Phill Niblock’s 80th birthday is to be celebrated at the end of September with screenings of his film works at New York’s Anthology Film Archives. Details of his upcoming Touch release to follow soon…
28th September – 30th September 2013, Anthology Film Archives, NY
It is mindboggling that a man with the tireless energy and ceaseless touring schedule of Phill Niblock is about to turn 80. An internationally recognized artist with a wide body of music, film, photography, video, and computer works, Niblock has specialized in making intermedia performance since the mid-1960s. As a composer, he creates thick clouds of drones that are filled with surprisingly active microtones and timbres that generate many other tones in the performance space. During concerts of his music, Niblock simultaneously presents films/videos focused on the movement of people working, or computer-driven black-and-white abstract images floating through time. While Niblock is best known today as a minimalist composer, he actually started his artistic practice with film (and photography) – in fact, his first compositions were created to accompany his films.
Born in Indiana in 1933, he has been an artist/member of the vital Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York since 1968, and its Director since 1985. Over the years he has produced more than 1,000 performances at the EI loft in Soho, acted as curator of the innovative XI Records label, and launched a second EI space in Ghent, Belgium. Recordings of his music are available on the XI, Moikai, Mode, and Touch labels, and DVDs containing his films and music have been released on the Extreme and Die Schachtel labels.
This program provides a glimpse into the broad range of Niblock’s cinematic explorations, from rarely-presented early works to a selection of films from his well-known “Movement of People Working” series, which he usually shows at his concerts.
This 80th birthday tribute has been curated by Katherine Liberovskaya.
Screening details can be read at www.anthologyfilmarchives.org
