ADAM D MILLS talks to Adrian Klumpes of post-jazz trio 3ofmillions about the gentle art of improvisation and the importance of immediacy. Photography by MATT SUTTON.

The old rock journalism cliche, “This is what you get when you stick x, y and z in a room together” is entirely apt in the case of 3ofmillions. Not two months after forming, the trio – Adrian Klumpes, Abel Cross and Finn Ryan – holed themselves up in the studio for a single day and just played, improvising their way through four hours of material from which they culled the eight tracks that make up their debut album Immediate.

Actually, the story goes a little further back than that. 3ofmillions began in 2006, when Klumpes and Cross started jamming together after the dissolution of his much-loved former outfit, Triosk. “I got a surge of energy to put a new trio together following Triosk's last gigs,” he explains. “So with new energy, Abel and I started including [drummer] Dave Goodman and called the project OJCS.”

After a mere two gigs, however, Goodman left to write his PhD. Enter 17-year-old Finn Ryan. Recommended to Klumpes and Cross by Clayton Thomas, who had played alongside him as part of sprawling, amorphous improv ensemble The Splinter Orchestra, Ryan proved to be the perfect fit for the nascent group. “At only 17 he gets a vast array of sounds out of the kit,” enthuses Klumpes. “He has a set of ears that are wise beyond his age.”

That was in February of this year. 3ofmillions then spent the next two months jamming/rehearsing a couple of times a week, always taking the same approach: no plans, no chords, just free improvisation. “We always jammed with virtually the same set-up – me on piano, Rhodes, loads of FX pedals and some microphones (in the piano too), Abel with his acoustic bass guitar, FX pedals and feedback and Finn on the drums,” says Klumpes. “I guess that was starting point enough. We knew the kinds of sounds we were all capable of making, and excited that anything could come up, with a range of styles – from free jazz to ambient to post rock-influenced beat-based things to textural playing.”

Crucial to the art of improvisation is malleability: the ability as a performer to adapt, both within each performance and as you move between different groups and ensembles. Improvisation requires an ability to find one’s own space within a collaborative framework, and to strike an oftentimes precarious balance between confidence and deference: nobody likes a show-off, but there’s no point in shyly shrinking into the background either. No single member is the star on Immediate. One moment you might be marvelling at Ryan’s dexterity, the next you might be absorbed in Klumpes’s cascading piano or lost in Cross’ fluid bass. What’s most striking, however, is the way all three of these elements – plus the electronics that run through most every track – are so perfectly tessellated.

“No chords were worked out, no electronics pre-determined. With the live set-up in place in the studio, nearly all of the electronics were done on the spot.”

Each member of 3ofmillions brings their own back-story to the group: Klumpes spent years in electronic jazz group Triosk and was a founding member of Pivot; Cross is best known for his role in furious grind group Pure Evil Trio, but has also played in a number of more jazz-oriented ensembles; and Ryan, as mentioned, has been involved in The Splinter Orchestra, through which almost every Australian improviser of note has passed through at one point or another.

Naturally, echoes of these pasts reverberate through Immediate – they’re a part of who these guys are as musicians. But, in spite of the group’s relative youth (just a wee 10 months), 3ofmillions have developed their own internal, synergistic language; one that allows plenty of room for both the gentle, delicate ‘Her Subtlety in My Subconscious’ and the more manic tones of ‘Conscription’.

“Apart from knowing each others set-ups and influences, we also got to know ways to go about melody and harmony in a way that we could stretch ideas across improvisatory turns or anticipate modulations. That's where the jazz education comes in handy,” explains Klumpes. “No chords were worked out, no electronics pre-determined. With the live set-up in place in the studio, nearly all of the electronics were done on the spot ... That's important to us because we want the electronic component of the overall sound to influence the direction the improvisation takes, as much as what we play on our instruments.”

The session yielded almost four hours worth of material, broken down into 14 discrete tracks of up to 35 minutes in length. Eight of these were chosen for Immediate (and two for the Golden Calf 3”, released earlier this year on hellosQuare Recordings). Post-production was kept to a minimum during the editing and mixing stage, so as not to rob the tracks of their spontaneity. “There are no overdubs as such, but occasionally we would use some sounds from that improvisation to make loops,” Klumpes explains. “For example, the bass line in ‘Improvised Explosive Device’ is just two chords from the very end looped and reversed to create a repetition that the melody/free playing can sit on top of. Alternatively, there were times when we left out parts, and then post-processed it, such as the chords of the ‘Inconvenient Thankyou’ introduction.”

During the editing process, the band focused on the music’s “turns” – those moments, whether drawn out or instantaneous, where the sound shifts gears. Thus, each of the songs on Immediate end somewhere different to where they began – sometimes this change is gradual (‘The Toll’), sometimes more drastic (‘Inconvenient Thankyou’).

“I felt that documenting the ‘turn’ was new to the post-jazz language,” says Klumpes. “Groups like The Necks rely on making the turns really gradual, so that over the course of a meditation you'll end up somewhere else. We wanted something more immediate than that – hence the album title. So editing the longer pieces down and centring the turn was something we aimed to do in post-production. It leaves the music sounding more unsettled and urgent. I think that is important for avant-music.

“If the sounds themselves are a little confronting, then its valid for the music to be moving. In contrast to this, we left our very first improvisation whole, and it comes at the end of the album, ‘Accepting What Is’. This is how we recorded it, and you'll hear roughly four or five turns. This actually then, being so natural, feels like a soothing release from the album's tension to that point.”
 Immediate, however, should not be taken as wholly representative of who 3ofmillions are as a band, or as musicians. It is a single moment in time, specifically one autumn day, in the ongoing history of a band with (hopefully) a long future ahead of them. What 3ofmillions sounded like on that day is not necessarily what they sound like today, or will sound like tomorrow.

“We're already sounding quite different live to that of the album,” says Klumpes. “We will always strive to communicate better musically.”

By its very nature, 3ofmillions is a group that must remain in flux. The effect of every gig, every rehearsal, every recording session is the furtherance of the group’s natural evolution. In 3ofmillions, there’s no looking back at the past, no second-guessing the future. There’s only now.

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