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Freedom of the City/The Necks in London/Midnight Sun
ByWe are just three ordinary Joes. We are not tortured geniuses.
Lloyd Stanton, The Necks
On May 14th and 15th, The Necks played two nights at Pizza Express. The Australian trio's music is all improvised, but its slowly-evolving, sensually-textured dynamic is in complete contrast to the music produced on the London scene. On the afternoon before the first show, I talked to The Necks, bassist Lloyd Swanton, drummer Tony Buck and pianist Chris Abraham, about this and other matters. The interview is below.
When the Midnight Sun tour arrived in London on May 28th, we were presented with another contrasting take on improvisation in the guise of Supersilent. The Norwegian quartet - Helge Sten (aka Deathprod) on electronics, Stale Storlokken on keyboards, Arve Henriksen on trumpet and Jarle Vespestad on drums - only meet to play concerts or to record; they don't rehearse or discuss their music. Their music makes heavy use of electronics, notably treatments and delay of Henriksen's trumpet. (A brief solo set from Henriksen - during which he single-handedly built a multiphonic, layered tapestry of sound, left one craving a much longer feature.) As with much improvised music, its direction is unpredictable; at the gig, Supersilent produced an adrenalin-charged noise storm that owed much to rock music. (At times I was reminded of late sixties Soft Machine) This contrasted dramatically with the more subdued, atmospheric mood of their latest CD release, Supersilent 6 (Rune Grammofon), one of the year's best so far.
Three versions of improvised music, all very different, all very good. Lucky us!
Interview with The Necks
All About Jazz: For a gig like tonight, what preparation do you do, if any? Lloyd Stanton:
AAJ: So when you go on stage, what happens happens. It is totally improvised. Tony Buck:
LS: It will always sound like The Necks. We are not reinventing the wheel every night. Certainly we get into some familiar areas. But if that starts happening too much, we get bored with it and one or all of us will start pushing it in another direction, without having to say anything. It is just clear that, "We are not going to go there tonight, we are going to do something a bit different."
TB: We are always pushing the envelope, adding different approaches or techniques, timbres and stuff. We all do so many different things outside of this project that there is plenty of source material to be applied within that template or framework that is The Necks modus operandi.
LS: I feel that some of my other involvements are falling by the wayside over the last few years, as this band has been increasingly time-consuming. Certainly, it is not just other bands we play in; just the listening we do is always informing the direction of the music. I am certainly listening to different things now to what I was sixteen years ago, when the band started. I'm sure the other guys are the same.
Chris Abrahams: Yes. We're the same.
LS: We do have a framework, an approach, that doesn't depend on the material we use or specifics about music, even the style of music, in a way. It is just a framework into which to place all these different things. We don't dilute the concept at all, but it is really open to anything. There are infinite possibilities to add different approaches.
AAJ: But you only need to hear a few seconds to know it is The Necks. How do you explain that? LS:
CA: It was always like that. We sounded like The Necks when we first started playing together. It hasn't changed a great deal.
AAJ: It sounds like it emerged fully formed when you first played together. Is that really how it was? LS:
AAJ: Did you know it would work before you got together? CA:
TB: We got the idea from different conversations and ideas that we expressed to each other at the time, while being involved in all these other different projects, that we were having similar frustrations or similar ambitions in musical terms.
LS: Sixteen years ago, we were all much more involved in the modern jazz scene. It has taken on a life of its own now, to the extent that we sometimes feel a little uncomfortable with being listed on the jazz chart. I know a lot of people hearing it wouldn't think of it as jazz. But I think you can trace it back step by step, and definitely there is no clear break anywhere in the link; it does actually go back to jazz originally, but...
TB: Music's about what it sounds like. In a way, The Necks sound like jazz but it's not really jazz to me; it just sounds like it.
