Phil Niblock: c/d, s/d

anyone see him live?

Excellent live, very loud and enveloping. When I saw him in Chicago, they also played a number of his films. One of which was very excellent early 1960s Sun Ra footage!

the piece 'five more string quartets' has always been a favorite too

any word on the new double set on Touch yet?

were the touch pieces made from pro-tools (I have to read those sleeve notes when i get home)?

don't mean to sound harsh, after years of working with analog, the clarity of digital is an interesting thing to explore. very curious to hear the new album.

Also, you should switch to decaf.

and he is a damned nice guy. he'd probably do an interview if he wasnt tightly scheduled...

(but yeah, try to get the interview)

We'll soon be announcing the pre-orders for Phill Niblock's Music For Cello. These three pieces were composed and recorded in the 70's / 80's and have waited a very long time to get into your ears. pic.twitter.com/fhimOiWPBM

— Important Records (@imprec) December 7, 2018

lol

live streaming now

As the longest night of the year unfolds and the journey of our planet nears the point when Winter commences in the Northern Hemisphere, Phill Niblock stages his annual Winter Solstice concert for the 13th consecutive year at Roulette, with a special twist in honor of his 90th year on Earth: 24 hours of music and film. Running from 12pm to midnight on two consecutive days, this live performance will consist of 12 sublime hours of music and mixed media film and video each day, with special guest performers interspersed throughout.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3mywn0XdKtA

Posted on the obituary thread as well, but according to David Grubbs, Niblock has passed.

RIP

Sadly only saw him live once but it was quite nice

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3anZ2MvINJQ

RIP. An amazing and wonderful influence on experimental music in NYC for decades. Real hero shit.

Goddammit, I always wanted to make it to that winter event he puts on but I just couldn’t ever make it work out — was afraid I’d get this news before I ever did. Niblock blew my mind early on when I was getting into Reich, Riley, Oliveros, etc…still one of my favorites from that general scene.

RIP, i don't know his work well but remember being impressed by young person's guide to phill niblock as pure drones

RIP. The one time I saw him perform, he asked the organisers to advise the audience beforehand NOT not to wear any hearing protection. He would have been in his 80s at the time, so I admired his contrary resistance to the 'If it's too loud you're too old" school of thought.

:-(

maybe he's why i have tinnitus

i interviewed him in the mid 90s, heard his music in his own NYC loft-space i guess in chinatown -- it was one huge big room (huge!) and he'd staged avant-garde festivals there since the 60s, he'd built i kind of small house in the corner and lived in that. he had these amazing speakers that were somehow the shape of space invaders machines, and you walked around in among them and heard the layers of the drone change around you, like the note was the size of the room and you were the size of an atom. when we went going to eat afterwards he pointed and said "there's paik" and it was nam june paik out getting groceries or whatever

he was a nice guy, full of funny gossip about like lamonte young and whoever. RIP phill

Big RIP to the guy responsible for one of my most memorable first listens to anything.

I found a used CD of Music by Phill Niblock (1993) at a record store around 2010. I was only vaguely aware of him at the time and hadn't heard any of his music, but the CD was cheap and looked interesting. So I buy it, get in my car and pop it into the CD player. "Five More String Quartets" (25 minutes). OK! I'm hit with a massive, dissonant wall of strings and am instantly compelled to crank the volume WAY up. It takes me a minute, but I intuit from the title and what I'm hearing that it's five string quartets all playing at the same time (it's actually one string quartet, and each player overdubbed their parts five times, playing different assigned pitches at each "pass"). Gradual microtonal changes in pitch are happening. I'm disoriented and feel like I'm flying through space, but somehow I can still drive. Everyone is playing different pitches at first, gradually getting closer together over the course of the piece, and by minute 24 everyone is playing the same note, which is an incredibly satisfying effect, one of the finest examples of "music as a gradual process" I know. I only had a 10 minute drive home from the record store, so I slowly cruised the neighborhood until the full 25 minutes played out. In short, a life-changing musical experience.

So check out "Five More String Quartets" if you haven't heard it, but play it LOUD if you do. Also, the CD has great liner notes with commentary from Niblock and various collaborators, as well as the score for "Five More String Quartets" which is rendered as a series of tables denoting the pitches each player is to play during each minute of the piece.

*immediately looks for “Five More String Quartets”*

i'm going to need to watch 'movement of people working'

his films are lovely, such as i've seen of them

i often wondered if films and music shared aesthetic or construction principles (and may well have asked him about this) but i don't think they do really

(possibly because that's what he told me? it's the kind of thing i would ask. i shd dig out the tapes of the interview and see… )

the wire on fb shared a dan warburton interview from 2006 where he touches on it (there's also a quote from yourself i believe at the end.). the films sound like they're very much up my alley. dvds seem to be oop though. i might have to look on slsk.

There was a CD/DVD edition of World of Echo that included semi-abstract performance footage of Arthur Russell that was filmed by Niblock.