Jazz breaking news: Necks Confirm New Studio Album Release
Thursday, August 4, 2011
The Necks have confirmed that Mindset is the title of their next album to be released in September.
In a first for the group it also marks their debut on vinyl.
The Australian piano trio – which has a sizeable underground following among jazz, improv and classical music fans drawn to their original sounding improvising ethic – will tour again in the UK in November to support the release with dates at the Bishopsgate Institute on 18-19 November for the Vortex City Sessions during this year’s London Jazz Festival. The Necks – pianist Chris Abrahams; bassist Lloyd Swanton; and drummer Tony Buck – have been around since the late-1980s and this is their sixteenth album. Mindset is a studio album, only their third to date and is released by the ReR label, the record company the band has worked with for some time and who put out previous album Silverwater among other records. It will be issued on vinyl as well as CD and digital formats.
The Necks can be mesmerising live and at the Union Chapel in London in May 2009, during a brief tour, the first set of the concert was just a single piece, more than a half-an-hour long, grounded in the language of minimalism, drawing on the broad sweep of the innovations made by Terry Riley and Steve Reich but taking in other musics, including the spirit if not the letter of jazz and avant rock. Long, held notes – sometimes moving towards a biting point but never quite reaching a jarring distortion – had a momentum which was not created artificially, especially where dynamic control was concerned. Their return is a tantalising prospect. – Stephen Graham