Music Arcades: The Necks: Silverwater

Praise for The Necks was assaulting me from all directions. Jazz on 3 on the radio, Mapsadaisical on the blogs and Brian Eno on the sleb endorsement.

People say you have to see The Necks perform live to get the full experience. Well, yes, for the full experience. But I think what they really mean is that you have to sit down and listen: not read a book, not walk to the bus stop, not do the washing up, just listen. We've lost the habit of doing this, and the only way to do it is through the concert hall ritual, close the doors, dim the lights and surround you with strangers who don't want to chat. I tried listening to another Necks album this morning on the bus into town. Even when I put my Kindle away, it didn't work: the ceaseless stopping of the 176 along the Walworth Road was enough to throw my concentration, and before I knew it the music had moved on without me noticing.

As this appreciation puts it, "For a band whose essence is slow modulation it's interesting that at the start you can never predict which way any piece will go; and that, although it seems hardly to change, by the end you are in completely different musical territory." I reckon the trio in the band must have some generative rules they stick to to enable the music to take off in such different directions while still remaining coherent. Those kind of rules are exactly the kind of thing that would tickle Eno's fanny, of course.

So, anyway, last year was when I finally surrendered and invested in checking out The Necks. I say invested because, then at least, you couldn't just dip into their stuff on the streaming sites because it wasn't there, and they weren't on the download sites either. I went to this show at the Barbican, which was good if not great, and added Silverwater to the top of my Amazon wishlist — it arrived on my birthday.

As ever, Scott says it better than I ever could, and I'm still finding my way around the 67-minute track that is Silverwater. Its approach feels a little like Vision Creation Newsun, though this time I don't think there are any edits. I'm curious at how a couple of new elements seem to emerge and then disappear again soon after, like wrong turns. As with Steve Reich, this is music as a gradual process, but whereas the process in Reich is a physical one, like layers of sand shifting on a beach, The Necks' process is more organic, with the elements interacting in a tangled ecosystem.

Since last year, someone has flicked a switch so that several of The Neck's albums are available on eMusic. Since the albums are just one track each, and eMusic has a low fixed price for each track, they're offensively cheap.

MusicBrainz entry for this album
Wikipedia entry for this album
Rate Your Music entry for this album
Some metadata about this album at Last.fm