Dans le monde musical, Phill Niblock est un transfuge. Contrairement à ses pairs, les quatre pères fondateurs du courant minimaliste La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich et Philip Glass, qui ont tous reçu une éducation musicale académique, Phill Niblock avoue n’avoir jamais été intéressé par une telle formation. C’est d’ailleurs l’image, et en particulier la photographie, “quelque chose de très naturel pour moi”, qui lui a d’abord permis d’assouvir sa soif créatrice.

Au milieu des années 60, il rencontre Elaine Summers, chorégraphe et réalisatrice expérimentale, qui l’introduit à la vidéo. Leur collaboration aboutit, en 1968, à la création de l’Experimental Intermedia Foundation, “une association fondée par des artistes, pour des artistes” visant à promouvoir l’art “intermédia” – “des films, des diapositives, de la danse, de la musique, le tout combiné en un événement, une performance”. La fondation, située dans son loft de SoHo, devient vite un centre nerveux de la scène expérimentale new-yorkaise. Un millier de concerts y ont été produits depuis sa création.

Le concept d’art “intermédia” – préféré au terme de “multimédia”, jugé trop commercial – est fondamental dans l’œuvre de Phill Niblock. Ses films, par exemple, une suite de longs plans-séquences d’artisans au travail, n’ont jamais eu vocation à être des films “per se”, mais sont plutôt destinés à s’intégrer dans un ensemble de manifestations artistiques formant performance. “Ce sont des images extrêmement réelles. Mais elles n’ont jamais eu la structure de films documentaires. […] Les documentaristes ont d’ailleurs toujours détesté mes films. Et les réalisateurs expérimentaux les détestent parce qu’ils sont trop photographiques.”

Devant le peu de succès rencontrés par ses films, Phill Niblock se concentre alors sur son travail musical. Contrairement à d’autres compositeurs de sa génération, il assume l’étiquette “minimaliste”, parce qu’elle décrit adéquatement la démarche de minimisation du matériau et de la forme qui est la sienne. “Le cœur de ma démarche est de soustraire divers aspects de la structure du médium avec lequel je travaille. Dans ma musique, par exemple, il n’y a pas de rythme, pas de mélodie, pas de progression harmonique traditionnelle. Mon travail tourne autour de l’idée d’absence de développement, au sens musical du terme. C’est aussi vrai de mes films. La plupart du vocabulaire cinématographique en est tout simplement absent. Pas de narration, pas de montage. Il y a peut-être seulement deux séquences, en quarante heures de film, qui ne suivent pas l’ordre chronologique.” Au milieu des années 70, Tom Johnson, critique au Village Voice, résume cette démarche avec un mémorable : “Pas de mélodie, pas d’harmonie, pas de rythme. Pas de connerie.”

La musique de Phill Niblock est éloignée du minimalisme répétitif enjoué et teintée de psychédélisme de Terry Riley, Steve Reich ou Philip Glass. Elle est plus proche du minimalisme radical, fondée sur les longues durées, de La Monte Young. La majorité de ses pièces consistent ainsi en un ensemble de drones, notes tenues, bourdonnantes, qui s’étirent à l’infini, évoluant presque imperceptiblement, et desquelles émergent une infinité d’harmoniques miroitantes. Pour le compositeur, “l’idée est de créer une espèce d’environnement flottant”, dans lequel l’auditeur se laisse dériver, perdant peu à peu contact avec la réalité, et notamment avec le temps. “Si quelqu’un, après une heure de performance, pense qu’elle ne dure que depuis dix minutes, c’est parfait. Et cela arrive. Souvent, les gens n’ont aucune idée du temps que cela a duré.”

Le processus de composition de Phill Niblock est très manuel, très artisanal – une parfaite métaphore des images de ses films. À son principe, des enregistrements – autrefois analogiques, aujourd’hui numériques. Un ensemble de drones, joués sur des instruments – toujours acoustiques – dont le timbre est particulièrement riche – guitare électrique (Guitar Too, For Four), vielle à roue (Hurdy Hurry), voix nasales (A Y U). Phill Niblock combine ces enregistrements, les fait interagir en en modifiant légèrement les fréquences. Il entretient une passion pour les intervalles microtonaux, dont l’interaction produit d’étonnants phénomènes acoustiques. Au cœur de sa musique gît ainsi une certaine indétermination – c’est ce qui la différencie de celle de La Monte Young. Phill Niblock se laisse souvent surprendre par ses pièces : “Je peux prévoir, mais je ne peux pas prévoir de manière exacte. Certaines de mes pièces sont donc un peu différentes de ce à quoi je m’attendais.”