CA: I don't think we have any problem being called a jazz band. Except we do sometimes feel that people who are very much into modern jazz and a tradition of soloists and rhythm section and ideas of virtuosity - the individual pitted against a rhythm section in the background - would be sort of disappointed. We feel that people who are more into that sort of thing, we don?t provide them with the kind of entertainment they are after. So the term "jazz" may be misleading from the audience's point of view.
LS: The modern jazz players in Australia that we have grown up with are all very supportive and enthusiastic about the group. I think some modern jazz musicians who may have read about us and come along would think, "When are they going to start? They've been playing for over an hour now! Where's the head?" But we do have a few fans in the international jazz scene, which is nice. Some people have really clicked with it.
AAJ: You fit the description "beyond category". There is nothing like The Necks. Do you see yourselves in any tradition? CA:
LS: It is impossible for us to be objective about our own playing. If it is the case that there are few parallels then I'd find that very inspiring, and I would think that others would too. We are just three ordinary Joes. We are not tortured geniuses. I have been reading a biography of Hector Berlioz; there is a man given to extreme emotions on a day-to-day basis. I think it is really encouraging if we have come to a music that people are really connecting with and are saying, "I've not heard anything like that. I can't put my finger on where it's coming from but I really like it." That is great because it does show that ordinary people can still do those things.
TB: If you think about the elements that make up a style of music, say the nature of riffs or chords or repetitive patterns that make up a style like soul music, if we played that for eight bars, you'd say these guys are playing soul music. But if we play it for twenty-eight minutes then it's The Necks. If we play a very smooth jazz in a Miles Davis kind of way, but then differ the duration, then that is one thing that makes it quite Necksy. (Necksy?) There are certain touches on our instruments that are quite original. You can tell it is us playing which also adds to the sound, the weight of Chris's touch on the piano, or the way that I use cymbals, the timbre of the bass. That also contributes to The Necks thing.
AAJ: Yes, Chris's solo album sounds like The Necks without bass and drums, instantly recognisable. LS:
TB: One decision we made was about keeping at it and not trying to push it anywhere. I think a band like The Doors is a much more applicable to our way of approaching music than Charlie Parker is. (pause) Unfortunately. (laughs)
AAJ: At home, I have your stuff filed with minimalists like La Monte Young, which is partly to do with the duration of stuff and the slow evolution? CA:
TB: Also I think there is a hidden influence of that technology in the way we make records. Even if we are not using samplers or whatever, when we make a record we sculpt it in a way that it is informed by the traditions of dub reggae, or even using a twenty four track tape like a sampler?
CA: In some ways La Monte Young or Gordon Monahan or people who were experimenting with different timbres out of acoustic instruments, at the time when they were doing that, at the height, people would say, "Well, I've never heard anything that sounds like that." but the next generation responded by saying that it sounds like a synthesiser. In a sense, that is similar; we are a generation removed from that. Rather than have nothing to compare it to, people have a technology to compare it to, which we are playing around with.
AAJ: You said that you are listening to different stuff now. What are you all listening to at the moment that is forming the future sound of The Necks? LS:
CA: We have played quite a lot in Europe over the last five years. I have started listening more to new European improvisers and electronic music. There are people in Australia that are very interesting, like Tim Alderman, an electronic musician who I think is very inspiring. And I really like that Fennesz and Polwechsel album [ Wrapped Islands (Erstwhile Records)]. I think that is really beautiful. And people like Radian [http://www.radian.at/]. That is the latest kind of music I have come to, from listening to reggae and jazz music.
LS: We also, of necessity, have to listen to a lot of our own stuff. It is all so bloody long. We are constantly discussing what we want to release and what we want to mix and so on. And there are only twenty-four hours in a day?
AAJ: So you record everything, every gig? LS:
AAJ: You've got your own website and you do your own selling. Is there the Necks equivalent of Deadheads, dedicated fans? LS:
TB: There are a couple of independent radio stations, student radio stations, in Australia that have annual Neckathons, midnight to dawn playing all the albums. That's pretty strange! (laughs)
LS: We're not in the Grateful Dead league, but with e-mail and so on, we get a lot of feedback from the fans.
