Tony Buck (left), Lloyd Swanton and Chris Abrahams.
Photo: Jesse Marlow
Corner Hotel, Richmond, January 11
Next month, the Necks will perform a concert at the Melbourne Town Hall, with pianist Chris Abrahams playing the auditorium's Grand Organ in what should be a compelling acoustic experiment.
Then again, every concert by the Necks is really an acoustic experiment. Each performance opens with an expectant silence during which audience and musicians become acutely aware of the listening environment, and where the small sounds that punctuate the air - the scrape of a chair, the hum of an air conditioner - become a window into the music about to be created.
There were moments at the Corner Hotel on Tuesday night, too, when Abrahams' piano resonated with the stately grandeur of a full pipe organ.
In fact, at various times, Abrahams and his colleagues (bassist Lloyd Swanton and drummer Tony Buck) seemed to be accompanied by an entire string orchestra, or a choir of unearthly voices, or the sound of factory workers busily clinking and hammering on an invisible industrial site.
These mysterious sounds - clearly discernible, yet impossible to locate - often drift in and out of the Necks' music as if carried by the wind from somewhere nearby. In part, they are a product of the overtones emerging from Abrahams' open-pedalled explorations at the keyboard - most frequently in the form of incessant ripples and astonishingly precise chopping patterns that build a powerful momentum.
Swanton and Buck also use extended techniques on their respective instruments: Swanton sawing in rapid flurries with his bow or pulling firmly on one string to create a startling vibration; Buck conjuring clouds of resonance from a continuously tapped cymbal, or scraping a miniature gong around the rim of a tom to produce a subtle metallic shimmer.
But it is the dreamlike space the music creates that turns a clinking cymbal into a cluster of mountain goats in the Himalayas. The use of space and repetition - in particular, the way each player locks into an improvised motif and extrapolates on it, again and again - produces a hypnotic soundtrack that allows the listener to add his or her visual accompaniment.
One particularly urgent passage on Tuesday night set my internal projector on full beam, as the climax of a yet-to-be-written Hollywood epic played itself out. There was wind and rain; grand passion; and a strong sense of foreboding - a result of the relentless, tension-filled propulsion that almost every Necks piece generates, before subsiding to set the listener down on a serene but strangely unfamiliar shore.