The NecksA certain gravity permeates the room the moment The Necks arrive on stage at the Brisbane Powerhouse tonight. One could almost hear a pin drop in the moments of anticipation that play prelude to Chris Abrahams' delicate commencement on the piano. The keys dance a soft repetition in unison for a brief time before Lloyd Swanton succeeds with a slight bowing of his double bass, and Tony Buck finally joins to complete the triangle. Buck's use of his kit is anything but typical. Instead of attacking it in even the slightest manner of battery, he produces a very distinctive effect through measured revolutions of a chosen cymbal. There is, however, nothing that seems gimmicky about this brazen experimentation. The fact that the sounds of such minimal occurrences may be permitted to enter the fold and play a major role in the soundscape is actually a big part of what makes this slowly evolving movement so utterly mesmerising. Though restrained in their application, the three of them in-synch manage to produce something that is truly engaging. As if Lynch and Antonioni collaborated to envision a desolate port removed from time, this early aural excursion conjures the most frightfully exquisite imagery.
After some time their wandering, free-form composition begins to move in broader, more frenzied rhythms, sustaining peaks through many light and dark corridors of reverberating sound. Their cyclic revolutions oscillate around each other in such a way that explicit shifts are rendered near imperceptible. They move through vast contrasts, but they apply a level of subtlety which alleviates any crudeness from their progressions. The perpetuating repetitions seem to affect minor symptoms of amnesia, in that even if you know where you are it's kind of hard to pinpoint exactly how you got there. Even the comforts of linear memory in general somewhat become deconstructed through this device of repetition, for each moment seems to take on a paradoxical relationship to its neighbour – both same and other. But perhaps it's this elusive and unfathomable sense of coexisting sameness and otherness that makes such a performance so damn wondrous. As the movement is slowly reduced and reined in, each of the the musicians drops off, concluding in the order they commenced, and the revelation rings loud and clear – this exquisitely unique moment is happening again.
