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Reviews

Touching Extremes (web):

An excellent record - as usual - by the REAL father of the minimal structure. Forget La Monte Young or Philip Glass – the recent stuff, of course - and grab "Touch Works" (..and also all the rest of Phill's CDs...) if you want to be charmed and hypnotized. The first piece is a superimposition of hurdy gurdies - courtesy of Jim O'Rourke - that leaves you breathless at the end. The rest is Tom Buckner and his baritone voice in all possible strokes, put together for your head to wonder "where am I?" (I gave its first try while walking to work and I almost lost my path - I mean it). You'll be enormously satisfied when the record is over, you'll play it again and again. Quintessential sound physics. [Massimo Ricci]

Copious singularity

Sometimes you may wonder whether the music of composer and Experimental Intermedia director Phill Niblock ever changes. Yes, each piece consists of continual shifts within clusters of tones, intensified in performance by the acoustics of the space. Musicians and listeners can even create shifts by changing their position in the space. And, yes, he does use different instruments to build his pieces on. And the exact treatment they get differs for every piece. But the principle behind the process does not seem to have changed throughout the years. Niblock records samples of musicians producing tones at exact pitches, tuned only microtones apart. Intervals of 2 and 3 Hz are no exception. These samples he puts together in long strings and multiple layers of sound. Differences between individual compositions must arise from the procedure followed, and from the characteristics of the basic material. Niblock's first CD used recordings of flutes, his second (both are on XI Records) had one piece for quintupled string quartet, and one for quartet, flutes, and assorted synthesized instruments. His latest, Touch Works, has one composition for hurdy gurdy.......
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