It’s hard to know. The No-Neck Blues Band—NNCK, like a postal abbreviation—are surely New York’s longest-continuous-run improv jam hippie circle, but their only constant, as a unit, is flux. Hang around the New York avant-garde musician scene (what of it there is) long enough, and you’ll come across any number of people who claim to have jammed with NNCK, been on an album, knows “one of the guys in NNCK,” or crashed on a Hint House couch. But besides whoever might be in whatever there is that resembles their inner circle—current members, former members, scene-hogs, Forced Exposure and Volcanic Tongue—not too many people really know who these folks are (save a few ex-members on to other things, like Ted Rall from Excepter and Davenport’s Clay Ruby). It’s not hard to imagine that Godspeed You! Black Emperor! learned everything they need to know about shadowy, anti-fame mystery from NNCK—I even imagine that GYBE’s Hotel2Tango resembles NNCK’s Hint House, their Harlem loft-cum-rehearsal space-cum-concert venue-cum-residence, right down to the pervasive beer-and-bongwater smell. But Godspeed get past the populist border by virtue of bombast and a clear agenda, and NNCK have remained a fiercely under-known and defiantly weird prospect.

All this despite a decade-plus-long torrent of releases. This being improv, it’s always a roll of the dice with regards to quality—good chance you could just have ten minutes of aimless sludge on your hands—but, especially these days, you’ve got a better chance of catching the aimless shambles as it coalesces into some slow, grand sway or menacing shimmy. Early on, they made a dark howl in the vein of the earliest days of musique concrete, recorded at the lo-est of lo-fi; the shriek that begat the Skaters. But as time wore on, a more hardened and singular aesthetic developed, chiseled out of nodding waltz-time rhythms augmented with hand drums and shakers, Rhodes organs right out of the headiest days of psychedelic rock, and a melodic sense with a healthy understanding of erosion and entropy. Make no mistake, this can often still be a shambles, but at their best they create breezy and even majestic mini-epics to de- and re-evolution. Their keen sense of repetition and recreation (no matter the line-up) has a certain mystifying quality, like a séance, which makes their appropriation of occult imagery (Qvaris, the title of their most recent album, is taken from Aleister Crowley) almost a no-brainer; that they often move beyond that kind of stifling myth-making is a testament to the very particular noise they make, a noise that’s as palatable in a darkened wood as it is in a rock clubas it is on a jazz-head’s bookshelf, and that’s an accomplishment no matter who you are.

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