It’s always a joy to see the Australian trio, The Necks, in the intimate surroundings of Cafe Oto. It has been at Dalston’s Cafe Oto and at the Vortex, across the road, where the Necks put in the groundwork to build their reputation and devoted following in London. It was a case of ‘the boys are back in town’ and, given that they now often play much larger venues and festivals, a welcome surprise that they had chosen to return to Cafe Oto for a two-day residency of afternoon and evening shows.
The trio’s performances are unique – there’s a pattern to them, yet there’s no pattern, more a resounding, amorphous shape brimming with invention. There’s no script, no pre-arranged structure. Instead, there’s an underlying, elusive abstraction to the musical language that Chris Abrahams (piano), Tony Buck (percussion) and Lloyd Swanton (double bass) have evolved over nigh on forty years of improvising together, cross-referencing jazz, rock, the music of the world and the minimalist canon – and anything else uncovered in-between.
As it was on the Sunday afternoon show, the third of the four, where their two extended sets grew from low-key sounds and light, insistent rhythms to evolve as a meditational journey in their first set, to a busy, intensive dodgem-car ride in the second. Yet that’s to over-simplify. The improvised routes they choose to follow are more like sonic versions of artist Mark Boyle’s Journey to the Surface of the Earth where darts were thrown on to maps and the topography of that real earth spot subsequently meticulously reproduced. To unashamedly mangle another song title they ‘set the controls to the depths of the ocean’. There’s mystery, darkness, and something unfathomable in the statements that they so carefully and intuitively contrive.
From Buck’s hand-held shakers with the sounds of tiny bells, Abraham’s melody-hinted piano recces and Swanton’s carefully picked bass notes they wove a path through gentle cymbal rushes, hovering, bowed bass echoes and strongly formed piano figures to wind their way to an intensive crescendo in the first set, with Buck’s shakers struck by his knee to maintain the beat in its final stages.
Swanton put down delicate bass lines to launch the second set which saw Buck scraping a drumstick across a tom’s skin while striking a rattle in tandem with the taps of a small hi-hat, and Abrahams ultimately bringing out the powerful, welling bass tones of Cafe Oto’s Yamaha grand, with the sustain pedal (Artur Rubinstein’s ‘soul of the piano’) firmly, emphatically down.
Complementary sets – the longer, first set camouflaged with constraint, the second looser in its meandering flow, made this another of Cafe Oto’s highly successful Sunday afternoon concerts, fully deserving of the unhesitating standing ovation from the sold-out, listening audience.
Chris Abrahams: piano
Tony Buck: percussion
Lloyd Swanton: double bass
