Phill Niblock is a happy person. There are many reasons for this.
For several decades he has created and published audio/visual material he is proud of; hetours 12 to 15 countries a year, presenting installations of his work; he presides over arts
panels, and with what time remains he divides between his homes in Brooklyn, New Yorkand Gent, Belgium.
In his 70s - an age of decline for most - Niblock is at his creative peak, composing for labels
including Touch and his own XI recordings. Though he may not have achieved outstanding
commercial success, he has made some of the most noteworthy if not beautiful 20th and21st century drone works.
Phill Niblock began making music since the late '60s, when he was 35, originally tosoundtrack performance art pieces he organized. Since he could not find music he wanted
at the time, he simply made his own. He has continued to do so ever since, in relative
obscurity, until lately: the world is starting to catch on. It is difficult to get Phill Niblock todiscuss his music outside his dry, matter-of-fact manner. His discourse on composition is as
minimal as his music.
Since the '60s, Niblock has witnessed many technological advances in the recording process.
Among the more significant changes was the switch from analogue tapes to digital recording
via computers. This transition for Niblock was not a big deal, as he is willing to embracetechnological change where there is demonstrable improvement. In particular, theimprovement was embodied in Pro Tools, a software program that he is enamored with.
Phill Niblock: "I used to work with multi-track tape recorders and record directly onto tape,and build the pieces by multi-tracking that material onto multi-track tape. Most of thosepieces were eight channel pieces. It's very analogous. Pro Tools is simply a multi-track taperecorder; the same way with tape as with computer.
"Now it is possible to do 32 tracks, so we have an incredible number to work with. You
simply get more tracks and the sound quality is extraordinarily good. (The process) didn'tchange much except one thing; instead of prescribing the exact pitches and recording themwith the musicians I simply record the tunes and I make the microtonal intervals bymanufacturing new sound samples which are a different pitch by using a pitch shifter.
So that's the difference. But I'm also recording directly to disk through my computer toa hard disk."
Niblock creates his layers through specific instrumental solos and combinations, such as
baritone saxophone; bass clarinet and basset horn and Eb clarinet; piano; cello and bassoon;
cello and bassoon and contrabassoon and contrabass; hurdy gurdy, and even the humanvoice.
The sounds are dissolved in layering so as to render the source instruments unrecognizable;
this results in new tone combinations. Thus each composition is a potent solution, converted
into textures that brush against the ears like so many yards of exotic fabric. The textures arereminiscent of the hum of electrical wiring on a summer day, the buzzing din of honey beesor a group of monks engrossed in their Om. A cursory listen reveals an indecipherable din;prolonged listens reward with a trove of overtones and chord changes. These revelations
occur with the gradualness of dusk, ever so subtly. Considering the intensity and durationof these pieces, it is surprising to learn that Niblock produces his music fairly quickly.

"Usually I work very fast, particularly in Pro Tools. Pro Tools is really great, once you getgoing it's really fast. Instead of making a score laboriously dubbing from one recording toanother onto multi-track the score for Pro Tools is actually as you make the piece, after thefact rather than before. So that's really great and can work anywhere I set my computer.
So I can make a piece easily again for if I have a fairly decent set of monitor speakers. Forinstance the Hurdy Gurdy piece, I made that in a day and a half, including listening to thesamples and deciding what to do. I had a concert, and it was to be played, and I had twodays to do it."
In addition to the advance from analogue to digital, Niblock has witnessed the widespread
digitization of cultural artifacts wherein recording platforms for music can now be
downloaded via peer-to-peer internet file sharing (not to mention rampant home CD-R
duplication, which despite spreading music rapidly, have caused record labels to sufferconsiderable revenue loss). File-sharing and piracy has affected Niblock's music in aninteresting way.
"I visited some guy in Poland at a party and he had this incredible wall full of five hundred
experimental music CDs, including three or four of mine, and they were all burned.
Somebody in town would buy a CD, and everybody would burn a copy of it. A fantasticarray...I didn't see any published CDs on his shelf - it would be nice if he bought the CDs
just because the quality would be better - but on the other hand, he's got the music andhe's listening to it so that's an amazing idea, that that stuff is out there. The idea is you want
the music to be out and around. If it's out and around it's better than no one ever hearing it.
