neckst.

The Necks are a surprisingly underknown band of remarkable longevity with a dogged commitment to their unique sensibility, and on Friday I was fortunate enough to see them play in Auckland.

They are a trio (piano/bass/drums, with some laptop assistance to throw in loops and such). They begin, quietly with an idea on one instrument. Repeated. Another joins in, with a repeated pattern of his own. Then, a third. These ideas start minimally and are basically non-idiomatic, apart perhaps from their own hermetic idiom.

As the piece continues, the parts slowly morph, and the texture increases in density. This can happen very, very slowly. Although time stopped for me during their performance, I have reliable confirmation that each of their two pieces were about 40 minutes in length, and in the first I don’t think the drummer touched his cymbals for 30 minutes. Listening at any point you may not notice any variation in an individual player’s work. Then five minutes later you’ll realize they’re playing something completely different.

At one point during the first song, I had the closest thing to a religious experience that I could hope to have while listening to music. Completely, totally lost in the texture, in the sound world. I felt like I was staring deeply into a Rothko painting – not staring in it, actually, but falling into it, every detail of texture – oh, fuck it, you’ll never believe me and the purple prose cheapens it. I’ll put it in argot that anyone can understand: if this isn’t the gig of the year then it’s going to be a fucking great year for music.

I bought two CDs at the show, hoping for similarly revelatory experiences, and was disappointed slightly by both. As David Stubbs put it in his review of TOWNSVILLE (an album I looked at but didn’t buy) in The Wire:

The very occasional disadvantage of The Necks is that if you don’t happen to be enamoured of the idea they start out with, then that’s the whole album wiped out.

CHEMIST, their newest studio release, is a bit too enthralled with the electronic side of things for my tastes, vaguely dubby and bloopy. Also, with the tracks clocking in at roughly 20 minutes apiece, they feel somewhat foreshortened (as odd as that is to say about 20 minute tracks). SEX, meanwhile, is their first album (from 1989), and is a single 56-minute track; however, it shows a band that has not completely divorced themselves from the jazz idiom.

There may be other records by The Necks that I like better, which I hope to discover. (I have a copy of HANGING GARDENS somewhere which I remember being quite impressive; I suspect it’s languishing in Portland.) However, I wonder if the Necks are uniquely unsuited for home listening. They require an attention that is all too rarely given to music listening outside of the concert hall; further, on a moment-to-moment basis their music is not as gripping as it is in context.

The performance happened in the Civic Theatre’s Winter Garden and I hope for the love of God no more performances by artists of this (or, really, any) caliber are scheduled there. The seating was all around tables, which was awkward and with the flat floor made for terrible eyelines; further, the bar didn’t shut down until 10 minutes after each set started, so the first minimal section of the set were interrupted with the clinking of bottles and ringing of the cash register. Also, the casual atmosphere made a few people think it was okay to talk through the whole fucking set. Thankfully, at a certain point the sonic density of The Necks rendered their conversation inaudible, but the desire to punch them in the jaw lingered. At the end of their set, they promised they would return soon. Hopefully, I will see them, and at a different venue.

In other news, I joined a gym yesterday. I believe this will increase my uptake of terrible music dramatically. I hope to report back on the efficacy of listening to Jesus Lizard vs. listening to Jawbox while using an elliptical trainer.