C’est que les pièces de Phill Niblock sont incroyablement plastiques. Quand on lui demande s’il compose parfois en fonction de l’espace dans lequel sa pièce sera jouée, il renverse la question : “C’est plutôt le contraire qui se passe : ma musique change radicalement selon l’espace dans lequel on la joue. Et bien sûr, selon le système de diffusion. Généralement, les espaces les plus fantastiques sont les cathédrales, les grandes églises, qui sont très ouvertes, et dans lesquelles il y a beaucoup de réverbération de surface à surface.” Une dimension spatiale accentuée par le souhait du compositeur “d’amener les gens à se déplacer” pour expérimenter cette plasticité de la matière sonore – une gageure, avoue Phill Niblock. “Les gens s’imaginent toujours qu’ils doivent rester assis le plus silencieusement possible.”

La musique de Phill Niblock peut paraître difficile d’accès, trop intellectuelle, trop élitiste. Elle est en réalité extrêmement sensuelle, presque charnelle, accessible à qui veut bien entrer dans son jeu, fermer les yeux et se laisser porter par ses vibrations. Le compositeur insiste pour que sa musique soit jouée et diffusée – enregistrements et musiciens jouant live sont généralement associés dans une même performance – à un volume très élevé, afin que le son emplisse tout l’espace, enveloppe l’auditoire, et que toutes ses potentialités harmoniques s’expriment. Aux auditeurs de se frayer ensuite un chemin dans cet environnement sonore. “Ce qui m’intéresse, c’est de créer un monde visuel et sonore ouvert à des interprétations et à des perceptions très différentes.” La simplicité des drones, leur “minimalité” ouvre un espace à l’imagination, lui procure une liberté sans pareille. Sans mélodie, sans harmonie, sans rythme pour la guider, elle est entièrement libre de ses associations.

L’œuvre de Phill Niblock est une expérience à vivre. Seul un système de diffusion professionnel et des musiciens jouant live peuvent lui rendre justice. La question est de savoir si vous êtes prêts à faire cette expérience. Jeudi prochain, le 3 avril, au Musée des Beaux-Arts de Nantes, vous en aurez l’occasion. Ne la manquez pas.

Sophie Pécaud et Emilie Friedlander

Photo : Sophie Pécaud

Publié dans Fragil, mars 2008.

La musique de Rhys Chatham s’abreuve à deux sources. Celle de l’avant-garde minimaliste d’abord, le compositeur faisant partie d’une tradition consacrée qui va de La Monte Young à Tony Conrad et de Terry Riley à Charlemagne Palestine, en passant par les plus médiatiques Philip Glass et Steve Reich. Celle du rock des Ramones ensuite : c’est un concert du groupe au CBGB’s qui permit à Rhys Chatham, alors âgé de 25 ans et meilleur connaisseur de Boulez que de la vibrante scène rock de sa ville natale, de “trouver sa propre voix”, celle d’un pionnier désormais cité comme initiateur du courant rock noise et influence majeure de groupes de rock expérimental tels que Band of Susans, Swans ou Sonic Youth.

“À l’époque, je composais de la musique minimaliste dans la veine de celle de La Monte Young. Et puis je suis allé à un concert des Ramones au CBGB’s, et ça a changé ma vie. Je sentais qu’il existait un lien entre cette musique et la mienne. C’est à ce moment-là que j’ai emprunté la Fender d’un ami et que je me suis lancé dans le rock. Je pensais que si Steve [Reich] pouvait travailler avec la musique africaine, et Phil [Glass] avec le jazz, je pourrais travailler avec le rock. Pourquoi pas ?”

Le résultat de ces recherches : Guitar Trio, toute première pièce à faire fusionner les principes du minimalisme et ceux du rock. D’abord expérimentée dans diverses configurations – l’une d’elle, Tone Death, inclut un saxophone –, la pièce se stabilise en 1977 sous sa forme actuelle. Son instrumentation : de deux à six guitares électriques, basse électrique et batterie – Rhys Chatham restant quelque peu indécis quant à sa définition du “trio”.

