Phill Niblock makes thick, loud drones of music, filled with microtones of instrumental timbres which generate many other tones in the performance space. Simultaneously, he presents films/videos which look at the movement of people working, or computer driven black and white abstract images floating through time. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60's he has been making music and intermedia performances which have been shown at numerous venues around the world among which: The Museum of Modern Art; the Kitchen; the Paris Autumn Festival; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Akademie der Kunste, Berlin; ZKM, Karlsruhe; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard; World Music Institute at Merkin Hall NYC. Since 1985, he has been the director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York where he has been an artist/member since 1968. He is the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EI since 1973 (about 1000 performances) and the curator of EI's XI Records label.
Phill Niblock's music is available on the XI, Moikai and Touch labels. A DVD of films and music is available on the Extreme label.
"Those who attended Philip Glass's all day rehearsals back in the early 1970s were both flattened and exhilarated by the volume his ensemble generated as they pumped out relentless ostinati from electric organs, synthesizers and winds. Though Phil moved on to concert hall respectability long ago, there's always been a strain of minimalist composer who likes it LOUD - think Glenn Branca and Rhys Chatham with their guitar orchestras or Tony Conrad's wall of amped up violin scrape; maximalist minimalists perhaps.
Phill Niblock is one such composer, though the term seems at odds with the sculptural immensity of the sound he's been creating since the early 70s. His music is mostly created on tape - long tones made by acoustic instruments are spliced together to remove attack and decay, leaving only pure notes. Trombones, saxophones and the like are stripped of their characters almost, to become mere tone generators. His interest is in the kind of beat frequencies, harmonics and overtones made by combining tones that differ from each other by only a few hertz, sketching out his ideas using sine waves and oscilloscopes.
If this all sounds rather dry, then that's because it probably is. But from such prosaic beginnings emerges a music of bewildering intensity. This is ambient music in the truest sense; played loud through a decent set of speakers (don't use your kitchen CD player with all the knobs missing), Niblock's held tones are less music than a sonic environment. As you move around the room, different harmonics emerge, tiny clusters of melody appear and disappear. What you hear depends on so many variables that the same piece yields different results every time, making any detailed analysis superfluous, not to say futile (don't listen under headphones; it'll drive you insane).
Niblock's influences are more from the world of visual art than music; the darkly sensuous tones of Mark Rothko or the clean lines of Donald Judd's sculpture. In his hands, music ceases to become time based; it just is. Whether you decide that this is just psychoacoustics masquerading as art or a listening experience that has few rivals in its power is up to you. If that sounds like a reviewer's cop out then that's because it probably is; Niblock's music defies description. Give it a go, and TURN IT UP..."
Peter Marsh, BBC
"Phill Niblock's music and films are concerned with detail and simplicity ... dense, imposing sound mass ... Sum and difference tones pile up until they sound like an orchestra of voices ... one listens first to one level of detail, then to another, only gradually learning to hear everything at once."
Robert Palmer, New York Times
"[Music] consisting of sustained, closely juxtaposed notes knitted together in slowly but sometimes suddenly shifting texture ... tense, tight beats, lazily cyclic curves and floating colorational shifts induced by clashing overtone patterns."
John Rockwell, New York Times
"Waves of sound roll over the audience ... the piece began to swell in emotional intensity, but it was not overtly dramatic; the intensity of this piece was in its didactic nature ... As if putting your ear to a seashell, you listen and hear the roar of the familiar."
Charles McCurdy, Philadelphia Inquirer
"One can say that he works with loud sustained tones, that he piles them together in multi-track versions, that the tones are produced originally on conventional wind and stringed instruments, that they are purposely out of tune, and that the resulting frequencies beat wildly against one another ... rhythmically active these sustained pieces are, due to the many beats or pulsations which come about as the 'out-of-tune' notes jar against one another."
Tom Johnson, Village Voice
"The music has a steady kinetic push that makes you feel like you're riding on some slow vehicle taking you directly into the details of the picture."
Wendy Perron, New York Native
Live bookings: Phill Niblock is handled by Danilo Pellegrinelli
shakti (music)
management & booking
CH-6994 aranno
(Switzerland)
office phone: +4191/600 30 70
mobile phone: +4179/699 64 83
info @ shaktimusic.ch