AAJ: In that respect, you are very accessible. I have e-mailed you a couple of times and I was astonished to get a personal response the same day. That is practically unheard of! LS:
AAJ: The reason I started off on the Deadhead route was because of the multiple disc live set. If you have an archive of live stuff, presumably there would be a market of people wanting that, like Dick's Picks? If, say, you put out a ten-disc set. LS:
AAJ: Your first album was called Sex. Why that title? TB:
LS: That was a working title in the absence of anything else. I am pretty sure the engineer was just marking the tape off and asked us what we were calling it, and one of us said to call it Sex. It just stuck. That is possibly our simplest, most unchanging album, from 1989. It does sometimes occur to us that someone who'd come along and heard some physical outpourings might wonder if they had got the right band. As I said before, the modus operandi hasn't really changed but some of the textures we are coming up with now are very different to Sex. It is actually our most popular album.
AAJ: Related to that, what are your audiences like? Particularly, what is the gender balance of your audience? LS:
TB: Which may be because we tend to do improvised music festivals.
LS: We are rather groovier in Australia. It is the sort of thing for rock and pop fans to go along to when they want to see something they haven?t seen all year, without feeling intimidated. In the UK the balance is more fifty-fifty.
AAJ: Your music is all improvised. The London improvising scene is like chalk and cheese compared to your music ? people like Evan Parker, for instance. In London, improvising generally means playing without memory, with no hint of repetition or anything. TB:
LS: Some who are very dogmatic might consider that to have any system of commencing a piece, which is what we do rather than all playing at once, is too much pushing it into a box. But if they do think that, they can hear that is simply a mechanism for getting things going and bringing some ordering to it. A lot of the stuff we are coming out with is textbook free improvisation.
TB: Someone might say because it is structured it is not improvisation. It might not be free improvisation. But that would be like saying that Indian musicians don't improvise. They have a basic framework and structure and they improvise within that. We are much the same.
AAJ: Could you foresee a situation where you might collaborate with any of the players we have been talking about, like Burkhard or John Butcher? Is there a situation where that would work? TB:
LS: And yet, there is also something very balanced about what we've got between the three of us. There are that many permutations that it is exciting without being completely out of control. If you start introducing too many people, there are the possibilities of losing a bit of...
TB: We are pretty reticent about diluting this or doing projects outside of it. If we did, it would be a special thing for some reason specific to our relation to that person or their approach.
AAJ: What happens next, projecting five years on? Is it slow evolution? LS:
TB: The career of The Necks is much like the music. We kind of set it going but it troops off on its course and the best thing we can do is to keep out of its way.
AAJ: Why is your label called Fish of Milk? LS:
AAJ: So it was an actual thing. How mundane. LS:
CA: For the name, we each went away and thought of about thirty names. One of mine was The Necks. It just seemed to click. It wasn't originally meant to mean anything but since then people have imbued it with various meanings, the connection point between the brain and the body, the mind and the physical.
LS: At the time we were going to be very formal in our approach and I thought that The Dogs would be a really good name for us, for a band that in every other respect was very formal. I rang up Chris and said I had a great idea for the name of the band. He said, "Yes, so do I, The Necks." So I said, "OK. Fine." I never got a chance to suggest The Dogs.
TB: Would we still be here if we'd been called The Dogs?!
Distribution of The Necks CDs is patchy, around the world. The quickest, easiest way to get them is directly from The Necks themselves by mail order at: http://www.thenecks.com/pages/cds.html
Discography
Photosynthetic, 2003 (CDLA)
Athenaeum, Homebush, Quay & Raab, 2002
Aether, 2001
Hanging Gardens, 1999
Piano Bass Drums, 1998
Music for the feature film ?The Boys?, 1998 (Wild Sound/MDS)
Silent Night, 1996
Aquatic, 1994
Next, 1990
Sex, 1989
(All on Fish of Milk, except where indicated.)
Next month: Rhodri Davies interview