PHILL NIBLOCK

Boston / Tenor / Index

LP (Black Vinyl)
CD

Boomkat Product Review:

This is a bit special; a first ever showcase of some of the earliest known works by drone/multidisciplinary titan Phill Niblock, recorded between 1969-72 in NYC and Boston and previously unreleased, featuring a stunning hour of engrossing material that’s studded with surprises. RIYL La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, Tony Conrad, Catherine Christer Hennix, Morton Feldman, Stephen O’Malley.

R.I.P.

An American photographer and filmmaker turned autodidactic composer, Phill Niblock’s fascinating origin story bears repeating here. After his studies in Economics in 1956, Niblock moved to NYC to document its radical jazz musicians and dancers. In the years that followed, a chance encounter while riding his motorcycle, and feeling its engine nearly sync with the truck engine in front, prompted a lifelong fascination with the physicality and trance-inducing sensations of drone and skewed, microtonal tunings that has guided a near peerless body of work over the proceeding half century.

Crucially, Niblock had no musical training, but by 1968 he was already recording himself, as remarkably heard here on ‘Index’ (1969), and two further pieces from 1972 that feature other interdisciplinary artists chiming into his vision. Of course, Eastern forms of durational raga and slow drone music had already triggered much fascination in the West in the ‘60s via the Hindustani classical music-trained La Monte Young & Marian Zazeela, as well as Tony Conrad and John Cale as Theatre of Eternal Music, and also via the sustained notes of Morton Feldman from the late ‘50s, but Niblock’s efforts here represent a rawer, less controlled approach that feels distinctly intuitive and more spellbinding as a result.

This release foregrounds the two 1972 works, with ‘Boston III’ featuring Rhys Chatham (flute, voice), Martin Bough (tenor sax), and Gregory Reeve (viola, voice) holding to a captivating 25 minutes of pitch-smeared string, wind and haunting vocals on the A-side, whilst the noirish tension of ‘Tenor’ finds Niblock starting to really get inside his thing, overdubbing Martin Bough’s sax into microtonal overtone clouds pregnant with dread. However the one that really gets us is ‘Index’ (1969), depicting Niblock solo on guitar, strumming and tapping its body in a way that recalls single stringed African musics and also Indian tabla with gripping harmonic shifts that surely reflect that epiphany on the motorbike. Trust us this last, earliest, shortest one goes hard, but the whole LP is quite magnificent if microtonal zone-outs are your thing.

LP (Black Vinyl) (3)