Phill Niblock: Music + Films

The concert, to which MaerzMusik invited intermedia art pioneer Phill Niblock on his 70th birthday, combines new compositions with the premiere of older film material from the series ‘People Working,’ created in China in 1988. Projected simultaneously onto two screens, the films, with their long shots of people engaged in simple manual tasks, form a level independent of the music, which, with its arrangement of projectors freely in the room and the actions of the projectionists visible to the audience, is similar to the performance character of a concert. This is accompanied by loud drone pieces, those ‘walls of sound’ that establish overtone fluttering and dense beat patterns in their physical presence, which change with the movement of the listener in the room.