Sunday Afternoon Listening Café #18
Sex, The Necks
To continue with Aussie music, I’m moving on to a band that are great friends of The Whitlams leader Tim Freedman, The Necks. They tour extensively in the UK and Europe so you may know of them if you live in that neck of the woods.1 They have played some of the big US cities as well.
They are an improvisational piano trio unlike anything you’ve heard. Composed of pianist Chris Abrahams, percussionist and guitar player Tony Buck, and bassist Lloyd Swanton, they describe their music as not entirely avant-garde, nor minimalist, nor ambient, nor jazz.
I heard them live on Good Friday 2004 in Sydney in a small bar. I sat with a couple who offered me their spare room for the final month of my trip, so I will always be grateful to them for that. I also have a strong memory of walking them back to their B&B on an incredibly cold Victoria Day weekend after their first (and I believe only) Toronto show, promising that it isn’t always cold and watching their delight when they picked up the eau de skunk, something they had never experienced before. An abject lesson in perspectives.
This album is a single, improvised hour-long track that I find groovy and hypnotic. The transition from one mood to the next is smooth like buttah. The musical skill of all three of them is incredible. I have a hard time describing this album so I’ll let them do it.
Sex was not the band’s first recording, but it was their first release. Recorded in 1988, it established the long form approach that the band has become known for, and has continued to be a strong seller in the Necks catalog. Fifty-six minutes and six seconds of strange/beautiful acoustic ambience plays out as Swanton’s pulsing bass motif combines with Buck’s gliding cymbal work and Abrahams’ sparsely melodic piano. The effect is mesmerizing and immersive - an excellent album with which to begin listening to The Necks’ music.
The album was released in Australia in 1989 but was released in the US in 1995. The recording engineer Michael Webster had this to add about the process.
The bass player also made those great overtone sighing sounds with the bow in an overdub. There were some overdubs with the drummer doing various percussion, and I think possibly there was a piano overdub. The discussions of what they were planning on the overdubs were interesting. It was like "after 10 minutes I'll start doing x", and around 30 minutes I'll do this... Also, I'm glad they finished before the tape ended. Very hard to get an hour long two inch tape at the the time. I dropped the damn thing at one point, and had to find a new reel to shift it onto.
There is no Spotify link because only their 3 most recent albums are there but you can listen to it on their Bandcamp. A fan also uploaded it to YouTube, which is where I found Webster’s comment. It would be better to use the Bandcamp link though.
If you’re not sure if you’re up for it, here’s a taste of them to help you decide. This video is from 1989 so it’s in the same flavour as Sex.
Enjoy your listening cafe!
See what I did there?