You should already know that we are terminal fans of the Necks from this article. We took advantage of the band’s date in Trento to ask the bassist of the band Lloyd Swanton some questions about the Australian trio’s live dimension.
Hello Lloyd, first of all thank you for agreeing to answer our questions. In particular, we would like to deepen and investigate the relationship between Necks’ music and its live dimension. This aspect seems to us very interesting on the one hand because of your refusal to play predetermined music and to rely exclusively on the free improvisation, on the other hand because the live dimension has always seemed to us the one where it is possible to really capture the essence of your musical project.
So let’s begin from… the beginning… A truly magical moment of your concerts is the intimate silence that precedes the beginning of the exhibition. As a spectator I had the feeling that that silence, religiously shared by the audience, generates an intense communion that breaks down the barrier between listener and artist and generates the right atmosphere and then be kidnapped by the musical flow that will soon wrap everyone. Is it my suggestion or do you think it’s shareable? What are the factors that determine who starts playing every night?
I entirely agree with what you have said. We hit upon the idea of us all waiting in silence for one of us to start, as an effective mechanism to guarantee some sense of order from the word go, but as time passed it became clear it was beginning to not only assume a certain ritual element, but that it was serving a very handy purpose of quieting the room.
As to who starts each piece, that is completely random. As we’re taking the stage, we have no idea who is going to start the piece.
Another idea I’ve had is that the first note or pattern you play influences the whole performance and the improvisational flow that will inform it. As if that note or pattern already contained the embryo of everything you will play. What do you think?
I guess that’s a version of The Butterfly Effect! In a way, what you’re saying is entirely unremarkable, and yet, in another way it is also a very profound summary of the infinity that faces the improviser. Every note – every instant, in fact, is a potential turning point.
In my opinion, one of the secrets of the vitality of the live sound of the Necks is based on a paradox: on the one hand an absolute freedom that is, however, strictly regulated by the rules that you impose. What does it mean for you to move within a dynamic suspended between drive and (self-)control?
That is the ever-present challenge; the thing that keeps it exciting and interesting for us even after all these years. There is an ongoing tension in our musicking, between convention and iconoclasm, but it’s a positive tension.
And speaking of vitality: where do you find new impulses every time to create new music at every performance? Have you never had the temptation to crystallize your formula, maybe just to refine it and make it perfect?
It’s a bit of a commonplace, but playing with The Necks gives me all the inspiration and rejuvenation I ever need – both musically and psychically.
No, we’ve never been tempted to formalise our method, because that would be the death of it. There is no denying that the three of us have established certain performative conventions which we often draw on, but what keeps it fresh is that all three of us know that if we repeatedly fall into these same patterns of behaviour, then sooner or later one of us is going to start rebelling against what he sees as the threat of predictability creeping into our performance. So he will head off in a fresh direction and state it against the textures we were generating, and straight away a new direction is born. It may last for a few minutes, or till the end of the piece, or for weeks.
If in live contest you only show up as “Piano Bass Drums” , in studio you often choose to enrich your sound with other colours (I’m thinking of Chris’ organ and samples or Tony’s guitar). Is it a choice dictated by the desire to stay as close as possible to the original source of the Necks sound or is it more a matter of practical reasons?
We decided from very early in the band’s existence that, although there are clear connections, we would never try to make our concert identity and our recorded identity one and the same. We see this as a positive – you could say that we make records in order to create things we could never do live in concert, and we play live so as to do things we could never achieve in the studio.
You improvised on stages all over the world for more than 30 years, a very long period in which from a human and artistic point of view many things can change. What do you think has remained unchanged in your way of playing both as individuals and as a trio and what do you think has changed or evolved in your approach to improvisation and music in general? If you had to define with a term or an adjective the Necks of the beginnings and those of today which would you use?
Hmm, we’re getting into difficult territory here. Because, not only do I think that in some ways we are the least objective people to ask about our music, I also have this firm belief that people play music to express things we simply cannot express by any other means, so in a way it’s always a bit futile trying to describe music. To some degree, I feel music should not talked about. It should be listened to, and everything that needs to be said will be in what you hear.
So I’m going to be frustratingly generalised in my answer. I think what has remained unchanged is the fundamental way that Chris, Tony and I relate to each other musically, and the goals we have when we perform. But what that fundamental thing is, and what those goals are, is the bit that’s impossible to put into words.
What has changed is also hard to describe, but in a way I just need to say that most people would agree that the changes that any human being undergoes in over 30 years of living are numerous and profound, and it stands to reason that one’s music would naturally undergo a great degree of change also.
But having said that, if I can step outside of myself for just an instant and try and put myself in the shoes of a listener, I suspect that what appeals to a lot of our fans is that though our music has undoubtedly changed considerably over the band’s lifespan, somehow we’ve been able to hold to something that is quintessentially “Necks”.
