When the Necks released their debut album, Sex, in 1989, it didn’t make waves overseas. But the international profile of the Australian improvisational jazz trio — Chris Abrahams on piano and electronics, Lloyd Swanton on bass, and Tony Buck on drums, guitar, and more — grew over time, even as their material got more difficult. It’s not that each of the Necks’ roughly two-dozen studio LPs is more abstruce than the last; the band has charted a checkerboard path, remaining resolutely unpredictable for the past 35 years and counting. But the dedicated fans they’ve accrued over these last three-and-a-half decades have only grown more adoring in the face of their hour-long epics. Their latest, Bleed, arrived devoid of context beyond its single-word title. Slow and mysterious, it leaves room for infinite interpretation.
Given their tendency toward abstraction and their appeal to enthusiasts of the esoteric variety, it might surprise fans to hear that the Necks aspire to regularity. “We’re really all about being normal,” Swanton told American author Kate Hennessy in a 2015 interview for the Quietus. “Only then can the extraordinary happen.”
When we catch up via video call, the band is scattered around the world: Abrahams is in Sydney, the Necks’ hometown and point of origin; Swanton is 60 miles west in the Blue Mountains; and Buck is in Berlin. As it turns out, the Necks are in fact normal and extremely witty sexagenarians — self-proclaimed partiers, too, although I suspect this claim may have been made in jest. Over the course of 90 minutes, we digress endlessly, at one point moving away from music entirely to discuss Abrahams and my mutual love for Tim Heidecker and Gregg Turkington’s On Cinema at the Cinema. (This part of our conversation has been cut for clarity and flow.)
Despite the light tone of our discussion, there are times when the Necks lock in, showing glimmers of the mind meld they achieve onstage during their iconic live sets — always improvised and never intentionally related to any of their studio releases. In these moments, they open up, revealing pearls of insight into their collective goals, shared histories, and symbiotic creative processes.
The FADER: Lloyd, you once said that the Necks were “really all about being normal” because “only then can the extraordinary happen.” Can you expand on that?
Lloyd Swanton: I have no specific recollection of saying that, but I think it’s quite a good line. I think it just [means] our focus is on the music and how we can bring it into being — not getting full of ourselves, not chasing stardom or accolades, simply identifying that we’ve found an amazing way to generate music from pretty simple origins and always staying true to that.
Chris Abrahams: [Not trying] to be exceptional was part of the founding ideology of the group: allowing the music to unfold while we’re playing it and trying not to get in the way of it. Remove the ego.
LS: I might have been referencing that William Blake quote about how we can find eternity in a grain of sand. I can very much relate to that.
You were talking about your pre-show rituals, how the only consistent one is trying to punt an empty wine bottle into a trash can.
CA: Ah, yes, but in a very non-wreck-the-band-room vibe. It’s a healthy competition to try out our hand-eye coordination.
Tony Buck: Some people think we must be meditating on stage or something, but the music is just part of our lives, and we want it to be something that unfolds out of us naturally, not extra to anything, so we don’t feel we have to be in any special frame of mind. It’s just what we do.
I’ve never seen the Necks live, but I’ve probably watched your Copenhagen concert video 100 times, and I love your quadruple live album. When you’re editing a project like that one, how faithful do you try to remain to the original recording?
CA: I’ve been guilty of thinking a live performance and the recording of a live performance are the same thing, and that’s clearly not the case; you can’t experience a live performance by listening to the recording of a live performance.
TB: We’ve talked about taking the bits where the piece comes together without the element of how it got there, or having a whole collage of live recordings. That and having a live [album] be a document of the performance as it happened are very different philosophies, and a lot of improvisers don’t want to doctor [their recordings]. But with our approach to making studio records, we’re not opposed to playing around with them, so we’ll probably end up doing that in the future.
But you haven’t done it with a live album yet.
TB: Well, [the recordings] are mixed, so sometimes the dynamic is played around with. If sections are very soft, you can bring them up a bit in the lab; you can shape them, which is a form of manipulating a live performance, so it becomes something other than a document straight away.
