OPEN will be the Necks' 17th album, and the 11th released by ReR. Here the band returns to the territory for which it is best known: a single, glacially mutating, long-form piece that runs for a little over an hour. The previous record, "Mindset", said bassist Lloyd Swanton, "reached some pretty intense levels at times, and though we never overtly discussed it, I think that on Open, by contrast, all three of us were taken by the idea of working in a field of significant stillness. At least, after a couple of days' recording, it became clear that the music was leading us in this direction." Feeding into the ground plan are floating arco harmonics, minimalist funk, iterative piano figures, subliminal and liminal pulses, twittering electronics and at one point an arco bass choir. It is unequivocally a studio work, with layer laid on layer, while still, miraculously, remaining architecturally spare.