The Necks are an Australian improvisation trio—piano, bass, drums, nothing else—and these two hour-long pieces from 1997 prove that collective listening at the highest level needs no composition, no safety net, no second take. If you've ever wondered what three musicians sound like when they're genuinely speaking to each other, this is the answer. Essential.
—LINER NOTE—
An hour of music with no written notes, no overdubs, no edits, no net.
The Necks—Lloyd Swanton on bass, Tony Buck on drums, Chris Abrahams on piano—recorded two separate improvisation sessions in 1997 and released them as a paired work: Mosquito and See Through. No studio tricks. No splicing. Just three people in a room, listening harder than most of us listen to anything in our lives, and trusting that sound will emerge from attention.
This is not free jazz in the way you might think of it. There’s no shrieking or chaos or the kind of show-off virtuosity that sometimes hides behind the word “improvisation.” What The Necks do is quieter and more demanding: they build. A single idea—a rhythm, a chord shape, a texture—enters the music almost imperceptibly, and over minutes, sometimes over half an hour, it develops and transforms and becomes something you didn’t predict but absolutely recognize when it arrives.
Mosquito begins with Abrahams at the piano, the notes sparse enough that you could count them. Buck’s drums enter not as punctuation but as breath, as presence. Swanton’s bass settles underneath like a foundation being poured. For the first fifteen minutes nothing much seems to happen. Then you realize everything is happening. The pace has quickened without anyone announcing a tempo. A figure has emerged and is being examined from different angles. The music has weight now, intention. By the time it reaches what feels like a climax—a moment where all three voices are moving together—you’ve traveled so far from that opening sparseness that you can barely remember it.
See Through takes a different path. It’s more restless, more searching. The piano is busier here, almost agitated, and Buck responds by tightening his timekeeping. Swanton moves between being a rhythmic anchor and a melodic voice. There’s genuine tension in this one, moments where you can hear the musicians disagreeing or at least testing each other’s limits. It doesn’t resolve so much as it eventually exhales. By the end you’re not sure what you’ve heard, only that you’ve heard three people talking in a language that has no words.
The recording itself is clean and balanced—engineer credit goes to the players themselves, really, the skill of knowing how loud to play so that everything registers. The piano is never buried. The bass never disappears. The drums never sound like clicks on a grid. In a lesser recording, any one of these instruments could dominate. Here, they rotate the foreground, sometimes all three occupy it at once, and the balance shifts based on what the music needs.
What strikes hardest after hearing this is how much of what we call “composed” music is actually just improvisation with the editing done beforehand. We hear a symphony and we hear choice, but those choices were made at the desk, on paper, days or weeks before the performance. Here, every choice happens in real time. Every moment could fracture or transform. The musicians are not playing what they planned. They’re playing what they’re hearing in the moment, responding to Swanton’s note choice, to the sound of Buck’s brush on the snare, to the harmonic space that Abrahams is holding open or closing down.
You need to hear this with patience and without distraction. Not background music. Not something to have on while you’re doing something else. This demands the kind of attention that’s rarer now—the willingness to sit with sound as it unfolds, to trust that something worth hearing is being built even when nothing dramatic is happening. It’s a conversation between three masters of their instruments and their craft, and you’re being let into the room.
🎵 Key Takeaways
- Three musicians improvised two separate sessions with zero studio manipulation or editing.
- The Necks build from single ideas over half an hour into unrecognizable transformations.
- Mosquito opens sparse with piano, drums enter as breath not punctuation.
- See Through features restless piano, genuine tension, musicians testing each other's limits.
- No shrieking or show-off virtuosity, just three people listening harder than usual.
Is this jazz?
Not in the traditional sense. The Necks call themselves an improvisation group. There are no bebop heads, no blues changes, no swing feel. It's closer to classical minimalism married to free improvisation—highly structured listening without written composition. Think Feldman or Ondes Martenot, but with piano, bass, and drums.
Do I need to know anything about The Necks before listening?
No. This is a perfect entry point. The Necks have been playing together since 1989 and have released dozens of albums, so they know each other's language completely—that deep listening comes through immediately. You don't need history; you just need ears and patience.
Why are there two separate pieces on the same album instead of one two-hour piece?
These were recorded on different occasions and represent different moods and approaches. *Mosquito* is gradual and patient; *See Through* is more restless. Hearing them as contrasts deepens the listening experience—you hear how the same three musicians can take completely different paths.