Music by Phill Niblock
Hurdy Hurry (1999, 15 min) Jim O'Rourke, hurdy gurdy samples
Harm, for cello (22 min, 2003) Arne Deforce, cello, recorded samples
Lucid Sea (20 min, 2003) Lucia Mense, recorders, recorded samples
Sethwork (2003, 21:48) Seth Josel, acoustic guitars played with E-bow, recorded samples
Images by Phill Niblock
The "Movement of People Working" series, Film/Video - Peru, Mexico, Hong Kong, Hungary, China, Japan
Bio:
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.
Excerpts from reviews:
"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
Phill Niblock is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60's he has been making music and intermedia performances at: The Museum of Modern Art; The Wadsworth Atheneum; the Kitchen; the Paris Autumn Festival; Palais des Beaux Arts, Brussels; Institute of Contemporary Art, London; Akademie der Kunste, Berlin; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard; World Music Institute at Merkin Hall; and on radio in the U.S., West Germany, France, Holland, Switzerland, Austria and Belgium. He has had grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the New York State Council on the Arts, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Creative Artists Public Service Program, the City University of New York Research Foundation and the Foundation for the Contemporary Performance Arts. He is Director of the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York. He has been director since 1985; an artist/member since 1968. He is the producer of Music and Intermedia presentations at EIF since 1973 (about 1000 performances).
Recently, an Experimental Intermedia organization was formed in Gent, Belgium, to support the artist-in-residence house and installations there.
resonance constantly
At the end of Phill's first track when the audience was let back into silence, Reuben Lorch-Miller's fluorescent hum emerged loud and present. I smiled at the conversation between Reuben's background/foreground humming sounds and Phill's sounds, which even in their loudness can hide many secrets, and which can vanish even when fully enveloping you, the way water becomes just the "out there" when you are floating in it.
Close your eyes, turn your head, move around. When listening to Phill's music you are not sure if the plusing and overtones are in your ear, some faulty resonance in the fluid carrying sonic information to the little hair sensors there, or from some part of the roof or walls sent into a sympathetic vibration.
I thought of James Turrell's light spaces where the light goes right up to your retina and you are not sure if what you are seeing is actually there or is the by-product of some misfire in your visual circuitry. Phill's sounds envelop your body. You are bathed in a constancy of infinitely varying eddies and currents. You aren't quite sure how the sound is making contact with your body. In your bones, in your head, it is very physical.
The images resonate on a very different plane for me. Manual labor is physical, but Phill's images are distant, far away in time and space, from another world really. These images are of someone else's everyday actions, someone else's constancy.
On leaving Almost Something, as when you arrive, Oliva-jane Ransley is still waving. The video which I have seen multiple times now, made me think of how strange it is that our culture uses the same gesture for something as fundamentally different as a hello and a good-by. Our constancy, our everyday, surely seems very strange and different to some one far far away.
FG