"Sex" by the Necks

This long-running Aussie band has built up a word-of-mouth cult following due to their enigmatic, hard to reduce, atmospheric, hypnotic, idiosyncratic style. The album Sex is one looooong track that never changes mood or vibe, but there is an unsettling tension that slowly surfaces. The Necks are playing “jazz” in some broad sense, but at least on this record seem to have none of the jazzer preoccupation with individual expression, mastery of technique, or compositional ambition. Instead, the Necks focus on texture, ambience, delicate introduction of piano structures framed by rests, and an ego-free rhythmic repetition: what you might call “addition by subtraction”.

This is not music for attention-deficit disorder types, as the sparse evolution of the piece proceeds at a glacial pace. But Sex offers an encompassing, emotionally subtle, fully realized exploration into a single dimension of haunting, quiet intensity.