Attending your performances creates a sort of temporal suspension, where the conclusion is equivalent to a sort of return to reality. It’s no coincidence that the pieces rarely close abruptly, but rather they fade into an anticlimax that represents a “soft landing” that leaves the viewer to reflect on the experience that he just lived. How do you experience this dynamic on the other side of the barricade?
Very much the same as the audience! Obviously, as the performers, we have a lot more say in how it ends, but within the ensemble, none of us can read the others’ minds, so each of us are still potentially in line to be very surprised at how the piece ends.
After the set, we may briefly discuss the directions that it took, but never in a very specific fashion, and never prescriptive. We would never resolve, after a set, to do something similar in future “because it worked so well”, or conversely, to avoid a certain area because it hadn’t really worked in the piece we just played. That would be the death of the band!
Because of the transversality of your music and your difficult collocation, you find yourself performing in often very different contexts: from the “Sydney Opera House” to the concerts of Nick Cave, from the crowd of the Primavera Festival to realities such as small provincial theatres or small deconsecrated churches. How do you deal with different audiences? How much does it affect your performance to find in front of you the more composed audience of jazz rather than the more wild one of rock? Who do you think is able to better understand the essence of your music?
We deal with the diversity by not letting any of it affect us in a negative way, only positive. I wouldn’t say there’s any one audience that we prefer. There is good in all of them! All we do hope for is a respectful crowd, and if not totally silent, at least reasonably quiet.
What really affects the outcome of each performance is the individual acoustics of the space, and it’s stating the obvious to say that a big part of many of our pieces involves us playing music to “sound out” the room, in order to know what music to play!
We like to think we’re adaptable to just about any kind of acoustic, but I’d say our preference is for somewhere with a bit of resonance, so that we can work with some interesting acoustical effects as they present themselves, but not so crazy resonant that we’re really just churning and tumbling with no way of getting any traction to move the piece forward (if indeed that’s what we want to do in that particular piece!)
In addition to the usual frenetic live and studio activities, this year we find two stimulating but very different collaborations: the studio sessions with Underworld (collected in the box set The Drift) and the concert in Poland with the orchestra Sinfonietta Krakovia and Ilan Volkov. Can you tell us something about these two experiences?
Underworld and The Necks have had a mutual admiration going on since we first worked with Karl Hyde as part of Brian Eno’s Pure Scenius in 2009. They told us they’d like to bring us in to their music and eventually we found a chance to all get together and record, at the end of one of our European tours. We spent 2 days in the amazing AIR Studios in London. They had worked up a half a dozen terrific loops that we all played along with and then we gradually started to push them elsewhere. Rick Smith was able to sculpt the loops as we evolved and Karl was improvising vocals so there was always something happening. We didn’t know how it would go initially, but the first piece evolved really organically, and then so did the second, and then the third, and then there was no stopping us!
The Krakow gig was the third time we have worked with Ilan. It really is quite incredible – he gets an entire symphony orchestra improvising along with us. In a way it’s like The Necks plus a guest artist – but this guest artist brings a symphony orchestra with him! He’d be one of the only people in the world that can pull this off – a highly credentialed conductor (BBC Scottish Symphony , Boston Symphony, etc) who is an improvisor and speaks the “language” of improvisation.
As I said, we’ve performed twice before with Ilan and an orchestra – the Adelaide Symphony and the BBC Scottish Symphony, and both of those concerts were incredible, but this was the first time we’d worked with a sinfonietta, and though the sound was smaller than a full orchestra, the responsiveness was just wonderful. I think in many ways it was the most successful encounter we’ve had yet.
When you collaborate as The Necks with other musicians and ensembles do you do it as single musicians or do you continue to relate to the outside as if you were a compact nucleus?
We are always The Necks, I think. There may be some tangible changes to what we’re doing and how we’re going about it, but I think the three of us are always thinking of ourselves as part of the trio rather than as individuals.
I guess the unanswered question when we collaborate with someone else is, how far can we take The Necks’ concept away from its home base before it’s no longer The Necks? Fortunately I don’t think we’ve ever got near that point.
Finally, another very important event in 2019 is your participation to the new Swans album. The great respect that your self claimed fan, Michael Gira, has for your music is reflected in the masterful way in which he managed to “use” your contribution. I know that you recorded solo the bases of the two tracks that were then enriched and completed by Gira and in fact it is strange to listen to your music within the song form, although unusual as Swans’ one. Can you tell us more about the process that led you from the free sound of The Necks to the more structured sound of Gira? How did these songs develop and what are the indications and the degree of freedom that Michael Gira left you?
Michael sent us versions of the songs with just vocals and guitar, and asked us to provide whatever we saw fit to provide; total artistic free reign, so we played along and laid down tracks. We gave him a few extra options for him to consider when mixing, but basically we just tried to ascertain the essence of the pieces and provide an appropriate setting for them. I think both tunes worked wonderfully well.
