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| The Movement of People Working 1973–91 (film still) copyright Phill Niblock |
There is a modesty that has repeatedly characterised the presentation of
Phill Niblock’s art for the past fifty years, from the title of his 1982 India
Navigation LP Nothin’ To Look At Just a Record to the current retrospective of
his creative output since the early 1960s, Nothin’ But Working. All of the
apparent simplicity and humility belies the immense power, density and
singularity of his intermedia explorations.
Niblock is known primarily for his microtonal drone compositions in
which recordings of specific tones, played on a single acoustic instrument, are
amassed to create a dense, continually shifting cloud of overtones, through
multitracking and playback at volumes of up to 115db. Despite the careful
compositional choices, the results efface the sense of a directing hand, as
well as the typical identifying marks of the source instrument.
Niblock’s series of 16mm films, The Movement of People Working (1973–91)
– which comprises scenes of individuals engaged in traditional modes of manual
labour, in countries including Mexico, Peru and China – avoids rhetorical, and
non-linear editing as well as any narration, which might contextualise the
images more specifically but also ask us to interpret them. They are more engrossing and unusual without.
Presentations of Niblock’s works primarily involve pre-recorded material
played very loud, along with multiple projections of the films of workers. Yet
far from yielding a result which is unresponsive to the particularities of a
given performance situation, the sound interacts with each space in a different
way and the films are not specifically timed to follow the music. In addition,
Niblock often invites musicians to accompany the material, sometimes a
recording of their own playing, in the live situation. The audience’s attention
is not directed toward any single point of focus and the different rhythms
imparted by the sound and pictures eradicates any normative sense of time.
This year Niblock celebrates his 80th birthday but he is evidently a
tireless and enthusiastic artist. Niblock regularly performs in various
countries, and a several records have been released through Touch Records over
the past decade. In addition to the retrospective – taking place in Lausanne,
Switzerland – a collection of essays and interviews, Working Title has been
published, in a bilingual edition by Les Presses du Reel. It reflects the
diversity of Niblock’s artistic undertakings, which also includes jazz
photography, street photography, films of musicians including Sun Ra and Arthur
Russell, as well as a number of asynchronous sound films collected on the Six
Films DVD available from Die Schachtel.
Touch has recently made a number of Niblock’s records available for
streaming online. While the accessibility of Niblock’s work in a recorded
format is invaluable, the direct experience of a Niblock live performance opens
up entirely new possibilities for audition and physiological interaction with
sound. I spoke to Niblock in February prior to a performance at Café Oto, in
London. Below is an edited version of our conversation.
Yusef Sayed: One thing that is fascinating about your drone
works is that they can be experienced somewhat differently in each new context
in which they are played.
Phill Niblock: This is literally true, because so much changes in the
acoustics of the space and the sound system that it can be an entirely
different piece. You don’t really hear the music if you’re playing it from a
recording on a home sound system. You have to be in a concert space where it’s
happening and then it has to be happening well. So there are a lot of concerts
where the sound is so-so.
Is that what keeps you excited about going to different places to
present them?
It’s interesting that there is that much variety. We did a concert
in Lisbon recently, in a pretty lousy hall – with a low ceiling with two Meyer
speakers in the front and two JBL Eons in the back – and we were going to show
video, but the projector was so dim.
Of course, it is not just the space in which the drones are played
that determine what is heard, but the technical conditions as well. Do you just
have to rely on whatever equipment is at the venue, or have you had the ability
to specify?
I used to carry a projector, but my projector broke and wasn’t fixed
properly.
And in terms of the sound system?
Whatever you get.
When you arrive at a venue to setup, you must do a soundcheck before
people start filing in. As I understand it, when the audience come that changes
the extent to which the sound can move and the overtones can react. So how much
can you do beforehand, or do you not get too hung up on it?
Well, the main thing is to find out when you play it at the right
level, that it doesn’t distort. When you get a really bad system, it’s so
distorted, you can’t do a lot.
Is the setup in your loft in New York the ideal, in terms of the
playback equipment?