Guitar Trio repose sur un principe extrêmement simple, dont les effets sont extrêmement riches : la répétition. Les guitaristes s’attachent à répéter obstinément la même note, puis les deux mêmes accords pendant près de 20 minutes. Leur but : en extraire toute la substance harmonique. Comme le rappelle Rhys Chatham, une note n’est en effet jamais “pure”, mais contient, outre sa fréquence fondamentale, une infinité d’autres fréquences dont certaines sont plus audibles que d’autres, selon l’instrument que l’on a sous les mains et la manière dont on en joue.

De l’unité peut ainsi surgir la diversité. De l’unisson, la mélodie. Évoquant l’une des premières représentations de Guitar Trio au Max’s Kansas City, Rhys Chatham se rappelle : “Des gens venaient jusqu’à la table de mixage pour demander à notre ingénieur où nous cachions nos chanteurs. Les harmoniques que nous jouions résonnaient avec une telle clarté que le public pensait qu’il entendait des voix” (Rhys Chatham, Composer’s Notebook 1990. Toward A Musical Agenda For The 1990s, Table of the Elements, Atlanta, 1990).

Le déploiment harmonique est l’effet principal de l’usage de la répétition. Ce n’est pas le seul. Pour Rhys Chatham, répéter sans cesse le même accord à un volume effroyablement élevé, avec le soutien d’une batterie soliste qui pénètre et structure la masse sonore de l’intérieur, est aussi le moyen de créer chez son auditoire – et, accessoirement, chez ses musiciens – un état de transe quasi chamanique.

L’originalité de Guitar Trio consiste à avoir transposé des principes purement minimalistes – la répétition, le jeu sur les harmoniques – dans le domaine du rock, et de les avoir subordonnés à son instrumentation, à ses techniques de jeu et à son attitude. Guitar Trio n’est donc pas l’une de ces pièces que seuls des amateurs éclairés de musique contemporaine peuvent apprécier. Elle ne repose pas tant sur un intérêt théorique que sur l’impact viscéral produit par une brochette d’authentiques rockers jouant très, très fort et très, très vite –la représentation se termine sur une orgie de trémolos et un certain nombre de cordes de guitare cassées…

L’impact est d’autant plus fort que Rhys Chatham ne travaille jamais qu’avec la fine fleur de la scène rock locale. Les trois-quarts de Sonic Youth à Brooklyn, des membres de Tortoise à Chicago, de Godspeed You! Black Emperor à Montréal. Pas question pour le compositeur de se contenter d’un de ces gags musicaux que sont les tentatives très ircamiennes de Tod Machover ou de Pierre Henry – le modèle du genre restant l’inénarrable Messe pour le temps présent de 1967. Question de respect pour le genre.

“Quand j’ai composé Guitar Trio, il était important pour moi de ne pas être un “infiltrateur” de la scène rock. Il est facile pour un compositeur classique – Tod Machover, par exemple – d’écrire une pièce “citant” le rock et de la jouer dans un contexte classique. Il était important pour moi de jouer cette musique – à laquelle j’avais tout donné, mon histoire de compositeur classique aussi bien que mon histoire de musicien de rock – pour un public de rock, dans un contexte rock, avec des musiciens de rock.”

Depuis 1977, Rhys Chatham est allégrement passé de trois guitares à six (Die Donnergötter, 1984-85), puis à 100 (An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, 1989). Il a fait culminer son œuvre pour guitares électrique sur la butte Montmartre avec les 400 guitares de Crimson Grail, monumentale et délicate pièce commandée par la Ville de Paris pour la Nuit Blanche 2005.

L’année dernière, le compositeur a eu une nouvelle révélation. Cette fois, ce n’était pas le punk des Ramones, mais le drone doom metal de Sleep : “Récemment, alors que j’étais en tournée, j’ai entendu ce groupe, Sleep, et leur album Dopesmoker, qui m’a laissé sans voix. Je me suis dit : ‘Mince, c’est ma musique !’” Résultat : Rhys Chatham est revenu aux fondamentaux – trois guitares, basse et batterie – et a repris la route avec son nouveau groupe, Essentialist. Son projet : réduire le métal à ses éléments essentiels ; le reconstruire ; transcender sa signification initiale. À découvrir l’année prochaine en Europe.

Sophie Pécaud

Photo: Renaud Certin

Publié dans Fragil, novembre 2007.

