Phill Niblock

Phill Niblock was an American composer, filmmaker, and videographer. In 1985, he was appointed director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium. Niblock’s first musical compositions date from 1968. Unusually, even among the avant-garde composers of his generation, he had no formal musical training. His early works were all done with tape, overdubbing unprocessed recordings of precisely tuned long tones played on traditional instruments in four, eight, or sixteen tracks. His later works are correspondingly more dense in texture, sometimes involving as many as forty tracks.