It’s very good. Ideal? I don’t know, because of the old speakers. On
December 21st I do this six-hour concert – which I can’t do anymore – and
sometimes, towards the end, one speaker will start to sound raggedy. But then
the next time you try it, it’s perfectly fine.
Are all the pieces finished by you at the loft, or are they worked
on and finished wherever you are at the time?
Wherever I am, basically. I wouldn’t probably play it on the big
system until it’s finished anyway. I’m working with monitor speakers in one
place or another. Even in the loft, I don’t work in the same room, with the
same sound system.
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| Phill Niblock in performance, 2006 copyright Diogo Valério (Creative Commons) |
Are there certain engineers whom you prefer to record your pieces?
The chief one is in Belgium, Johan Vandermaelen, but I’ve recorded
recently with Marcus Schmickler in Cologne. He has a Brauner microphone, it is
really fantastic, so when I recorded my last piece in Boston, in the Fall, I
asked them for a Brauner microphone and it turned out they had a Brauner
microphone – because it’s the Berklee school of music. The guy who was the
chief of the sound crew came with a microphone himself and put it on the stand,
left, and as soon as we finished the session he came and took it off and put it
back in the locker. It was a $10,000 microphone, he really wrapped it up fast
[Laughs]. Another recording engineer is Robert Poss, in New York. Robert is a composer and guitarist, with a small studio. I have made many pieces with material recorded with him. On some of them he is both the engineer and a playing guitarist!
I came across a piece that you did for Touch Records, called ‘Sound
Delta’ which is comprised of field recordings, and it struck me as being one of
the few recordings of yours that was somewhat distinct from the typical drone
pieces.
It’s totally distinct, yes. There’s a series of twelve or
fifteen sound collages. There’s a new one, of crickets.
Where was that recorded?
In Ikaria island in Greece, in August. I do quite a bit of work with
my partner, who does live video and I play those sound collage pieces and I mix
them – so I’m constantly mixing, which I never do otherwise with the music.
What are the other recent pieces you’ve been working on?
I finished a scored piece, 'To Two Tea Roses', in September 2012. We
recorded multiple tracks with the Ensemble NeoN and then I mixed them to make
the recorded piece, the playback. In the concert, the ensemble played live
along with the recorded parts.
In 2011 I recorded three versions of a scored piece called ‘Two Lips’
which was commissioned by the Champ d’Action in Antwerp three years ago, and
they were played by three guitar quartets, three different guitar quartets. So
we’re issuing the next Touch CD and one side will be those three versions, one
after the other. Then in 2012 I made a piece for cello for Arne Deforce and a
piece for electric harp for Rhodri Davies, both of which are a half hour long,
and so that’s the other CD of the two CD set. I finished the masters, they’re
at Touch but I haven’t finished the notes. I was hoping to have it out before
the retrospective opened in January but I didn’t make it.
That label has recently celebrated a milestone of their own, 30
years. You obviously have a good relationship with them.
They reprint my stuff too, which was my request – they just reprinted
'Touch Food', which had been unavailable for a couple of years.
I’d heard that the plant had lost the masters tapes.
They just found a CD copy and copied that, which is not uncommon.
Everybody’s having their trouble with pressing plants. One thing that is
interesting about Touch is that they’re always willing to reissue the stuff
because it simply continues to sell. It’s a weird phenomenon. It’s the same
with XI, that stuff’s really old. It doesn’t sell as well as Elaine Radigue’s
‘Trilogy de la Mort’ – our bestselling record, which is great because that’s a
really beautiful piece and the best piece of hers, I think.
XI is the other label that you release stuff through, which is your
own. Do you have any plans to keep that label ticking over in terms of anything
that you want to put out?
There’s only a couple of CDs still in the works, and then we have to
decide what to do. There's a CD from Ulrich Krieger and he just simply has been
too busy to get it out. He keeps saying, last year he said he’d finish
[Laughs].
And related to that, in terms of the history of Experimental
Intermedia, I’ve come across some archived recordings that have been put in a
couple of places online. One of the websites is Art on Air and there’s a couple
of pieces in the Free Music Archive.
