Necks' albums contain lengthy, trancey jams anchored to simple melodic lines and propelled by swinging, funky grooves. The insistent repetition of harmonic elements recalls minimalism while the fluid and atmospheric instrumental interplay recalls jazz-rock.

The trio first proved its worth on the 56-minute composition that fills the album Sex (Fish Of Milk, 1989 - Private Music, 1995). The subdued rhythm and slightly syncopated tempo create a delicate texture for the intermittent patterns of neoclassical piano and sensual trumpet wails. The cascading piano notes coalesce in a hypnotic stream of casual tones. But then the music begins to warp, and dissonances and harsh tones appear. The way Abrahams caresses the piano is unique, both abstract, exotic and romantic.

Next (june 1990 - Fish Of Milk, 1990) contains six pieces that try different avenues.

Aquatic (Fish Of Milk, 1994 - Carpet Bomb, 1999) featured Stevie Wishart on hurdy-gurdy and introduced an ethnic flavor. If Next Had Tried to differentiate their art in six different directions, Aquatic serves the same purpose but in a continuum rather than a set of discrete pieces.

Necks went back to the original format to achieve their classical sound. The double-CD Silent Night (september 1995 - Fish Of Milk, 1996) contained just two meditations, the sample-driven Black and especially the slow, fragile, colloquial interplay of White.

Piano Bass Drums (Fish Of Milk, 1998) was recorded live.

The Boys (Fish Of Milk, 1998 - ReR, 2004) is a film soundtrack. It suffers from being a fragmented work, the opposite of their favorite format.

Hanging Gardens (Fish Of Milk, 1999 - ReR, 2001) is a 60-minute composition that summarizes their minimalistic technique. Frantic hi-hat work and ominous bass lines surround and underpin haunting keyboard noises. The mood is cryptic if not gothic. The music gets more frantic, stormier, funkier and more psychedelic. Ten minutes into the piece, the piano, by repeating a pattern of five notes, creates an atmosphere of suspense, akin to Peter Green's End of the Game. The playing begins to reveal its jazz roots and, twenty minutes into the piece, the five-note pattern resurfaces at a higher octave and the jamming fires up. When it dies out, a phase of quiet abstract counterpoint takes over. Forty minutes into the piece, the music picks up energy again, unleashing a rocking, Nice/Colosseum-style organ-driven tumult, eventually leading to the five-note piano pattern again, this time in a more claustrophobic setting.

The Neck's ambient minimalist jazz-rock reaches its zenith on Aether (Fish Of Milk, 2001 - ReR, 2002), where a simple chord is repeated like a mantra to elicit consonant vibrations from the other instruments, like evoking one by one all the subtle hues of one fundamental color. Eventually nirvana appears, in the form of a cosmic drone that leads the music into an ecstatic crescendo of counterpoint. It is probably the most ethereal of their works.

Athenaeum (Fish of Milk, 2003) is a 4-CD live set.

Photosynthetic (Long Arms, 2003) was recorded live in Moscow in 2002.

By now, the trio (spread around the world) played together only a couple of times a year. Drive By (ReR, 2003), yet another one hour-long slowly-unfolding chamber piece that relies on both minimalist repetition and jazz improvisation for its dreamy ambience and fluent dynamics. If Hanging Gardens was lively and virulent, and Aether was pure understated bliss, Drive By can be said to be the perfect encounter of Miles Davis, Terry Riley and Brian Eno. With a stronger sense of the groove than its predecessor (and a touch of African polyrhythm), the amalgam of Tony Buck's tribal drums, Lloyd Swanton's repetitive bass lines and Chris Abrahams' wavering piano meditations is a classic of casual conversation. It almost sounds like the counterpart to Soft Machine's sixth album, which, starting from similar premises, accomplished much more austere and geometric structures. The keyboards are absolute protagonists, yielding the totality of the piece's diversity, with occasional peaks of pathos. As usual, the meaning is as cryptic as a summer breeze. Halfway into the track (at 27 minutes), children are heard playing in the background, and the delicate timbres of the piano seem to engage in some kind of counterpoint (while a distorted organ whines on top of it); and at 48 minutes the music is invaded by a loud buzzing sound, as of thousands of bees, and other animal-sounding noises, while the tempo gets funkier, until the music dissolves and only chirping birds are left.
The only drawback compared with its predecessor is that somehow the textures do not achieve the same sense of otherworldiness. The process is, in a sense, too obvious for the spectator to be hypnotized by the clockwork.

The double-CD Mosquito/ See Through (ReR, 2005) contains two hypnotic streams of consciousness. Mosquito opens with disjointed percussion sounds. A stubborn piano note is joined for a minute by light drumming (for the first time about 14 minutes into the piece, then a few more times). That is all the excitement for the first half. In the second part the drums are a bit more prominent, but the piano note is still hypnotically (although not mechanically) repeated and the center of action remains with the percussion.
See Through, one of their formal peaks, opens with smooth, half-whispered, jazzy piano phrases dropping on a fibrillating noise of cymbals. For seven minutes, it sounds like a jam between Pharoah Sanders and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. This is a slow dance between a sexy piano and ominous cymbals. The piano phrases relent as soon as they accelerate, relax as soon as they hit harder. Chris Abrahams is a master of breaking the suspense before it acquires the slightest dramatic overtone. His keys float weightless in the air, rarely encountering an obstacle or a detour. His fugues are colorful as much as his silences are cryptic. This piece is his personal showcase. After about 50 minutes of cascading tones and sudden pauses, the piano is finally engaged by the drums (not just the cymbals) and the last ten minutes are a crescendo of frantic drumming.

Chemist (ReR, 2006) was unusual for the Necks because it contained three mid-length tracks instead of the usual hour-long monolith. Steady drumming, echoing bass chords, tiny dissonances, hypnotic and jazzy keyboard runs build up the eerie, raga-like atmosphere of Fatal, reminiscent of early Pink Floyd and of Miles Davis' jazz-rock via his underrated rock disciple Peter Green. The progression of the playing mirrors the increasingly feverish reaction to an ecstatic vision, driven by intensely fibrillating piano a` la Terry Riley and harsher distortions. A puntillistic exercise for deep listeners, Buoyant weaves a fragile tapestry of disjointed notes, held together by the thinnest of musical pretexts. Abillera disentangles itself from a facsimile of the cryptic pulsing cacophony of Riley's In C to soar in an intricate mandala-like pattern of frantic piano notes.

The live album Townsville (february 2007 - ReR, 2007) is representative of their method. A bass-line is used to set the tone for the improvisation. The other instruments build sounds around it, notably the piano with cascading meditations that shift from a new-age mood to a forceful free-jazz attack. All the way the cymbals sound more like light rain than rhythm. While time brings more structure and emphasis to it, there is no question that their music remains in a permanent state of suspension.

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