So you would sell fewer CDs, but you wouldn't sell all those CDs to the guy anyway, because
he wouldn't buy those CDs anyway, because he wouldn't spend that kind of money.
"CD sales are probably a little less affected in this area of experimental music than they are
anywhere else. You're only selling a couple of thousand CDs in the lifetime of the CD. You
still sort of sell 2000 CDs, but [at least] the music is out there. Everything that is out there isissued from a dozen different places as MP3 files. If you want to hear my music you can justgo sit at your computer and download the stuff from someone.
"What the net has made possible is that many more people, in having CDs out, many more
people know of me and of my music than...it wasn't at all possible before 1995. Really it's
astounding, in ten years, how much the stuff is out. I would see a few people through LPs
in the '80s but they were relatively few people, so it makes a huge difference in getting gigs.
I'm not a particularly popular composer but people know of the music. That's because CDs
are out and that's because this whole internet technology of publicity."
Niblock has had the distinction of having worked with the foremost musicians of his time,
both well known and obscure. Among the better known are Jim O'Rourke, Thurston Moore
and Lee Renaldo of Sonic Youth. The fact that these musicians are popular could not be ofless interest to him, as Niblock avoids pop music. When given a choice, he prefers to listen
to Jazz, which to him was about avoiding mainstream music. The fame of musicians he works
with is strictly incidental.
"Jazz is something I like to listen to. Early Jazz - I like Ellington for instance. I photographed
the band for about three years in the early '60s. It was a lot of fun; I was listening to musicthat I liked as well. There was constant talk about doing something with those photographs.
There are many people, both from the swing era and later, like Dolphy, Mingus does some

really fantastic writings, and Monk. There's a fairly big range of stuff I listen to."Though not jazz or rock, one musician he worked with has received posthumous fame,the late Arthur Russell. In fact, Russell's long lost gem, World of Echo was re-released theyear of this writing, as a CD-DVD package on Audika. The DVD portion features intimate
video footage of Russell filmed by Niblock himself, who recorded a mere five feet awayas per Russell's request.
"I knew him for quite a few years. He was very quiet and a sweet guy, quite shy. He was themusic director of the Kitchen [in New York City] for several years. A lot of people knew him
because of that. I knew very little of the whole pop music scene that he was part of. So it
was kind of surprising because I wasn't interested in that scene at all.
"He had done a concert here. I liked the weirdness of what he was doing in the concert, andwe decided to this video shoot [in Niblock's studio]. I think he did two or three altogether
over the years before he died. After the concert, I proposed to him that we do thiscollaboration where I would shoot video and we would set up about the same set up as theconcert and so we did. He had designed this very inexpensive but weird lighting system touse, so what you see in the background is this lighting system. Some [lights] were coloredand some were aimed at a length of one meter wide mylar, and the guy who was runningthe lights using a simple dimmer ward, changed the intensity of the light and turning off andon the different colors. He also twitched a string tied to the mylar so it shook. That's what
was causing the patterns on the wall. We did two shots on two different occasions, and thefirst one didn't work so well, and that's actually what's on the DVD after the film itself, which
I didn't like nearly as much.
"The music from World of Echo came mostly from that session. I liked that music. We madeseparate recording on PCM digital in the old days when you were recording digital music onvideo tape. Arthur had track stereo tapes from the PCM digital and he made the record(World of Echo) out of that material. This thing was just issued and it was shot in 1985 - it's
already twenty years old."
Niblock is alert, attentive and keen for someone his age; his demeanor is suggestive of
someone decades younger. This could be attributable to his philosophy, which he claims is
nothing organized, but sums up in one tidy word, "work." More music and DVD releases areslated for release, as well as more collaborations and tours. In fact, when he spoke for thisinterview, he was in the midst of a world tour, as he enjoys traveling. Wider acclaim for thiscomposer and no doubt finer works are yet to come, thanks to his longevity and willingness
to embrace change.
Ibrahim Khider | Jun. 19, 2005