“When the Necks party, we party.”
You’ve said the process of naming albums often takes longer than recording the albums themselves. Tell me about that process.
CA: We spend a lot of time together, and during that time, if we’ve got something we need to name, someone will go, “What about this?” And the other two will go, “No, no, no.” Then someone else will go, “What about this?” There’s no end to that. I think it took 18 months to name Hanging Gardens.
Who came up with Bleed?
TB: Lloyd did. More and more, when someone comes up with a title that’s at least half OK, to avoid this 18-month [process], it’s like, “Yeah, great. Fantastic. Let’s go with that.”
LS: It’s a word! Hey, everyone, we’ve got a word! If it takes 18 months to come up with one, maximum two, words, you’d be here for a long time waiting for us to form a sentence.
CA: We each have our own interpretations of why [a title] seems fitting. There’s a poetic element: You can’t explain the word, and it means something more than its dictionary definition. There’s some magic that the word has that relates to the music in a way I can’t explain.
“We’re looking for novelty, in its best sense.”
Bleed has more negative space than most of your recent records. What’s your state of mind in the studio when you’re recording a slower, more abstract album like this one versus a busier, jazzier one like Travel?
LS: We recorded the bed tracks for Bleed a long time before we mixed it. When we mixed it, we decided to go very minimal and only use a sound when we felt like it wanted to be used. We were ruthless with what we discarded from this album, and that was a mood that excited the three of us as we proceeded: “Don’t get in the way. Let’s let this unfold.”
TB: The reviews have all talked about how it’s minimal, and in some senses, that’s true. There’s often just one instrument playing, so there aren’t often lots of vertical layers, but horizontally, it’s actually quite dense. They’ve also been talking about how open it is, but to me there’s a very strong pulse all the way through. It’s not overtly stated by a drum kit, but there’s this throbbing eighth-note thing that goes through the whole record. It’s interesting that people aren’t noticing that.
LS: There’s that underlying architecture, which is almost subliminal, but at any given moment, there’s not a lot of articulated rhythm. I’m not denying there’s some kind of forward pulse, but there’s a lot of stillness, too. We’re content to sit in whatever space we’re in.
TB: Listen again. I was surprised at how throbbing it is.
LS: You were up and dancing around the living room, too, weren’t you?
TB: Headbanging.
LS: When the Necks party, we party.
There aren’t many recognizable patterns or traditional harmonic/melodic phrases on this album. Are you still moving toward a shared goal when you’re improvising this way?
CA: I think there’s been an evolution in the band. Whereas on the early records, a diatonic phrase would be repeated once every two bars or so in a rhythmical way, now that phrase is coming from a more [conceptual] area. There’ll still be iterations of similar material, of course; they aren’t necessarily repetitions, but they don’t move out of that particular concept.
LS: The three of us are intensely curious about the sounds we can generate from our instruments without using any kind of extraneous devices, and that drives a lot of what we do. We’re looking for novelty, in its best sense.
CA: We’re making it up as we go along. There’s no one saying, “This has to go this way.” That’s how we make music, and that’s how we’ve wanted to make music from the start, back in 1986. We wanted to get away from “Look how great a composer I am! Look at my chops on the piano!” People often ask, “So you guys never rehearse?” as if it’s unusual, but we couldn’t rehearse what we do. We don’t want to know where we’re going — rationally, at least. There’s possibly something deep inside us from having played together for [38] years where we know where we’re going, but we don’t want to have a rational idea or a preconceived path of what we want to present.
Everything is intuitive: I don’t sit down at the piano and go, “OK, I’ll play something melodic here.” I just play the piano, and whatever comes out is more complex than anything I could come up with in the dimension of rationality. I want to be moved or entertained by what I’ve made, as I think every artist does. We want to feel an interest when we hear something we’ve done: “Wow, I don’t know why I did that or why it seems to work.” One way of doing that is to get out of the way, remove oneself from the rational process of making art.