Phill Niblock – Looking For Daniel

Unsounds / Echonance Festival

Phill Niblock sadly passed on the 8th of January, so it’s almost unfortunate that this work appears within the month. Unrelated and unrushed (it’s been sat in my to-review pile for a fair old while). And really quite welcome.

I’m not a massive fan of drone music but Niblock is one of the people I’d say is allowed to do it. I saw him performing on Sussex Campus — hurried note-checking says it was for his eighty-fifth birthday in 2018, put on by the ever-diligent Lost Property, Brighton’s perveyors of all that’s necessary in experimental music. It was an absolutely crushing roll of tones, unrelenting and shifting very slowly, in some tonal world all of its own imagining.

One of the major differences between the live and the home experience is that I’m now at an age where I’m not inclined to wind up the neighbours with excessive volume. So the home experience misses something of the blur of the shape of the room from the exceptional volume of the live version. I imagine part of the live effect is precisely that the tones find different refractions from the contours of a given room, generating cross tones and various Tartini effects.

But that’s by no means to dismiss the home experience — here there’s two pieces, “Biliana” (2023) and “Exploratory, Rhine version, Looking for Daniel” (2019) — so if not the last works, then certainly in sight of them. Biliana has a small ‘live’ element, the voice and violin of Bilian Voutchkova. The piece sits in one of those chords that’s just begging to resolve — which, of course, it never does.

Just eking out tension and supplementing it with discreet microtones, never moving away from the core tensions but finding gaps and harmonic stresses within the large part. If you’re familiar with these sorts of pieces you’ll know that, done well, they bring about a real sense of having gone mad with all the wealth of harmonic material that you can’t quite focus on. The live part is largely indistinguishable from Niblock’s electronic element, but perhaps it’s noticeable in that an electronic phrase is naturally longer and less wavering than a human voice. Noticeable, but not that noticeable

“… Daniel” is perhaps more subdued, having a larger complement of live instruments — so the wax and wane of the drones are more noticeably human-shaped; rather than a barrage of a drone, it’s more of a subdued throb, no less malevolent for living in human-phrase-time. There’s a lot more harmonic material, depending on how you think about it — or perhaps I should say that the harmonic development takes place in larger intervals than the first piece. It’s interesting to discover that, despite the relative aggression of Niblock’s digital inventions, there’s a great taste and flair for instrumental timbre here.

I don’t know Niblock’s work enough to say if this is the perfect tribute, but it’s certainly a magic pair of works. Acrid and brooding like cigarette smoke that turns out to be mustard gas. Certainly he’s maybe the last of a generation who stuck to their obtuse, revelatory guns right to the very last. RIP Mr Niblock.

-Kev Nickells-