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Phill Niblock: Connecting the Dots

Published: December 1, 2010

A conversation at Experimental
Intermedia
with Frank J. Oteri
September 30, 2010—2 p.m.

Transcribed by Julia Lu
Audio/video presentation and
photography by
Molly Sheridan and Alex Gardner

The music of Phill Niblock is so

completely different from other music
that it sounds like it is from another
planet. Yet to create this totally
unique approach to sound, Niblock
uses standard instruments—e.g. cello,
flute, trombone, electric guitar.
However, Niblock multi-tracks these instruments, originally with tape recorders and
currently with computers. The basic idea is for an instrumentalist to record a series of long,
held tones, all ever so slightly out of tune with each other, and then to play additional
long held tones along with those tracks at an extremely loud volume for about half an
hour, and sometimes longer. There are no melodies per se and it is devoid of harmony and
rhythm in the conventional sense. But multiple layers of pitches only slightly away from
each other is after all a kind of harmony, and the way the ear perceives the jarring clashes
of those pitches—we actually hear fluctuations in volume occurring with periodicity (what
acousticians, in fact, call "beats")—really is a kind of rhythm.

If this all sounds pretty heady, well, it is. And Niblock rolls off numbers of Hertz
frequencies—e.g. the number of cycles per second at which a waveform oscillates—with
the same kind of glee that other composers might reserve for harmonic progressions or
polyrhythms. (Watch the video!) Yet despite such seeming erudition, Niblock's approach
has little to do with theory; it's completely intuitive:

I completely don't use any sort of tuning system. So whatever tuning system
there is, is just made up.

Niblock never formally studied musical composition and did not even start composing until
he was 35. In fact, in college he was an economics major.

I was in pre-med for a year and a half, and then I was a sort of an undeclared
major for about a year, and then suddenly, I realized that I had to graduate
with something. Having an economics major meant I could get a B.A. 'cause I
had all the science credits and still take on business courses, and so I became
an economics major. But theoretically, I wasn't much of an economics major; I
wasn't much of a theorist at least.

Four decades later, he's more fired up than many composers one-third his age, and his
mind-bending sonic experiences attract devotees of experimental music and even the indie
rock and laptop crowds. In fact, CDs of Niblock's music are now released by the British
label Touch, which issues recordings by Fennesz and Brandon LaBelle. He's also writing
lots of music for orchestra, a performance paradigm that might initially seem completely at
odds with his compositional aesthetics, but he's found a champion in conductor Petr Kotik,
and a second CD of his orchestra music is coming out on Mode Records later this month.

Most of Niblock's projects, however, are totally DIY. It’s a self-sufficient business approach
that goes back to his early years as an experimental film maker, before he composed a
note of music, and it has also guided his half-century of work as a concert and visual art

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