One way to describe the Necks would be to say they are a trio: keyboard, bass and drums. Chris Abrahams plays the Ocean 2's grand piano with a loving touch. When he trills on a single low-register note at the beginning of their second hour-long set, you can hear tiny changes in its harmonic content, modulating like the filter sweep in an old synth.
Lloyd Swanton plays double bass, an orchestral one with a low extension. Drummer Tony Buck plays a modest kit with a single floor tom and a couple of ride cymbals. When he starts a hypnotic pattern on his hi-hat you marvel that someone can play so gently. Yet halfway through the set, after 30 minutes of slowly evolving improvisation, you are amazed that he can play so loudly with such subtlety.
What is both entirely new and entirely now about the Necks is their way of performing an hour of music in which everything changes very slowly and entirely logically. The Australian musicians have been together since 1989, and it appears that audiences have finally begun to "get it". They produce a post-jazz, post-rock, post-everything sonic experience that has few parallels or rivals. Sure, there are some interesting antecedents, from Terry Riley through to late-1960s Miles Davis; from Steve Reich's Come Out to This Heat's 24 Track Loop; from dub to trance. But those examples largely drew upon technological or compositional imperatives. By comparison, the Necks are totally exposed, with no scores or theories to hide behind. They are just three musicians seizing the moment. They may be teaching us to listen in a new way, but they communicate a fierce energy and warmth at the same time.
Their music is a thrilling, emotional journey into unknown territory. Ten minutes elapse before Abrahams plays more than one note at a time; more time goes by before you realise that Buck is hitting the snare with a stick or that Swanton's deep syncopated riff has grown into an extravagant chord. At their most intense moments you can't tell who is playing what, but the quiet moments are equally beguiling because their music develops so slowly, so unpredictably. Like seeing a world in a grain of sand, the Necks permit us to hear a whole new world of music in a sliver of sound.
