ABC's website is taking off in a number of directions.
One of them is in streaming music videos from Radio National shows like Music Deli. There are 2 long-pieces by the instrumental trio The Necks up here. [Audio only is also accessible.]
The Necks are three improvising musicians who work traditional instruments - piano, double bass and drums/percussion - into polytemporal dialogues where a fragment of difference in the eternal return of the same can insinuate itself into the conversation, lodge itself there and slowly turn a motiff or pattern inside out. Necks pieces unfold slowly. Instensifying around tensions that arise, organically.
If music is prophecy, as Jacques Attali asserts, then this is a future that sounds like neoliberal globalisation has alternatives that are heterotemporal, yet not arrhythmic or isorhythmic, but able to be harmonised: eurhythmic.
Necks sequences are long forms - often a minimum of 45 minutes - that work against the timespace compressions of instantaneous digital finance capitalism and its hit and run raids on the future.
Listening to the Necks might be a way into hearing what our polytemporal conjuncture sounds like. A musical Generative mise en abyme where framing and embedded elements and figures are turned inside-out; where paradigms shift; and time is experienced as constellation.
They groove too.
I recommend finding a comfy chair, relaxing and opening a long neck, or two.
ps Dan Hill from City of Sound on recent Necks experience at Sydney Opera House:
They seem to me to be pursuing a form of music with real structure, inverting that hoary old epithet of Goethe ['architecture is frozen music'] and playing defrosted architecture.
That's my own peculiar interpretation of course, and perhaps influenced by the weight of the Opera House around us, but it's something about the way they 'show their workings' in their improvisations, building dense blocks from discrete motifs and with such a pronounced sense of dynamics.
Defrosted architecture!
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