Rhys Chatham’s music has two origins. On the one hand, it comes from the minimalist avant-garde, the composer being a part of a hallowed tradition which goes from La Monte Young to Tony Conrad and from Terry Riley to Charlemagne Palestine, and also including the more well-known Philip Glass and Steve Reich. On the other hand, it comes from the rock of the Ramones: it was a concert of this group at CBGB’s which allowed Rhys Chatham, who was 25 at the time and who better knew the French composer Pierre Boulez than the effervescent rock scene of his hometown, to “find his own voice”, the voice of a pionneer now known as the initiator of the noise rock movement, and a major influence of many experimental rock groups, such as Band of Susans or Sonic Youth.

“I was composing minimalist music in the vein of La Monte Young at that time. And then, I went to a concert of the Ramones at CBGB’s, and it changed my life. I felt a link with the music. At that precise moment, I borrowed a friend’s Fender electric guitar, and this is how I went into rock. Essentially I thought that if Steve [Reich] could work with african music, and Phil [Glass] could work with jazz, I could work with rock. Why not?”

The result of that research: Guitar Trio, the very first piece to combine the principles of minimalism with those of rock. At first, various configurations were experimented with – one of them, Tone Death, included a saxophone. After 1977, the piece was standardized as a trio for three eletric guitars, electric bass and drums. Its current instrumentation: from two to ten electric guitars, electric bass and drums – Rhys Chatham being rather undecided as far as his definition of a “trio” is concerned.

Guitar Trio is based on a very simple principle, whose effects are extremely rich: repetition. Guitarists exert themselves at persistently repeating the same note, and then the same basic chord for close to 20 minutes. Their aim: to extract all their harmonic substance. As Rhys Chatham reminds us, a note is never “pure” but contains, besides its fundamental frequency, an infinite number of other frequencies, some of them being more audible than others, depending on the instrument and the way it is being played.

From unity may thus arise diversity. From unison, melody. Recalling one of the first performances of Guitar Trio at Max’s Kansas City, Rhys Chatham remembers: “People would come back to the sound board to ask our engineer where we were hiding the singers. The overtones and harmonics we were playing rang out with such clarity that the audiences actually thought they were hearing vocalists” (Rhys Chatham, Composer’s Notebook 1990. Toward A Musical Agenda For The 1990s, Table of the Elements, Atlanta, 1990).

Harmonic deployment is the main effect of the use of repetition. It’s not the only one. For Rhys Chatham, repeating ceaselessly the same chord at an obscenely loud volume, with the support of a soloist drummer who penetrates and structures the general waveform of the sound from the inside, is also a means of creating among his audience – and incidentally, among his musicians – a kind of shamanic state of trance.

The originality of Guitar Trio rests upon the transposition of strictly minimalist principles – repetition, playing with the overtones – into the field of rock, and their subordination to its instrumentation, playing techniques and gesture. Guitar Trio isn’t therefore one of those pieces that only hardened fans of contemporary music can appreciate. It does not rest so much upon a theoretical interrest as it does upon the visceral impact produced by a group of genuine rockers playing very, very loud and very, very fast – the performance ends up with an orgy of tremolos, as well as a certain amount of broken guitar strings…

The impact is all the more strong as Rhys Chatham always works with luminaries of the local rock scene. Three quarters of Sonic Youth in Brooklyn, members of Tortoise in Chicago, of Godspeed You! Black Emperor in Montreal. The composer could in no way content himself with a musical joke such as the ventures into rock of Tod Machover when he was at IRCAM (Vatican City of contemporary music in France), or even those of Pierre Henry – the model of the genre being the incredible Messe pour le temps présent of 1967. For it is a matter of respect for the genre.

“When I composed Guitar Trio, it was very important for me not to be an “infiltrator” on the rock scene. It’s very easy for a classical composer – Tod Machover, for example – to write a piece for quote and quote rock and to play in in a classical context. It was very important for me that I play this music – that I gave everything to, my background as a classical composer as well as my background as a rock musician – for a rock audiece, in a rock context, with rock musicians.”

Since 1977, Rhys Chatham cheerfully jumped from three guitars to six (Die Donnergötter, 1984-85), and then to 100 (An Angel Moves Too Fast to See, 1989). His work for electric guitars culminated in Paris’ butte Montmartre district with the 400 guitars of Crimson Grail, a monumental yet delicate piece commissioned by the City of Paris for the Nuit Blanche 2005 festival.

