THE NECKS – THREE

THE NECKS – THREE 
Fish of Milk 2020

Nominative determinism being the order of the day for Australian minimalist jazz cult trio The Necks, their 21^st album contains three pieces (2 + 1, geddit?), all around 20-minutes. The groove-based improv and pulse-less spatio-textural exploration of the first two, ‘Bloom’ and ‘Lovelock’, thematically span the group’s pivotal releases, Hanging Gardens (1999) and Open (2013). The final track, ‘Further’, even offers the sort of uplifting theme that periodically enters Hanging Gardens like a mirage plotted on tumultuous, asymptotic cyberfunk. That album served as the avant-jazz world’s pre-millenial summation of its adaptability to drum 'n' bass and hip-hop. Three conveys a similarly multi-faceted evocation of musical history whilst encompassing more than enough facets of this group’s continual evolution.

‘Bloom/Lovelock’ are homeostatic snapshots of immersive processes. The time dilation effect of their longer works is still there, just brought into more intense focus. Raw jams performed by keyboardist Chris Abrahams, bass player Lloyd Swanton and drummer/guitarist Tony Buck are molded through editing and multi-instrumental overdubbing. The inventive potency brings to mind condensed moment forms (if that doesn’t stray too far from Stockhausen’s original meaning). Process ebb and flow suggest larger visions, details hovering on the verge of tangibility.

Bustling micro-clockwork rhythms on ‘Bloom’ are spun from the motorik laminar fusion Abrahams’ collaborator Oren Ambarchi has made a stock-in-trade of late. A crazed cyber-samba’s not-so-gentle journey into that good entropic beyond, ‘Part 3’ of Ambarchi’s Hubris exudes a microbial virulence that seems even more apocalyptic on recent reacquaintance than at the time of its 2016 release. ‘Bloom’ is less febrile, more foliate: a vision of a world thriving in post-anthropogenic splendor.

Abrahams’ cyclical piano chords are in constant plangent motion. Spiraling distorted organ lines reminiscent of Mike Ratledge, Terry Riley and even Jon Lord at their most modal and fugal entwine like rhizomes in the middle distance. Swanton’s arco bass drones hover like primordial dragonflies. Delay-bathed behind-the-nut plucks and scrapes from Buck’s guitar conjure ferns unfurling luxuriantly in pure, un-diffused sunlight. The Necks’ music is often described as cinematic: the subjective gaze suggested here is consciousness contemplating its own forgetting in eons beyond history.

On subsequent listens, it becomes a Fourth World/Illbient remix of the same track by Kevin Martin, channeling dubwise the spirits of Teo Macero, Faust engineer Kurt Graupner and Pharaoh Sanders’ Black Unity a la Techno Animal’s Re-Entry. Details of a fractalized mosaic emerge through incremental adjustments of EQ, delay and phasing on Buck’s isochronous percussion. As with Martin’s production techniques, there’s a similar orientation towards drone effects like eerily dislocated siren calls.

‘Lovelock’ is named after the late Australian rock singer Damien Lovelock of The Celibate Rifles; but as the more graceful colors of ‘Bloom’ suggest that other Lovelock (biologist James, of Gaia fame), any sense of lamentation is similarly verdant.  There’s also a Lovelock Cave in North America’s Great Basin where surroundings are beneficial to the conservation of organic and inorganic material. It’s worthwhile holding all three associations of the name in mind to encompass this track’s affect. There’s a pensiveness suggestive of melancholy and loss, but its span and tone are impersonal, sedimentary, synchronic. Abraham’s piano lines conjure chromatic impressionist suspense cues pitched between Debussy and Takemitsu. The bass, switching unobtrusively between bowed drones and delicate muted fan strokes, and processed timpani and snare rolls suggest waves bringing nutrition in one pass, erosion the next, in everlasting endogenic cycle. Previous releases indicate The Necks have osmotically absorbed Brian Eno’s regard for mathematician John Conway’s ‘Game of Life’ computer program and its musical implications: simple rules that produce complex results. There’s a lot of the scintillating tension of Eno’s ‘Iced World’ on their 2018 release Body; on ‘Lovelock’ the aesthetic sublimation is even more natural, the rhythmic processes more tectonic than busily transient.

‘Further’ is a gently sloping groove in five meter that suggests the placidity of earlier Necks albums like Aquatic. There’s more of the opening track’s dense percussion layers; this time reminiscent of the stochastic automata of Robbie Avenaim, with whom Abrahams and Ambarchi collaborate in another trio formation. A fully realized theme in two-chord vamp form, ‘Further’ is the most radical thing on this album in terms of a return to a more archetypal formalism.

The Necks’ music often suggests landmarks of ecstatic jazz whilst substituting minimalist integration for maximalist expression. A February concert at MONA’s Logan Gallery in Hobart, Tasmania had discernable traces of the opening fanfares of John Coltrane’s ‘Seraphic Light’ and Pharaoh Sanders’ The Creator Has a Master Plan in its dense interplay. While Swanton’s meditative bass seems to extemporize on Cecil McBee’s riff, Abrahams’ arpeggios on ‘Further’ conjure Alice Coltrane’s harp glissandi on her seminal ‘Journey in Satchidananda’. It’s pleasant listening, if not quite as exciting as the refinement of process going on in the preceding tracks. A possible deviation into minimalist smooth jazz over agitation meditation?

A retrograde step is an opportunity to take stock of progress by contrast with tradition as well as change things up. Given how the global economy is taking an enforced break thanks to the coronavirus from the neoliberal ideology of perpetual growth, its an opportunity for everyone to reflect on other ways of being. Three is an excellent soundtrack for such contemplation. These brilliant musicians will hopefully continue to offer the deeply satisfying variety that’s available on this release when that other global crisis status quo returns.

COPYRIGHT © 2020 Jon Kromka

https://thenecksau.bandcamp.com/album/three