Phill Niblock’s music asks a lot of you. First, it wants your time: most of his albums are long (the five he’s made for Touch include three 2xCDs and a 3xCD set) and so are the individual pieces (of the 47 currently in my iTunes, 28 last over 20 minutes). The music itself is also demanding, comprising held tones without percussion or anything else conventionally used to mark time. (Niblock doesn’t actually play any instruments; instead he picks notes, records musicians peforming them, then edits and layers the results into drones.) Things change and progress, but it’s slow and subtle; you might not notice unless you skip around a track. So not only do you have to commit substantial time to a Niblock piece, you have to hang in when it feels like it’s taking a lot more.
Early on, Niblock made another demand: that you listen to his music at massive volumes in large spaces that create rich overtones. This wish meant that, as critic Bill Meyer put it, “It makes no more sense to play [Niblock albums] on earbuds or little computer speakers than it would to look at a reproduction of a Rothko on your mobile phone screen.” At first, this restriction kept Niblock from making records altogether. He started composing in the early 1970’s, but didn’t release his debut album, Nothin' to Look at Just a Record, until 1982. As he explains in the liner notes (reproduced in Superior Viaduct’s reissue), he didn’t want to “relinquish control,” but acquiesced in order to “reach all of the people that I would like to have experience the music.” He also added, in bold: “PLEASE PLAY THIS RECORD LOUD.”
So why are Niblock’s drones worth this much time and effort? What makes them better than others? It seems like it’d be an easy question, since minimalist drone on the surface is pretty uncomplicated. Yet, paradoxically, the simplicity of tones and apparent lack of change makes drone tricky to analyze. With most other music, you can point to hooks or shifts or moments that give a song unique power. With drone, pretty much the most you can say is that it moves you.
For me, that’s always been true of Niblock’s music. There’s a thrust to his drones; they never float or drift, always moving forward and often at high speed. Technically, that’s an illusion, since the music doesn’t have measurable pace. But on Nothin' to Look at, both sidelong pieces sound like they’re in perpetual motion. Sometimes they roll in waves; at other points they pulse like a buried heartbeat. There’s also a sense of ascent, especially on “A Trombone Piece”, which scales a sonic wall. That’s bit of an illusion too, since Niblock pre-planned his edits before he spliced the tapes, and thus could only guess at their effects. But I imagine he feels it too when he listens to his final compositions.
Once Niblock traded his tape splicer for computer software, he began to compose while editing rather than writing the pieces beforehand. That’s how he constructed the first disc in his new album, Touch Five, which contains two tracks: “Feedcorn Ear”, played on cello by Arne Deforce, and “A Cage of Stars”, which utilizes Rhodri Davies’ harp. Both are enveloping pieces whose only overt difference from what Niblock made 30 years ago is fidelity. They’re clearer and more detailed—easier to hear and focus on—than the rougher tracks on Nothin' to Look at. But they’re just as moving.
Even more exciting is Touch Five’s second disc, which uses a newer Niblock process: scores performed by musicians rather than created from their recordings. “Two Lips” is actually two scores with 20 parts total, all “distributed randomly amongst the musicians.” So the permutations could be infinite, especially since the piece is presented three times by three different guitar quartets. It’s not hard to hear the basic differences between the Zwerm Quartet, the Dither Quartet, and the Coh Da Quartet. What’s more complex is how each lineup creates a different atmosphere. The way each version conjures feelings and images (Niblock himself is a filmmaker, sometimes making films to accompany his music) shows how multi-dimensional his compositions are.
Which ultimately is what makes Niblock’s demands not only worth it, but somewhat irrelevant. You don’t have to accept any of them to enjoy his music. I’ve spent lots of time listening to his work on earbuds or computer speakers, and jumping around tracks rather than listening to each in full. Yet I’ve never left feeling unmoved. His drones are potent because they’re adaptable–whatever time or effort you put into them, you’ll always get something back.
