Chris Abrahams

★★★★ Appearance ROOM40. CD/DL Necks pianist goes it alone, stealthily.

An Australian pianist with a colourful CV that includes shifts with The Triffids, Laughing Clowns and Midnight Oil, Chris Abrahams has focused for much of the past three decades on The Necks, the jazz-adjacent but mostly uncategorisable improvising trio beloved by The Bad Seeds and Underworld among many. He’s also released a slew of solo albums, often pushing his keyboard work into ever more abstract territory. Appearance, though, is a straightforward, unadorned solo piano album, manna for those who love the Necks at their most genteel and ambient. Free of a rhythm section, Abrahams is more content than ever to let silence play as big a part as his notes, pushing past similarities with Keith Jarrett and into an even more rarefied space. Here, on these two gorgeous 20-minute études, he’s closer to Erik Satie, the great Ethiopian pianist Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guébrou and, if you want a Necks analogue, 2013’s minimalist masterpiece Open.