar riffs. 

This point (15'00'') also marks the beginning of the progressive dissolution of the drums, following an interminable fade out of more than a minute, magnificent, magical. Magical also because it is like a sort of technological reflection of the purely instrumental, lively, acoustic crescendo that had just preceded (we'll come back to this).
As if the drums had only served to propel, to put into orbit the loops which from 16'25'' onwards begin to turn together and on themselves.
This is the acme, the real climax ofAbillera.
The piano takes the ascendancy, unwinding its motoric and Wagnerian motifs like necklaces of hyaline pearls, powerfully consonant, like a John Adams lost in Phil Spector's studio. Suspension of time, dilation of the senses. Until the ensemble ends up, no less gradually, by regaining silence. This silence from which, barely twenty minutes earlier, it seemed to have been born. 

Judge for yourself:

Abillera is, as we said in the preamble, an atypical track, finally not very emblematic of The Necks' discography and approach. First of all, because at 19'53'', even if it's the longest of the three Chemist tracks, it's actually one of the shortest (!) of the trio. From Sex (1987) to the magnificent Three (2020), most of their albums (about 25) consist of a single track lasting more than 45 minutes, improvised live and eventually reworked in the studio.
Notable exception: the moving Next , the Necks' second album, released in 1990, and made up of six tracks varying between 5 and 20 minutes in length. Moving, because it allows us to hear Abrahams, Buck and Swanton still in their early days, and to better appreciate the extent of their disproportionate undertaking: to push the canonical form of the piano/double bass/drums jazz trio to its furthest limits , to the point of bringing it to the borders of "learned" music (and more particularly of the minimalist movement ), of kraut and post-rock.(2) As witnessed here, in 1990, Pele, an extraordinary piece, already visionary, which seems to span decades of jazz history while taking us through a multitude of states, from a bebop opening to a tribal finale via numerous static phases, where the trio stops on a loop to exploit all its harmonic and (poly)rhythmic virtues, the whole sounding like a sort of embryonic jazz version ofAbillera:

If Abillera is an atypical piece, it's also because its strength lies as much in the quality of its "composition/improvisation" as in its production, the latter becoming an essential component of the work. Rarely have the Necks enjoyed playing with studio tricks as much as here: Abillera is one of the few "maximalist" Necks tracks, one of the least improvised, where you can hear Chris Abrahams at the same time on piano(s) AND organ, Tony Buck on drums AND electric guitar, Lloyd Swanton on double bass AND bass guitar... The studio (these fades, pans, echoes, reverbs and delays) is a full-fledged protagonist of the musical dramaturgy, of the trance that is at work here - of the composition (even if, with The Necks, this is the result of a permanent improvisation). If this piece is perhaps the most "rock" of the Necks, it is also because it is the most "edited", the one that has been the object, I have the impression, of the greatest work of re-recording and editing. The solo exposition of the double bass motif/loop at the beginning, which is very atypical of The Necks, can be heard in hindsight as a kind of sampling, copied and pasted rather than played. I also love the way in which, around 15'00'', the "played" crescendo of the percussion is matched by its "artificial", technological version, a decrescendo which is not the effect of the instrumentalist, but that of the sound engineer imperceptibly lowering the volume curve of his recorded take.... So many details which, by making this piece even more intelligent in my eyes, make it even more intelligible and enjoyable for my ears.

This prominence of the studio work is all the more remarkable, and singular, as it is the concerts that have made The Necks' reputation, and explain - rightly - the increasingly fervent cult around this trio whose members are also pursuing numerous parallel projects. None of the concerts I saw was like the other, simply because the trio conceives each of its appearances as a performance linked to the acoustic and aesthetic properties of the venue, to the atmosphere of the evening and to its state of mind at the time: I have a particularly strong memory of their appearance on 14 April 2016 at the Collège des Bernardins, where the musicians seemed that evening to engage in a wordless, vertical, ascetic and acetic conversation with the stone vaults above them - that evening, their state of mind, even more than usual, was a state of grace. These apparitions are the result, on the part of both musicians and listeners, of a miraculous ability to surrender to the moment and to challenge their vocabulary and their habits (of playing as well as of listening). In this, but also by its radicalism, its intransigence and its obstinacy, the Necks' path reminds me, in the field of rock, of that of a band like Swans (3). It seems to have no other aim than to use a style (jazz, rock...) to delve ever more deeply into the mysteries of the musical phenomenon, to reconnect with the primal energy of sound matter in a fervent and patient hand-to-hand encounter with music, and thus to take this style elsewhere, to a place where questions of aesthetics no longer apply; to invite, on stage as on record, to abandon one's reference points, to prepare oneself for a trance.

The Necks should be back on the European stage this autumn.

David Sanson

1. Which you'd better listen to on good speakers and in an uncompressed version, by buying it for example on the band's Bandcamp page.
2. An undertaking that I think is summed up in the sober and programmatic title of their 1998 album, Piano Bass Drumsas well as the title of the only track on it: Unheard...
3. An American band of variable geometry founded by Michael Gira in the early 1980s, whose career began alongside Sonic Youth and which, after having disbanded in 1998 and reformed in 2010, has since enjoyed quite phenomenal success. In 2019, The Necks were featured on two tracks on Leaving MeaningSwans' latest album.

Photos © Camille Walsh
Photos © Bruce Lindsay
Photos © Tim Williams

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