The Necks - Mindset

The Necks seem to have been around forever and they’re still boiling the elements of jazz down, adding their signature dabbles and occasional electronic bursts, collecting and sieving through new sounds, gold panning their way into new forms. This album collects two 20 minute-plus tracks that shadow each other like long lost relatives at a wake. Not that this is dark music as such (though the bass rumbles) but rather that the two tracks circle each other, as if wary. They clearly know each other, share a few drops of the same gene pool, but they are rough twins, twins brought up by different brothers.

first track “Rum Jungle” is the relentless one; drums tumbling almost into the late period jungle-jazz rhythms of Omni Trio. It’s all about the interweaves; the pulses are constant but shifting, the cymbals flicking against each other, urging the track forward. Here, the drums are the bad leader, the organ drones and piano tinkles and bass sounds following, adding their own comments but keeping to the drum’s pace, not outstripping. Best listened to in the midst of a serious caffeine binge. This is fidgeting, made music. It gets claustrophobic, very claustrophobic. You’ll find yourself searching for space, expecting it, but it doesn’t come. There’s no space at all until…

The second track “Daylight” is formally more contemplative, the sounds given more room to breathe. It’s not just softer, more airy; it’s necessarily softer and more airy. Sometimes it seems like a jazz transcription of some lost modular electronics classic; the pops and scratches and lightness (albeit lightness in a very Noir setting; lightness as the first whisky of the day, after a long evening of malice) giving way eventually to a more consuming, denser sound. You’ll need both tracks. One will pull you into a hole, the other just about pulls you out again.

For those out there who already hate jazz; this isn’t what you think it is. The Necks are their own genre.


First on Freq

All Apologies

On The Gradual Impossibility of Music Criticism...

It first started with this little off post about Demdike Stare... Not exactly a slagging but maybe a kind of shrugging. Now if you look at the (obviously unrepresentative) sample of commentators there's clearly a mini-consensus here which then got me thinking: how come no one else has said that before?

((Where are all the haters?))

Well, one reason is the diminishing circles of the internet, of course and the even more diminshing circles of the live circuit... take my recent trip to the Exotic Pylon gig ; I was outside smoking when Chris Bailiff aka Position Normal popped up and said hello. Now, I've said nice things about Position Normal in the past on this blog but it occurred to me as we were talking... what if i hadn't? What if I'd written some terrible, slaked, gnarly, bitchling piece about him and now had to chat amiably as if nothing had happened...

And that got me thinking...

I referred back to the comments of the Demdike post and right there, in the very first comment, an anonymous comment agreeing about what I was saying but clearly uncomfortable about saying it because, well:

my newfound status as a recording artist (who sometimes gets mentioned in the same breath as Demdyke, and who has met and enjoyed the company of one of their members)prevents me saying too much, but just to let you know I feel exactly the same way as you. i feel like i should like this stuff a lot more than i actually do.

You see what I mean? Which then got me thinking even more about how these endless routes and cycles and spirals are getting tighter and tighter, about how maybe along the way they're crushing the life out of criticism itself because this isn't the days of the fanzines, or even the early days of the blogs. In these days, gulp, you might actually meet the people you're writing about, even if you live in the backarse of the West Country, with all the associated smoke and mirrors that that brings.

And these people, these kindly souls you've denigrated, might be really nice people.

Anyone not scared about this must be lying, I think. Or caught in a terrible arch of blankness, or self-immolation, or...

When I started writing for Freq, I remember thinking a similar thing. I'm getting lots of freebies sent my way, lots of stuff I like, lost of stuff I don't. I wrote a lot of positive reviews but felt weird when I wrote something negative. This wasn't even my site, it was someone else's; I didn't want labels to stop sending stuff to them for fear of the bitchy Loki reviewer gnarling them... One CD (nameless, naturally) I didn't even write about because I couldn't think of anything nice (or even eloquently nasty) to say about it... I started to worry that this terrible plague of positivity was going to corrupt me too.

((God, if I don't write nice things then no one will ever send me free stuff, or get me into gigs for free, or...))

But I got over it. Thought nothing more of it until a few weeks ago when I started to make and slowly let seep some of my own music... Immediately, you wait for feedback of course because, though music is supremely personal and I really think that the bext possible music is the one track you've made that no one else likes, there's still that need to put it out there, to gain something else from it, even if it's just a slight nod or a wink or a raised eyebrow...

And I did get some feedback and it was all pretty good (some of it was completely on the money) but then, I would wouldn't I? I let it out on my blog and my twitter feed, to people who are already following so, of course 1) it's more likely that they'll like it - that's the 'group' it's for (even though the group it's really for are mostly lying on their back in a ditch outside East Coker, or making their living selling drugs and whittling in the woods at Caswell Bay, or are dead) and 2) even if they didn't, would they say? They might bump into me, somewhere. They will bump into me virtually... I mean, it would take a lot of balls to be that rude, and it's the kind of balls people wouldn't want to have.

Again, I let it go. Calmed the fuck down.

But then there was this little bit of repartee with Kek over at his blog which was interesting from another, related, angle: what happens if someone who's already a mate releases something that's a bit shit?

Now, obviously, Kek is a mate but even he did a slight gulp when I (stupidly, I realise now) pretended to be offended by what he'd said (he was bang on, as usual) and that really got me thinking: if I thought, even for a second, via the irony-free domain of Twitter (curse that lack of italics) or the facial expression-free blogs, that I'd offended someone when I didn't mean to, I'd be scurrying back to my text, trawling over it, trying to find out where I'd slipped up...

And that's not all. Kek goes on to say:

Doing things for the right reasons (whatever they might be) can often balance out some of the potentially bad shit - vanity / attention-seeking / self-aggrandising / etc will almost always end in tears, so if anyone's gonna get into public-platform creative activities , then they need to weed that shit out of themselves pronto. But - gone round the block and met myself going the other way) I've certainly never written anything on this blog that I didn't mean. Though, sometimes I've meant to write something and didn't.

Which I think absolutely nails it and makes a mockery out of the lack of real criticism out there (The Wire, about a year ago, was full of reviews that refused to say anything negative - it seems to have gotten a bit better now, people are coming out their shells again); yeah, artists need to put away the self-aggrandising shit before even thinking of releasing anything and then the critics would be free to say whatever they really think, without fear of offending...

I mentioned this to a mate who argued that we didn't need haters; that they were an unecessary blight on the internet, hiding in their anonymity (confession: Loki's not my real name), spewing bad Exorcist bile but I can't agree... without them the circle contracts, the feedback artists get just makes them get worse, or go down blind alleys or try to second guess the critics by changing direction when, really, the old direction was where their mind was at...

I'm going to keep releasing stuff as IX Tab (maybe as Twiggwitch too - though I'll come to that) and it's gonna keep following my themes. That old bitch of a word - masturbatory - that's what I'm aiming for. It's music for me. If you don't get it; I don't mind you saying. I'll engage. I won't huff. There's no need for this politeness..

We need the haters, or at least the dissenters; they'll help... even if they don't mean to.

With that in mind the latest release of __________________________ is total and utter shite.