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Phill
Niblock - Touch
Works, for Hurdy Gurdy & Voice
Touch # TO:49 CD - 58:20 3 Tracks Barcode: 5027803144927 1. "Hurdy Hurry" (15:20, October 1999) Jim O'Rourke, hurdy gurdy (samples) 2. "A Y U", aka "as yet untitled" (21:30, October 1999) Thomas Buckner, baritone voice (samples) 3. "A Y U, Live" (21:30, October 1999/2000) Release Date: Monday 20th March 2001 |
Phill
Niblock / info
This is the first CD by Phill Niblock for Touch. Thomas Buckner, baritone voice (samples and live) All were completed with Protools software in a Macintosh computer, and are 24 tracks mixed to stereo. There are two versions of the voice piece, one the original tape piece, the other a version with three added voices, live, plus four tracks of pitch shift on each, done in Robert Poss's (Trace Elements) studio. Samples and live elements were recorded by Robert Poss at Trace Elements Studios in New York. The pieces were constructed and mixed in ProTools by Phill Niblock at Experimental Intermedia in New York. [AYU was commissioned by Thomas Buckner] |
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"Touch Works..." was designed by Jon Wozencroft with photos by Phill Niblock taken in Schezuan, China. This is his first CD for Touch. Phill is a sixty-something New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968Õs barricade-hopping. He says: "What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly." The stills in the booklet are from slides taken in China, while Niblock was making films which are painstaking studies of manual labour, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O'Rourke. MUSIC RECORDINGS: nothin to look at, just a record; two pieces for trombone with Jon English and James Fulkerson, trombone; India Navigation Records IN 3026 (LP) (out of print, the same material is on the Blast First double CD) Niblock for Celli, Celli Plays Niblock; with Joseph Celli, oboe and English horn; India Navigation Records In 3027 (LP) (out of print) Four Full Flutes, four pieces for flute, with Susan Stenger, Petr Kotik, and Eberhard Blum, flutes; XI 101 (CD) Music by Phill Niblock, ""Five More String Quartets" and "Early Winter"; the Soldier String Quartet, Susan Stenger, Eberhard Blum; XI 111 (CD) The Young Persons Guide to Phill Niblock, seven pieces, on two CDs, on Blast First/Disobey Records, London (to be re-issued on XI in the Spring of 2001) A work - Not Untitled, Knot Untied, Old, played by the Zeitkratzer Ensemble, on the CD titled "Zeitkratzer SoundinX", on the label Timescraper Music, ZKR 9901 A work - Didjeridoos and don'ts, for dijeridu, on the CD "Walls of Sound" by Ulrich Krieger, on OO disks A work - Guitar too, for four, for guitar, on the CD "Go Guitars", by Seth Josel, on OO Disks A Video/Music release: China and Sunsets, with the music Early Winter and First Performance; on Video O, from O.O. Disks, ooV2 (VHS, HiFi sound, 1 hour) Phill Niblock writes: "In October 1999, I made a concert at Merkin Hall in New York, as part of the series "Interpretations", produced by Thomas Buckner and the World Music Institute. The concert was shared with Ulrich Krieger, a composer and saxophonist living in Berlin. Normally, concerts in this series have two parts. Since Ulrich and I are collaborators for some years, we decided to interleave our works, and also to make a long concert. It was about three hours, nearly twice as long as is usual in this recital hall. I was preparing two new works for this concert. You guessed it, the pieces on this CD. The works are for hurdy gurdy, a stringed instrument played by cranking a resined wheel, and voice. I had met Jim O'Rourke some time before, and had asked him if I could make a piece using samples of his playing the hurdy gurdy. I recorded the samples in the studios of Robert Poss sometime in the winter of 1999. Tom Buckner and I had talked for some years about a possible piece. I asked him if we could do it for this concert. Later, he explained that he commissions works, so that was a pleasant surprise. When we were recording in Poss' studio, Tom was interested in doing some throat singing. I expected to work on these pieces during the summer of '99. I didn't, of course. I didn't start until two weeks before the concert date. I finished the voice piece on October 11, made the hurdy gurdy piece on the 12th and 13th. The concert was the 14th. On the hurdy gurdy piece, we hear only the samples recorded by O'Rourke. In the first version of A Y U, we hear only the original recorded samples of Tom Buckner singing. On the second piece, Tom recorded again in the studio, singing a line along (listening with headphones) with the first version of A Y U, and four channels of pitch shift were added to his live voice. He did this three times, for the entire length of the piece. Thus version one has twenty four voices, multitracked from samples. Version two has an added 15 tracks of the live voice. In each piece, I constructed some pitch shifted samples, and some of them were one and two octaves down. These were used along with the original samples as source material. There is not any other modification of the samples during the recording and mixing process." [A review by Kyle Gann, published in the Village Voice, New York, November 9, 1999] "Phill Niblock has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde since the late 60s. Though his compositions are "minimalist" in the classic sense, based around monolithic blocks of sound that slowly peel and fold in on themselves across time, his music is much more visceral and intense than, say, that of Terry Riley or Philip Glass". [David Keenan] Live at the Edinburgh College of Art [5.02.01]: "Come the end of the year there will be many more folk claiming to have been in the art schoolÕs Wee Red Bar than that precisely-named hostelry could accommodate, mark my words. The visit by John Cage associate Phill Niblock...was an occasion that will be identified as a highlight of 2001, an event...attaining such grandeur it was nothing less than magnificent." [Keith Bruce] |
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