Last year, the composer had a new epiphany. This time, it wasn’t the punk of The Ramones, but the drone doom metal of Sleep: “Quite recently, I was touring in a bus, and I heard this group called Sleep in an album called Dopesmoker, and it absolutely blew my mind. I said to myself: ‘Why, this is my music!’” As a result, Rhys Chatham went back to essentials – three guitars, bass and drums – and hit the road again with his new group, Essentialist. His project: to break down metal to its basics elements; to reconstruct it; to transcend its primitive signification. To be heard next year in Europe.

Sophie Pécaud

Photo: Renaud Certin

Originally published in French on Fragil, November 2007.

“Beach Point Pleasant,” the album’s first track and centerpiece, is built on a 2-second instrumental loop from Gétatchèwe Kassa’s “Tezeta Slow,” featured on Buda Musique’s celebrated Ethiopiques series. “Tezeta,” Matt Mondanile explains, “means memory or nostalgia, and the song is kind of an ode to past beach times.” Repeated ad infinitum, the passage abstracts into a kind of indeterminate, “oriental” refrain, like the generic soundtrack of a Mondo Cane-style travel log. As yellowed, Technicolor images of virgin beaches, unfurling palm fronds and coconut milk straight out of the nut begin to take shape in our mind, we are lulled deeper into our post-colonial fantasy with the introduction of new voices. A meandering pentatonic guitar line bubbles leisurely upwards to the surface of the mix like a 1960’s Cambodian pop recording passed through an underwater chamber—wah wah in the fullest sense of the term. Meanwhile, ambient casiotones layer gently into the space between loop and guitar melody like small gusts of ocean wind. The word horizontal is key here; for all his vertical layering of sounds, Ducktails’ ode to lost time is closer to a plateau of sun-dappled bliss than an emotional riptide.

The rest of the songs on the recording possess a similar horizontal quality, each with its own, unique feeling-plateau. “Pizza time,” a short track following “Beach Point Pleasant,” offers us a glimpse of the beach by night, marking a moonlit ceremony in which locals armed with traditional instruments, flaming torches and portable boom boxes descend upon the shore to dance and make merry. Each of Ducktails’ songs builds upon a single repetitive, root motif; here, he forfeits the archival sample for a cheezy up-tempo Casio beat, elaborating the “world kitsch” aspect of his sound through his twangy manipulation of guitar and bass.

On side two, Ducktails switches gears yet again with an evolving series of asymmetrical bongo phrases, artificial in source (drum machine) but human in their imperfection. If “Beach Point Pleasant” marks a nostalgic moment in the album’s evolution, and the second track, a celebratory one, “Gems 1 and 2” would seem to constitute their meditative conclusion. Soaring, synthetic drones stretch out across an early morning sky as Chinese flute melodies (perhaps sample, perhaps not) float in and out of earshot. Over time, the bongos become increasingly insistent, increasingly anarchic, as though their player, electronically mediated as he is, were imploring the sun to peak its head above the ocean horizon.

While it has absolutely no pretensions to being “intellectual”, Ducktails’ project rides a fine and nuanced line between East and West, the analog and the electronic, the manual and the pre-fab. Though it lends itself to repeated home listenings, it is probably best enjoyed in the way Ducktails himself likes to enjoy his favorite records: on the road, in his parent’s car, driving through the suburbs with the windows down.

Emilie Friedlander

For the third installment of this year’s Soy Festival, the Nantes-based Yamoy association brings us two groups recently signed to Thurston Moore’s Ecstatic Peace. New acquisitions, but by no means wet behind the ears. Dating back to the mid-90s, Sunburned Hand of the Manand Jackie-O Motherfucker are the pioneers of a New Weird America that takes pleasure in denaturing the codes of traditional American music.

“Welcome to the New Weird America,” wrote The Wire in July 2003, extending a hearty salutation to free-folk collective Sunburned Hand of the Man. The expression was a reference to the “Old Weird America,” a term coined by critic Greil Marcus to describe the Anthology of American Folk Music (1952), famed for catalyzing a folk revival upon its release and inspiring, among others, the young Bob Dylan. New weird America… a term that speaks as much to Sunburned’s traditional roots as to its penchant for the outré.

The collective’s continually evolving cast of characters—tonight, John Moloney on drums, Rob Thomas, Paul La Brecque and Ron Schneiderman on guitar, and Sarah O’Shea on vocals—hail as much from the universe of visual art and performance as that of music, and it shows. Sunburned’s live set resembles a pagan rite in which bearded men sporting deer heads and fringed leather vests parade through the audience flailing long, tortured tree-branches crowned with latex animal heads.

