Tony Buck, the Necks’ drummer, caresses a cluster of bells with his foot. Naturally, they sit inside a Frisbee. He rarely gets around to hitting an actual drum with a drumstick. Instead, he scrapes at his skins with a Tibetan hand chime, or adds alarm clock textures as the mood takes him – an equal third of one of the best live bands going.
The Necks’ upright bass player, Lloyd Swanton, meanwhile, sometimes plucks one note for several minutes – tentatively at first, then building up to pneumatic drill speed, scowling in the face of RSI. Or he’ll whip out a bow from the quiver hanging off his rented instrument, and coax a groan that reaches paint-flaking intensity in this Grade I listed church. The band usually use Dalston’s intimate Cafe Oto as their base for residencies in London, but this is a last-minute gig hosted in an atmospheric East End church where the vicar runs the bar.
Pianist Chris Abrahams, meanwhile, takes off his glasses, rubs his eyes and starts off the first of the night’s two long pieces (there is an interval) with some atonal flourishes faintly redolent of Debussy. By the second half, he is using his piano – the most lyrical, theoretically, of the three instruments on stage – as a percussive weapon, hammering so quickly at the notes that entirely new notes seem to form out of their residues.
It is so very difficult to encapsulate the appeal of the Necks – an instrumental trio from Australia, now in their 31st year of live improvisations. In essence, they make a humbling, transcendent racket, organic and living, but intense and machine-like at the same time. To say that the Necks are a jazz outfit that rocks approaches the point, but fails to nail it.
These three players operate on the cusp of genre, a space that could be easily over-intellectualised. Is it ambient jazz systems music? Free improv modern classical? But the emotional wallop of their output puts paid to all that over-thinking. They are alternately cleansing or transporting; stately and tender. In a world of ever-shortening pop hooks, they take a long time to get to where they are going. Tonight’s second set is even longer than usual, nearer an hour.
They come out of jazz – the Necks started at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music in the 1980s – and yet not one of them solos. The hierarchy of “lead” and “rhythm section” does not operate. Bass, drums and piano co-exist in radical equality, something that sets them apart from the vast majority of other outfits. Sometimes, maybe, two of the players will lock in together, foregrounding the third. It all unfolds differently each time, with the music varying according to the room’s acoustics and the vagaries of the instruments they pick up in each city (Buck brings his exotic toys along).
Key to it all is that the Necks play spontaneously, improvising every night. Going to see them requires a suspension of disbelief, a parking of the salutary cynicism that gets most of us through our days. The experience is enhanced by listening hard to the microscopic evolutions in everyone’s playing: mindfulness for noiseniks, perhaps. Or you can just zone out: the Necks can get very psychedelic, drawing on eastern forms, drones and devotional music.
Twenty albums capture this band’s ongoing development. Some have guitars, organs and obvious sculptural overdubs, some are more palpably jazz, some – like 2018’s Body – rock out with a motorik swagger reminiscent of Neu! The Necks also play well with others, supporting their countrymen Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds on their last tour of Australia in 2017. They’ve performed at Berghain, Berlin’s notorious techno mecca (Buck lives in Berlin).
More recently, the band seem to have embarked on some kind of outreach programme. They collaborated with electronic titans Underworld on two excellent tracks, A Very Silent Way and Appleshine Continuum, earlier this year; they’re also on the forthcoming Swans record. They are, perhaps, not quite a cult band any more.
For all their recorded worth, however, it is the alchemical stuff that happens when the three perform live that really unleashes the superlatives. The great consolation of all instrumental music is that there are no bossy lyrics telling you what to feel. The Necks double down on this, amplifying the listener’s own internal weather, or jolting you out of whatever funk you might be in.
They will change you, if you let them. Tonight, the arpeggiating piano, the gentle sussuration of cymbals and the deep eddies of bass are alternately quiet and pretty, anxious and impatient, menacing or jubilant. You hear what you bring to the encounter: the creak and moan of a vast wooden ship, perhaps, or the breathing of some great creature are both suggested by tonight’s first movement. Someone is sketching as they play.
It’s always worth getting close enough to see the band’s hands. Sometimes, there will be electric stand-offs, as Abrahams, Buck and Swanton get stuck in a holding pattern, waiting, almost daring each other to make the first move. Often, there will be eerie orphaned sounds that, however much you scrutinise everyone’s movements, don’t seem to have an author. The piano sounds like bells. The bass sounds like a drum. The percussion instruments sound like a cello.
The Necks will, occasionally, perform something that seems a little familiar. Tonight’s second set – one even more outstanding than usual – recalls Timepiece, from their 2017 album, Unfold, in its set-up: restless junk shop rustling.
The piece, though, grows into a monster, as though the three instruments were locked in battle, rather than the usual respectful circling. The bells are now chains being dragged across a floor. Abrahams’s playing is mercilessly robotic. A red mist descends over Swanton’s bowing. Everything roils on, some ineffable mixture of sad, angry and beautiful, until, gradually, the heat goes out of the encounter and the three instruments are once again just strokes, plucks and shimmers.
