NECKS - Silverwater

If there's one thing the Necks are no good at, it's measuring their own perceptions, complicating abstractions that are already wonderfully simple in themselves, just to fit their art into a context, into the funnel of song-form, into popular tragedy (in the Greek sense) and its thousand mass-market offshoots.

"Silverwater" is the triumph of improvisation, perhaps even more markedly so than on the previous "Chemist". Indeed, it picks up where that album left off, developing a texture that's if anything even more diluted, caught between the rhythms of a piano trapped in minimalist weaves, jazz excursions and classical canons.

The bass this time follows the paths of a liquid, almost non-existent fabric that gives itself over to creative repetition, to a loop (or millions of them) that takes its own time: it's born, grows, matures and dies within the life-span of a cycle that's never the same twice.

The true protagonist of the album, however, is Tony Buck's percussion (one of the best drummers on the planet), entrusted with the dynamic skeleton of the whole work.

Melody is perpetually just around the corner, but it never manages to find a decisive, defined space between the structural skin and the harmonic content of this celebration of an anti-aesthetic stream of consciousness - fascinating, devious, obsessive, free precisely because of that.

The Australian trio give their best live, and in that sense the 2007 live album "Townsville" is a snapshot, and so remains a one-dimensional artifact, an aesthetic impression lacking the depth and the feeling typical of the stage, the thought that becomes empirical fact the instant an idea turns into music. In this sense the Necks should be forbidden from making studio albums, since the resulting sound and dynamism inevitably become an abstraction of an abstraction, and thus a bleak aesthetic realism that is an end in itself.

It's nonetheless true that "Silverwater" (a single track just under 70 minutes long) is magic and rebellion, a musical nihilism without the violent Zornian nemesis, yet no less effective for it. It's water torture against the machete.

The result is an almost entirely organic ambient work (electronics, where present, are purely cosmetic), an intricate weave of organ, piano, gong, hammond, drums, bass, a faint guitar and an Indonesian anklung, all in the service of improvisation. It's fair to call it jazz, so long as it's understood more as a representational means than as the end goal of the artistic design.

"Silverwater" is yet another step forward into territory ever more distant from conventional genres, and it's the vivid, powerful expression of a clean break with musical doctrine for its own sake. The moment will come when the Sydney trio will have to stop, no longer finding an inspired idea, but that day still seems far off, remote in the future. The present is already history, and the past is a blurred, trembling memory, to be fixed in the mind by bending it to improvisation.

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13/01/2010