Remembering Phill Niblock (1933-2024)
’24
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
Phill Niblock at Art Cinema OFFoff in 2016 © Stephan Vercaemer
Lange Steenstraat 14
B-9000 Gent
On January 8, 2024, the world lost a remarkable figure: composer, film and video artist Phill Niblock. His profound influence and connection with the city of Ghent through various cultural organizations, including his own Experimental Intermedia, leave behind a lasting legacy.
Join us on a journey through venues in Ghent that Phill, both in person and through his work, deeply connected with over the years.
Times and locations (see the map below)
15:00 | Experimental Intermedia – Sassekaai 45, Ghent
- Gathering with a piece of music, a film and two window portraits
16:00 | Logos Foundation – Bomastraat 24−26−28, Ghent
- One Blue Rose (Phill Niblock), performed by the Logos Robot Orchestra (20’)
17:00 | Orpheus Institute – Korte Meer 12, Ghent
- Wheel Drive (5′)
- Guitar Too, For Four — Massed Version (Phill Niblock), performed by Juan Parra Cancino (30′)
- Wind Waves/Rumble Mumble, a collaborative video piece by Katherine Liberovskaya & Phill Niblock (22′)
18:30 | Art Cinema OFFoff – Lange Steenstraat 14, Ghent
- Film screening (75′)
20:00 | Experimental Intermedia
- Typical Phill-style soup made by Katherine Liberovskaya
- Typical Phill-style EI Huis hang out
In the presence of Phill’s wife, the video and media artist Katherine Liberovskaya. They have been collaborating together since the early 2000’s.
Phill Niblock
The Magic Sun
Phill Niblock shot the Sun Ra Arkestra performing on the roof of a New York City apartment building. Capturing extreme close-ups (fingers striking keys, lips blowing air, cymbals vibrating rapidly) on high-contrast black and white film (with no internegative), Niblock crafted a striking 17-minute montage that became a classic of underground cinema. The Magic Sun’s kinetic rhythm perfectly matches the Arkestra’s amorphous, free-flying sound. As Niblock’s images fly by, they seem to merge and blur, much as the fluid curves of the Arkestra overlap and build into intangible clouds of energy.
Comprised of rare moving footage of the band in this era, the result is a virtually abstract music film, edited with pinpoint precision that emphasizes the independence of image and sound, save a single magical moment of synchronization at film’s end.
The Magic Sun
Phill Niblock
Annie
A portrait of the dancer Ann Danoff with a sound collage soundtrack.
Annie
Phill Niblock
Max
Max pairs a soundscape by Max Neuhaus against a succession of processed images and heavily edited, percussion-based performance footage.
Many of Niblock’s early films are “portraits” of fellow artists from different fields of expression. Here, Niblock films performances of Max Neuhaus, uncelebrated pioneer of live electronics, percussionist and installation artist. Niblock’s shots are juxtaposed and craftily edited by Dave Geary so as to create a strange sense of constant change within repetition. The soundtrack is provided by Neuhaus himself, who mixes five simultaneous recordings of Stockhausen’s Zyklus (which the percussionist recorded in a more conventional fashion recently) and a feedback device called Max-Feed. The result is a noise assault in which the percussion is hardly audible under the shifting layers of distortion.
Max
Phill Niblock
T H I R
T H I R is a mesmerizing and hypnotic milestone film. Shot with a 16mm Beaulieu camera around Keene Valley, upstate New York in the Adirondak Mountains in 1971 – 1972, the film is composed of thirty discrete static shots of natural detail – including extreme close-ups of leaves, streams, flowers and crawling ants, each lasting over a minute.
The title is taken from “Ten Hundred Inch Radii,” the fourth and final instalment in his ‘Environments’ series of intermedia performance-installations. The 1972 premiere also featured the playback of Niblock’s original musical recordings and live dance by Ann Danoff (Annie) and Barbara Lloyd.
In 2008, Niblock composed and recorded an alternate soundtrack, One Large Rose, which was mixed and edited in 2015.
T H I R
Map of the four locations