We’ve been putting on some recent concerts for Art on Air. But the
label New World Records, which has a division called DRAM – which makes music
available to universities, music schools, subscribers –they’ve taken the
archive. So they have all the archive recordings and they’re digitising them
now. They will either keep the archive tapes at the end or we’ll find a place
which will take the archive. There’s a couple of places that want to take my
archive and that archive, but it is not decided. But they will have them all
digitised, that’s the most important part.
Do you foresee then that it will be only available as some sort of
subscription service to a limited number of people, if it’s through music
academies? Do you think those Experimental Intermedia archives will be
available at anytime to the wider public?
They said that we could have the files and that we could do what we
wanted to with them, but if we compete with them directly by making them all
available it doesn’t make a lot of sense. It’s relatively easy to get access to
that archive. It would be more likely that we did the same thing that we’re doing
with Art on Air, to make some things available on a piecemeal basis.
It seems that there’s such a rich history and archive there.
There’s a page on the website where you see all the composers who
have performed from 1973 until 2007. And there are omissions in it as well,
because the advertising of the early concerts was done using postcards. It was
before computers. In those first years, when the postcards were just typed on a
typewriter and sent out, we always kept a stack. But if we lost the cards, we
didn’t know who did concerts on certain dates. We didn’t start recording until
’79, so there’s six years when there were interesting people but none were
recorded – there was Julius Eastman, it would be nice to have a copy of that.
I found it heartening reading the history of Experimental Intermedia
that Bernard Gendron wrote that sometimes there were just a handful of people
there at shows.
Sometimes even less than a handful.
A lot of that stuff has a tendency to be romanticised, that it was
this buzzing hive full of artists. But it was a lot more small-scale for much
of the time.
Well some people simply weren’t well enough known and frequently we
would prompt people to send a card themselves and in a few instances people
didn’t do that at all and nobody would show up, zero audience. In one instance
a guy played and one woman came. It turned out she was a former lover of his
from years ago – but she was also a former lover of mine [Laughs]. So I was
shocked to see her.
Currently, there’s a huge retrospective of your work underway in
Switzerland. How did that come about?
It was actually supposed to happen in 2010 in Lyon but the financial
disaster bombed their budget so they cancelled it – and it probably won’t
happen there. What the curator Mathieu Copeland wants to do is put together the
films, the Movement of People Working films, which are pretty much together
now, and music, and sell it to a few museums as a playable archive.
Getting the material together was extremely hard work and in the middle
of it I had a heart bypass operation, so I was in the hospital. I came out and
there were two weeks when there wasn’t any thinking or working at all, I
couldn’t edit film. And then I started editing it, and it was just very hard
work.
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| From the series Buildings Along SoHo Broadway, 1988 copyright Phill Niblock |
So a lot films were edited for the first time?
The basic editing was all done in 16mm film and they were
transferred to video at a very high level shop in New York. They were all
spliced workprints and one thing that happened with the splices is that when a
splice got to the shutter it bounced – so at the end of every shot there’s
usually a bounce. So I was going through anyway and cutting out the splices but
then also the bounce; or if there were any flashes. And then re-colour
correcting what they had colour corrected. There’s no montage or anything like
that, I’m not reversing or changing the order. It’s really trimming and colour
correcting.
And what were the arrangements for the audio aspects of the
retrospective. Did you have the opportunity to put in place an adequate
technical setup?
They simply kept saying there was no budget, so they got a
relatively shitty sound system in the place where the most sound is, which is
too bad because it could have really sounded great – if they’d had a couple
more thousand to spend. Johan Vandermaelen was supposed to come with a sound
system but it was bureaucratically impossible to bring a sound system from Belgium
to Switzerland and take it back again, totally insane customs. And they
couldn’t buy the sound system, so we were arranging to rent it to them at a
very cheap price, but then he’d have to take it back again at the end of the
exhibition. We couldn’t do it.
That’s disappointing.
The sound system they got was okay, but it could have been much
better sounding with a bit more money.
When you perform live you regularly involve your films as an
accompaniment, and a lot of the time you have multiple screens going. Again, a
lot of that must be dependent upon the space and what resources are available
at a given time. Does the exhibition in Lausanne reflect your preferences
here?
