On Monday the 15th, The Necks kick off their Australian tour in support of their new single track album ‘Silverwater’ at Melbourne's Corner Hotel.
The album sees the band take a more mellow approach to 2006’s frantic ‘Chemist’, which pianist Chris Abrahams puts down to a combination of being in a new headspace and also recording digitally for the first time.“A studio album kind of represents - as much as a live performance - it represents where the band is at at a certain time,” Abrahams told Undercover. “We recorded ‘Silverwater’ at the end of an Australian tour, so we recorded after a lot of gigs and therefore there was a kind of zeitgeist in the band. Also, maybe I would do a ten minute piano take and we didn’t know where it was going to end up on the record, or Tony could do a drum feel for a little while, being able to do that and knowing that it wasn’t going to be a problem moving that around where we wanted did represent a new thing and I think it had a big impact on where the record ended up sounding.”
Fans familiar with their improvisational live shows might be surprised to hear that the albums are deliberately arranged and pieced together by improvised parts on various instruments.
“With a studio album like ‘Silverwater’ it’s very highly constructed,” he explained. “The process of recording it and the process of mixing it is always treated as two seperate things. A lot of the composition of the record comes through in the mix. We start to drop things out cut things out of mix things differently or play with the different combinations.
“One of the big things for ‘Silverwater’ is that we abandoned the 2” tape which we normally record studio records on and replace it with ProTools. Not only did this give us a great deal more tracks in terms of overdubs that we can do, it removed this real tyranny of real-time writing. Even though our studio albums are different to our live performances - they’re two different bands - but on 2” tape there is still a concept of what is recorded is recorded and it’s more difficult to move things around on a tape-based medium.”
So the album is essentially a sonic jigsaw with hundreds of pieces?
“Yes, very much. That posed quite a conceptual leap for us I think. In terms of the instrumentation I don’t think it’s that unique a record. We’ve always used lots of percussion and lots of samples and organs and guitar. It’s not that new instrumentally, but I think conceptually it’s quite new."
The band's improvisational streak is definitely in tact while they're in the studio, or they'd never get a record done.
“We’re very intuitive. We don’t tend to dwell too much on the actual process of making the music," Abrahams says.
"What takes time is more the logistical mundane things about it like getting the cover art or what are we going to call the record. We could have spent every day for three years making ‘Silverwater’, but as it turned out the whole production only took about three weeks.”
The live show, however, is a long leap from what you hear on the record. Despite using up to 60 tracks in ProTools for the recording of ‘Silverwater’, the live show remains a trio of piano, bass and drums.
“We never play anything twice and we’ve never played an album live," the pianist explains. "When we play live we just walk on stage and play. If there is anything that comes from ‘Silverwater’, it would come by accident, but we would never try anything like that. When we play live, so far it has always been piano, bass and drums. We couldn’t [replicate the album live] and we wouldn’t.
“Once you’ve experienced [a live show] once you wouldn’t necessarily want to do it again. We’ve always seen ourselves as two different bands, the studio version and the live version. The way we’ve constructed the record, obviously if it’s a live record then you turn the mic’s on and off you go, but in the studio we’ve had lots of overdubs and treated it very differently.”
The band have earned themselves some high profile fans, which saw them performing at the Sydney Opera House in 2009 with Brian Eno.
“It was a very exciting experience. We’re actually going to be doing it again at the Brighton Festival (UK) in May. Brian wanted a section of the performance to include a kind of Necks interlude, which went for about ten or fifteen minutes each, which of course represented about a third to a quarter of what we would normally do, but I think we all calibrated our process to the situation. Brian was very much the leader and we rehearsed for three days prior to the concerts and he had a very good way of going about directing an ensemble like this where a lot of the musicians had played with other musicians. There was Karl Hyde from Underworld and Brian had done stuff with him, but Karl hadn’t worked with John and Leo and I can’t work it out. You could probably draw a Venn diagram, but I imagine it was a way to experience the methods that he would have used on ‘Here Come The Warm Jets’ or ‘Before and After Science’. He got musicians in and then he directed the record. It was quite exciting to be involved.
You can pick up a copy of The Necks new album ‘Silverwater’, and their previous live and studio releases by clicking here, and you can check them out live at the following locations:
FEBRUARY
15 - The Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
16 - The Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
17 - The Corner Hotel, Melbourne, VIC
19 - The Metro, Sydney, NSW
20 - Powerhouse, Brisbane, QLD
21 - Community Centre, Byron Bay, NSW
27 - Street Theatre, Canberra, ACT
MARCH
1 - Charles Hotel, Perth, WA
3 - “Food Court” with Back to Back Theatre, Adelaide, SA
4 - “Food Court” with Back to Back Theatre, Adelaide, SA
5 - “Food Court” with Back to Back Theatre, Adelaide, SA
6 - “Food Court” with Back to Back Theatre, Adelaide, SA
7 - The Famous Spiegeltent, Adelaide, SA
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