Gig: The Necks

The Necks

The Music Gallery. Saturday, January 23, 2010.

On a Saturday night with several plausible rock'n'roll options, I made a last-minute choice of none of the above and headed over to the Music Gallery. Not having previously heard of The Necks before the announcement for this show, I was intrigued by what I gleaned from some quick research into the Australian trio, who are generally described as being subject to a Description Problem, not easily slotted into jazz or minimalism or the widely-defined avant-garde.

Strolling in about five minutes before the eight o'clock starting time, I found a nice spot and settled in. It was a fairly full house, but not packed, and mostly an older, "serious music" kind of audience. After a few minutes Chris Abrahams (piano), Tony Buck (drums) and Lloyd Swanton (double bass) took the stage and took a moment to adjust their instruments. Looking like a trio that could have been pulled out of a sales meeting or teachers' lounge, they paused for a moment of contemplative silence.

The first set started with a quiet piano figure for a couple minutes before Swanton joined in on a one-string bass line. Very slowly, the piano riff and the bassline expand, as Buck began a gentle hi-hat tapping. The bassline becomes a movement like a wave, sweeping in and out. The tone is melancholy, but lovely. Ten minutes have passed. Buck gently rattles a string of shells and the bassline speeds up. Abrahams begins playing just a single low bass note bong-bong-bong-bong sounding like a looped sample on repeat, a fading echo. In fact, for a couple minutes, the bass and piano sound eerily like a pair of Buddha Machines left running on a counter before Abrahams begins a slightly queasy figure on the high keys.

And so on, through what we might call the twenty-five minute first phase of the piece. But to slice it up into such a play-by-play does the music an injustice, committing Zeno's old mistake of breaking the great flow of time into discrete moments. Rather, much like life, The Necks' music goes so slowly from being one thing to being another thing with the individual changes coming so incrementally that they are almost un-noticed. I am a child; I am an old man —— and how the hell did that happen?

Although all of that is ex post facto. Perhaps the performance's greatest virtue, and the true mark of the musicians' talent is that it pulled me completely into its own timesense and brought out a spectacular sense of attention to the present moment. It flowed, I flowed. Meanwhile, the music began what could be a familiar trope, the slow build. But here the build came over twenty-five minutes or more, and wasn't a tool to some sort of cheap climax, all players blazing away, but rather simply built to a point where the musicians felt the need to unpack the sound they'd built up until it unwound like a ball of elastic bands and then slowly build back up again in a new way. Hearing the natural reverb he was getting in the church-y space, Swanton started playing to it, sending out gentle pulsations that echoed and made it sound as if there were a fourth player on stage. Abrahams shifted into a continuously gliding figure while Buck explored, for the first time in the performance, a backbeat-driven rhythm, driving the first set to its conclusion. Amazing.

Listen to an excerpt from this set here.

And then an intermission. Still in a pretty dreamy state, I wandered outside for a few minutes. An unseasonably warm night between cold snaps, I was quite comfortable in my shirtsleeves, pacing back and forth across the courtyard like a cheap, dime-store Heathcliff, the near-full moon hovering beside the old church tower behind a thin gauze of clouds. Headed in and saw some familiar faces to chat with before returning to my seat.

On the whole, the second set engaged in a different manner — instead of that pull-you-in and float along sensation, this encouraged a more active engagement, and I found myself leaning forward, trying to see when the soundscape shifted. Having done quiet and quiet-to-loud, the band now explored more in the middle ground, with Swanton starting things off and Abrahams playing off him. A rolling, chiming piano part was accompanied by an nearly straight jazzy bassline and then a succession of interchanging parts: the drums picking a consistent tappa-tappa rhythm, the bass shifting to something life a reggae riddim. Buck maintained his steadiness, hitting a a sort of Mo Tucker motorik plateau, while the bottom fell out of Abrahams' piano part, and he suddenly started playing like someone who had found a folded-over half-page of a Satie score, and was playing the bars he could see over and over, trying to work out the missing bits. And then a shift to clusters of piano notes signalled a meticulous rise in intensity. And then a lull and another rise, but not reprising what they'd just done any more than a memory reprises an event. The second set, going about fifty minutes, was a little more busy in its construction — still very good, but not quite so encapturing.

Listen to an excerpt from the second set here.

The band took a few minutes to cool off, then came back out and sat for a short Q & A with the remaining members of the audience. Improvisation being by its nature somewhat beyond the realm of description, it's interesting to hear articulate thoughts from those so deeply involved in it. Having been at it as a unit for over two decades, the three members of the band work with each other at such a deeply instinctual level that some of the specific questions couldn't be answered except with reference to the familiarity beyond words that such a long partnership brings about. But there was no shortage of interesting observations. Asked if there was a sort of overarching method to the band's works, Swanton attributed it to "slowing down the rate of change so that we and the audience can examine things more closely". And from there they talked about how the playing environment affects the sound, the relationship between performance and recording, and generally about how they incorporate their own responses and new influences back into the music. A nice chaser to the performance.

Left the church not long past eleven. Going in, I'd figured that I'd be out in time to wander over somewhere else and catch another band or two, but I felt fully satisfied, and not quite in the mood for any of my usual yowl-and-bash options, so I just walked over to the subway and headed home.