The stuff in Circuit is really pretty good. It’s three screens that
are roughly four metres wide and a big enough space so the sound is good,
except the sound isn’t as good as it could be because the sound system is 20
per cent below what it should be. What’s mostly wrong is that the clarity in
the high end is simply not there. So the volume is there, but the clarity of
what happens in the overtones is not happening.
Alongside the retrospective there is the book, Working Title.
Yvan Etienne is editing a whole series of books, for the publisher
Les Presses du Réel, in Dijon, France. The first book was Paul Panhuysen, who’s
a very close friend. So Yvan and I got together and collected articles and
decided a few things that had to be written, like the Kase article on the
films. One of the interesting ones, in fact I just read it myself recently, is
Volker Straebel’s music analysis: I learned a few things reading it (finally)
[Laughs]. And I’ve even been in lectures where he presented the ideas, but it
was in German, in Berlin.
I was hoping that the visual material would come out through the
book, not having had the opportunity to see some of your photographic work. So
was that a conscious decision, to not publish any images?
They decided that it had to be in black and white and no pictures.
We did the four DVDs, so…
Of course, two double-sided DVDs are included with the book – a new
installment of the Movement of People Working Series, shot in Japan, and the
rarely seen Anecdotes from Childhood videos – but I'm particularly interested
in the photography which isn't so often seen. I know it’s part at the retrospective.
There have been a number of proposals over the years to make a book of the jazz photos, which I did early
on in my photography. I have resisted. The problem with the jazz photographs is that
they’re just pictures of people and I have felt the artistic merit to be at a low ebb.
Recently,
after the retrospective in Lausanne it is perhaps more determined to do
a book. I have proposed doing a duo book with the Boatyard in Brazil
project, which is also in the retrospective and which I like very much - maybe a book that one has to turn over so that the book can start with either project.
The boatyard project was shot on Kodak Tech Pan film, which is very fine grain, for 35mm it looks really good. The Panhuysen’s wanted to do that at The Apollo House Editions, but it was simply too expensive, $15,000 in the early ‘90s and they had about $5,000. To print it badly, not having it be duotone, just sort of didn’t make any sense. We even went to printers and got tests of the duotone printing which looked really great; you virtually couldn’t tell the difference between the photograph and the duotone print, it was really good. So it would be nice to get them to do that as a book.
The boatyard project was shot on Kodak Tech Pan film, which is very fine grain, for 35mm it looks really good. The Panhuysen’s wanted to do that at The Apollo House Editions, but it was simply too expensive, $15,000 in the early ‘90s and they had about $5,000. To print it badly, not having it be duotone, just sort of didn’t make any sense. We even went to printers and got tests of the duotone printing which looked really great; you virtually couldn’t tell the difference between the photograph and the duotone print, it was really good. So it would be nice to get them to do that as a book.
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| Duke Ellington in control booth, 1962 copyright Phill Niblock |
In Lausanne you’ve also restaged 'Environments', which was last presented in 1972.
The Environments pieces were done as events with dance and music,
with three simultaneous film images and two slides. And we looked for the
prints of the three images and I couldn’t find them and then I found something
that had two – I don’t know what they were ever used for – and so that’s what I
converted and that’s what’s showing. There was another big batch of 16mm film
negatives from 1986 from China, where the film was fogged very badly by the
Chinese X-rays and the print was no good. It was printed but I never could use
it. But I did do a conversion of some of that material to video and the uneveness
across the frame wasn’t so obvious, so I was hoping to use that…but we couldn’t
find those negatives and we couldn’t find the three screens films. Then at the
end, as we were getting ready for the show, Mathieu came again and we moved
some stuff away from some shelves and there were six boxes of film. So we found
all the stuff. But it would have cost five to ten thousand dollars to redo the
Environments and it simply wasn’t possible within the budget. And we were going
to try to do ‘China ’86’ and another film which hadn’t been done, from Brazil.
The Movement of People Working films on the Extreme DVD set were
almost impossible to get for a while. It’s nice that those are available again.
