It’s the combo of the hour

At first blush, it seems like a gimmick: an album that consists of a single 60-minute song. But for the Australian jazz trio the Necks, an hourlong song is merely the best means of exploring the nuances of a sound or rhythmic pattern, allowing themes to emerge and unfold slowly without the pressure of time. That’s why the group hasn’t released just one 60-minute, single-song record but 12, the latest being separate CDs in a single package: “See Through” and “Mosquito.”

“Our taste for music operates with a lot less information than what you hear in much modern jazz these days,” said Lloyd Swanton, who plays bass in the group with drummer Tony Buck and pianist Chris Abrahams. “A lot of modern jazz tunes contain enough material for 12 of our tunes in the first 32 bars, so we wanted to set up an ensemble that used material far more economically.”

Unhurried and nonlinear, the Necks’ music is so sedate it can come across like the soundtrack to a painting. Their songs are calming, meditative -- jazz in only the most rudimentary sense.

The Necks may employ the core instruments of jazz, but they do not rely on the traditional foreground/background, soloist/rhythm section approach. They prefer the subordination of the individual to an overall aesthetic, “the cheerful collisions with other styles over any attempt to maintain the purity of classical status,” Swanton said.

With “Mosquito,” the more accessible of the new works, that musical collision is with African percussion, as Buck drapes rattles over a snare -- a sound that is mirrored with twinklings of upper-register piano and a minimalist bass line.

On “See Through,” the collision is with silence, a concept introduced in short, seconds-long bursts on the group’s 2001 album, “Aether,” but more fully explored on its latest release. Heady yet engaging, “See Through’s” rain-like texture is riddled with drawn-out stretches of absolute nothingness, the longest lasting 4 1/2 minutes.

“A huge, gaping chasm of silence in the middle of a very densely textured piece of music can pull the listener up short and really refresh his/her appreciation of sound,” said Swanton. “Like they say, you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone. It’s a very basic lesson in the fundamental properties of sound and silence, which we all need reminding of now more than ever, with our worlds so crammed with sound, music and noise to the point that even the really significant stuff often becomes static.”

High concept? Yes. And so is the band’s reason for coming together. Jazz musicians who had played together in various forms in the early ‘80s, the three joined forces as the Necks in 1986, uniting over the idea of music as a process rather than a product.

At the time, “it was purely an experimental band behind closed doors,” said Swanton. “We were quite adamant that we weren’t going to play in public.”

But the group was so pleased with the results of its experiment that the members changed their minds, playing their first public show a year later and, in 1995, releasing their first record, the languid and rhythmically understated “Sex.”

Live, the Necks employ the same techniques but a slightly different strategy than they do on record. In the studio, the group begins each project with a fully formed idea of the sounds and ideas it would like to explore. In performance, anything goes.

After a five-minute stretch of silence, during which each band member contemplates ideas, one musician will eventually start. Without knowing what the leader has in mind -- the tempo, time signature or key -- the rest of the group follows.

“A lot of places where we play, after about five or 10 minutes, you can detect a little bit of restlessness in the audience where people seem to be saying, ‘This is a joke, right?’ ” Swanton said. “And then suddenly the penny drops and people become very quiet, and they don’t notice an hour has passed.”

The Necks have performed only two shows in the U.S., both of them in New York City in 2001. At present, they are touring Australia, the first of two in their home country this year. In May, they’ll move on to Europe. Their albums are released worldwide on their own Fish of Milk label.

The Necks have no immediate plans to return to the U.S., even though their take on jazz has earned them a small but loyal following here, mostly among pop and rock fans who have heard snippets of their hourlong songs on public radio or been hipped to the group via word of mouth.

“The last thing I want to do is play music described as classical because that’s when the museums get involved,” Stanton said. “A lot of people try to achieve classical status with jazz, and I think that’s the kiss of death.”

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On the Web

To hear samples from the Necks’ “See Through” and “Mosquito,” visit calendarlive.com/necks.