Phill Neblock obit

Legendary Avant-Garde Composer & Filmmaker Phill Niblock Dead At 90

 He was not on the list.

Phill Niblock, the acclaimed avant-garde composer known for his pioneering work in minimalist drone music, has died, The Wire reports. No details of Niblock’s death are available at present. He was 90.

Niblock was born in Indiana in 1933. After getting an economics degree from Indiana University, he moved to New York in 1958 and began working as a filmmaker and photographer documenting the jazz and modern dance scenes. In 1968, after taking inspiration from the overlapping sounds of truck engines on the highway and performances in New York’s avant-garde classical scene, he began composing his own music. His work, which proved to be vastly influential, centered on microtonal drones that bled together into hypnotic textures.

Speaking to Tone Glow in 2020, he explained, “I only make one kind of music. I don’t make anything else. I’m interested in sound — a particular order in it. It all came from a very short moment of about five minutes of thinking about music and how I could make it and what I could make and what I couldn’t make. I defined what I was going to make in the middle of 1968 and the first piece was at the end of 1968, and that piece defined what I was going to do. What I was doing got better and more clear in a few years, but basically I had decided what to do, how I was going to do it, in a few minutes in 1968. And that’s all I did.”

From 1985 onward, Niblock was the director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music, and curator of XI, the foundation’s record label. At Experimental Intermedia, he put his filmmaking talent to use, documenting the work of towering figures such as Arthur Russell. He worked with a large list of noteworthy collaborators including Petr Kotik, Ulrich Krieger, and Sonic Youth’s Lee Ranaldo and Thurston Moore. Basically anyone I follow online from the experimental music world has been rhapsodizing about Niblock’s work today in light of his death. He was a true giant in the field.