The music, at first, is little more than a diegetic byproduct of the ritual unraveling before us. We catch the sound of a few metallic objects clanging into one another, a few hesitant guitar notes, a swelling voice. Little by little, the musicians abandon their totems and hone in on their playing. The music allows itself to be more present, more structured. More violent as well. Dark, throbbing guitar riffs, indefinitely repeated, adhere into an atmosphere at once bewitching and suffocating.

Next up, Jackie-O Motherfucker, an experimental folk collective formed in Portland in 1994 by Tom Greenwood and Nester Bucket. Protean by nature, the collective began as a guitar and saxophone duo, accompanying itself with home-made sound collages, rock mash-ups and hip-hop beats. JOMF’s lineup for its European tour is a classic one: a drum kit, two singers and three guitars wired to multiple effect boxes. Three guys and one gal, one of them proudly sporting an Ecstatic Peace! T-shirt.

JOMF’s set is a long voyage through a universe of meandering and occasionally disturbing folk. As their melody and vocal lines and the initial simplicity of their chord progressions will attest, the group’s sound anchors itself resolutely in the heritage of traditional American music. But JOMF takes on this legacy in order to pervert it, channeling it into experimentations that border on the psychedelic. Traditional song structure is rejected. We catch a verse here and there, but never a refrain. As soon as we sense a formal structure taking shape, the members of JOMF take delight in losing us again with their improbable solos, which evolve over time into mantras. JOMF would seem to do everything possible to hypnotize the listener: heady riffs utilizing a limited pitch range, the intricate interplay of three guitars going in and out of synch at will, their play with protracted duration.

JOMF’s drummer only rarely offers up a rousing beat, contenting himself with punctuating the sound of the guitars, one of which has been tuned down to a bass. Sometimes, within the transparent swatches of sound issuing from the four instruments – voices arise. Sometimes a male voice, at others a woman’s. Voices that groan in complaint more than affirm anything, that implore rather than preach. Breathy voices which rapidly melt into the general waveform of sound, waxing and waning in volume, taking the listener on a journey to the farthest, uncharted depths of this new, strange America.

Our only regret is that the John Calian violin present on numerous JOMF recordings could not join the three guitars that evening.

Sophie Pécaud

Translation: Emilie Friedlander

Photo: Renaud Certin

Originally published in French on Fragil, November 2007.

Composer Phill Niblock, key player in the New York minimalist scene, isn’t finished making his heady drones ring out all over the planet. On the road eight months out of the year, this composer and filmmaker will set down his suitcases next Thursday in Nantes for a landmark performance at the Musée des Beaux-Arts.

In the music world, Phill Niblock is somewhat of a renegade. Unlike his classically-trained mentors, the four founding fathers of the minimalist school (La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass), Niblock admits to never having felt much of an interest in the whole conservatory tradition. Indeed, it was photography, “something very natural for me,” which provided the platform for his first creative peregrinations.

In the mid 1960s, Niblock met choreographer and experimental filmmaker Elaine Summers, who introduced him to video. Their collaboration culminated in 1968 with the creation of the Experimental Media Foundation, “an artist-run organization, […] run for artists,” dedicated to promoting “Intermedia” productions–“Film, slides, dance, music, combined, as a performance event.” Based out of Niblock’s loft in SoHo, the foundation quickly became one of the nervous centers of the New York art and performance scene. Nearly a thousand concerts have been produced there since its creation.

The concept of “intermedia” art” –distinguished by its proponents from the more commercial “multimedia”—is fundamental in Phill Niblock’s oeuvre. His protracted continuous shots of artisans working were never intended as films “per se,” but as part of an ensemble of elements comprising an intermedia performance. “They are extremely real images. But they never have the structure of documentary films. […] Documentary people always hate […] my films. And experimental people hate the films because they are so totally photographic.”

Niblock’s relative lack of success as a filmmaker prompted him to hone in on his music. Unlike most of the other composers of his generation, he accepts the label of “minimalist” because he feels it adequately describes the paring down of content and form so central to his work. “The core of what I do is to strip out various aspects of the structure of the medium that I’m working in. So with the music, for instance, there’s no rhythm, there’s not melody and there’s no typical harmonic progression. And the work is very much about non-development, in the musical sense. The same thing is true of the films. Most of the vocabulary of the film is simply not there. Not narrative, no montage. I think there’s two shots that are out of chronological order in the entire 40 hours of film.” In the mid 1970s, Village Voice critic Tom Johnson summed up this process with a memorable: “No melody, no harmony, no rhythm. No bullshit.”

