I'm watching my man cook at his house. I know he's a badass in the kitchen, working in one of New York's finest restaurants for years now, yet I never get to see him in action behind the swinging doors, over the open flames and hissing steam. The precision with which he handles the knife is incredible, his knuckles and manual movements the very economy of action, each cut vegetable chopped meticulously. Everything, be it ginger, onion, peppers, or tomato, is reduced into miniscule 1/16th-inch cubes. "Why so small?", I ask. "The more finely chopped," he says, "the better the flavor." Technique aside, the resulting din-din is on a plane above how I imagined food could taste.
I didn't really make the connection between fine cuisine and the music of Phill Niblock until thumbing through the thick ten-page booklet of Indonesian images that accompanies his latest set: bushels of harvest, rice patties, kitchen prep, and oxen carcasses being carved up rib by rib.
The working methods of this minimalist composer are strikingly unique. At first it's tough to tell, since, for years, his recorded discography had large gaps, due to the limitations of the vinyl medium. The advent of the CD, however, allowed him greater frequency ranges and longer durations of uninterrupted time to cast his sounds in-- and the arrival of ProTools technology must have seemed an invention of Ron Popiel proportions, aiding him in easily amassing and processing his sounds. So while peers such as La Monte Young, Eliane Radigue, or Tony Conrad might have taken years or decades to bear forth variations on their initial 60s explorations, Niblock is feverishly cranking these days, his sounds mutating as he goes. The last few years have brought forth pieces for hurdy-gurdy and voice, as well as one for guitars featuring Thurston Moore, Kevin Drumm, and Jim O'Rourke.
That said, it's hard to tell some of his pieces apart. Once instruments like the French horn, didjeridoo, sousaphone, hurdy-gurdy, and guitar are singularly smeared into 25-minutes cloud chunks, you could be anywhere. Here, the saxophone of the first piece, the bass clarinet of the second, and electric bass of the third are cooked down to their vibrating essence, and then heated in Niblock's cauldron as an entirely new thing. Alchemical or purely from the open flame, the once-acoustic instruments are altered to sound otherworldly, to the great duress of your woofers; as the low fluctuations coagulate and gain amplitude, cranking up the volume (as Niblock always suggests) lets the sounds beat across every pore and surface of the body, massaging the constrictions of the earspace away.
The second disc holds "Pan Fried", a 70-minute bit of nervous system suspension that's easily Phill's grandest bit of glacial bliss yet, stretched out to commemorate his 70th year. Taking Reinhold Friedl's rosined fingertips as they rub a string tied to a single piano wire inside of a Bosendorfer piano (the piano of choice for heavenly hum by folks like La Monte Young and Charlemagne Palestine), several octaves of C# and F are recorded, then pureed. Between those two little notes, Niblock carves out a canyon that somehow has the basso profundo of the Million Man Choir, the slow grinding of plate tectonic pop, the 30-story high cicada song of spring, and the plinks of the Lord's own zither all freefalling through the space. That each droning sound dissolves into a heavenly consommé is one thing, but that the consummate effect is of you "soaking in it" makes it one of the more singular taste sensations of the year.