They had a really lousy distributor. Then it was sent to Microcinema
and they do a really good job of getting it about. It’s still selling. I just
got 100 copies myself, because I was running out totally. He originally issued
it without the notes (beause it has a really extensive notes). In fact, I even
printed the notes myself so that I could put them in copies that I send out.
Are there any plans to release any more from that series? The one
I’m intrigued to see, which I don’t think I’ve ever seen footage from, is from
when you shot in the Arctic.
That one’s less interesting. I want to do four DVDs. One of them
would have been out a year ago on Mode, it’s of Brazil. But it hasn't come out.
I found a good place for mastering in Cologne, from Marcus Schmickler, so I’ll
try to do one and see what it’s like.
I also want to do a two DVD set on Touch. So we’ll do four hours – two
two-hour films – and then I have to find the music. Some of it will be music
that hasn’t been issued before, but a lot of it will have to come from stuff
that’s already out on Touch. There isn’t very much music that I have done that
isn't published, that I want to have out anyway.
I’ve read your comments about your earliest pieces that you released
on LP. The medium clearly determined how long the pieces could be, at a certain
quality as well. But in terms of standalone compositions, there seems to be a
point beyond which you wouldn’t go in terms of length, despite the
possibilities for data storage today. I think the longest piece you’ve done is
70 minutes for Pan Fried, which I like a lot.
70 minutes for the piano piece, yeah. It has a beautiful sound,
there’s an incredible amount of bass. But because the timbral qualities of the
piano played that way are so loose, there’s not really a heavy fundamental and
all of the microtonal stuff doesn’t really do anything. You put two microtones
together and they simply don’t do anything that they’re supposed to do.
It’s much more interesting to play 3 or 4 pieces in a program that’s an
hour and a half than it is to play one long piece. So I’m not sure that in
concert I’ve ever played the piano piece at 70 minutes. There’s another version
of that track that’s 27 minutes and yet another version which is 11 minutes.
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| The Magic Sun (film still), 1966–68 copyright Phill Niblock |
I saw Frederick Bernas’s short film ‘Loft Chronicles’ on the
Internet recently, and it includes footage of you preparing a film of a music
box. It strikes me that an interest in close-up and detail links a number of
the film works. It's especially striking and untypical in the musician films, the
Sun Ra piece and the footage you shot of Arthur Russell.
Arthur Russell was shot just with a standard old single-tube colour
JVC camera which had a fairly long zoom lens, so it’s all just shot with that
lens. Whereas, in the Sun Ra film, the second two-thirds was shot with a Bolex,
but with a Kilfitt 135mm lens with extension tubes. So with that I had
extension tubes and a 135mm lens.
I like details. There’s a bunch of nature stuff that’s a completed film called ‘Ten Hundred Inch Radii’, the last of the Environments pieces. There are a lot of close-up images of ice and running water at the end of that film. I have a commission to make a new video and probably a new sound piece for a Paris gallerist, who has a house and garden (actually, more of a park) which also has an exhibition space within the garden. She wants to make an exhibition there for one, two or three years, so we have to design and make screens to have projections and sound. And probably I would project the film 'T H I R' there too, as a historic piece from ’71. I am shooting in May, I hope!
I like details. There’s a bunch of nature stuff that’s a completed film called ‘Ten Hundred Inch Radii’, the last of the Environments pieces. There are a lot of close-up images of ice and running water at the end of that film. I have a commission to make a new video and probably a new sound piece for a Paris gallerist, who has a house and garden (actually, more of a park) which also has an exhibition space within the garden. She wants to make an exhibition there for one, two or three years, so we have to design and make screens to have projections and sound. And probably I would project the film 'T H I R' there too, as a historic piece from ’71. I am shooting in May, I hope!
The retrospective exhibition, Nothin’ but Working continues at the Musée
de l'Élysée and Circuit in Lausanne, Switzerland until 12th May. My review of the book 'Working Title' appears in issue #351 of The Wire.
Special thanks to Phill Niblock and Rie Nakajima.
Special thanks to Phill Niblock and Rie Nakajima.