The music of Phill Niblock is far removed from the repetitive, psychedelia-tinged minimalism of Terry Riley, Steve Reich and Philip Glass. It is closer to the radical minimalism of La Monte Young, which hinges upon duration. The majority of his pieces consist in an ensemble of drones—buzzing held notes which expand out infinitely, evolving almost imperceptibly and emitting a host of sparkling harmonics. For the composer, “the idea is to make this sort floating environment” for the spectator to get lost in, gradually losing contact with reality, and, especially, with time. “If somebody, after an hour’s performance, thinks it was only ten minutes long, that’s perfect. And that happens. People don’t have any sense of how long the thing was.”

Niblock’s composition process is very manual, very artisanal—a perfect metaphor for the images that appear in his films. Recordings—once analogue, today digital—serve as his base material. Every one of his pieces consists of an ensemble of drones produced by instruments—always analogue!—that are particularly rich in timbre: electric guitar (Guitar Too, for Four), hurdy-gurdy (Hurdy Hurry), nasal voices (A Y U). The composer combines these recordings, gently modifies their frequencies and allows them to interact. Phill Niblock is passionate about microtonal intervals and the surprising acoustical phenomena that take place when they are allowed to intermingle. At the heart of his music lies a certain indeterminacy—one which distinguishes it from the work of La Monte Young. Often, Phil Niblock allows himself to be surprised by his pieces: “I can predict, but I can’t exactly predict. So that some pieces will be somewhat different than I expect them to be.”

Phill Niblock’s pieces are incredibly plastic. If one asks him whether he conceives his pieces in relation to the spaces where they will eventually be performed, he turns the question on its head: “It’s more the other way around, that the music changes incredibly, drastically, depending on the space it’s played in. And, obviously, the sound system. Typically, spaces which are really fantastic would be, like a cathedral, or a large church, which is very open, where there’s a lot of reflection off of surfaces.” A spatial dimension accentuated by the composer’s desire to “get people to wander around,” to experience the plasticity of the sound material for themselves—a kind of dare, Phill Niblock admits. “Nobody wants to wander around. They get the idea that they should sit there very quietly.”

The music of Phill Niblock can appear inaccessible, too intellectual, too elitist. In reality, it is extremely sensual—carnal, almost—accessible to all who are willing to dive in, close their eyes and allow themselves to be carried off by the vibrations. The composer insists that his music (which, in live performance, usually combines recordings and live musicians) be played EXTREMELY loud, so that it fills the room, envelops the spectator and maximizes its harmonic potentialities. Far from assuming a passive role during a Niblock performance, the spectator takes the reigns by carving out his or her own unique path through this extreme acoustic environment. “I’m interested in making a sound world and a visual world which is very much open to different interpretation and different perception. So, if an audience comes and everyone has a different perception of what happened to them, then it’s perfect for me.” The very simplicity of the drones, their very “minimalism,” opens up a vista for the imagination to roam in, a liberty without equivalent. With no melody, no harmony, no rhythm to guide it, consciousness becomes free in its associations.

The work of Phill Niblock is an experience to live through. Only a professional speaker system and live musicians can do it justice. Next Thursday, April 3rd at the Nantes Musée de Beaux-Arts, you will get a chance. Don’t miss it.

Interview: Sophie Pecaud and Emilie Friedlander, Paris, March 29, 2008.

Performance co-sponsored by Cable# and Apo 33.

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online culture magazine. Link to original article here.

Instants Chavirés, Paris, February 4th. Something is not right when George Myers, Dan Cashman and Jeff Hartford of Grey Skull (Breaking World Records) take the stage last Friday at the Instants Chavirés. For one, their instruments aren’t tuned—not, at least, in any way that might be expected to produce something deserving of the title of rock and roll. Second, some of the strings on Cashman’s guitar and Myers’ bass are broken—undoubtedly the fallout from the group’s last thrash session in Holland, but a bit unsettling to see at the beginning of a show. Third, and perhaps most disturbingly, Hartford’s high-hat looks like it has been run over by a car. Or at least bashed in so many times with a baseball bat that it looks more like a leaf of wilted spinach than an object designed for making sounds.

As the first thick drones ring out from Myers’ bass, we witness something that seems more like a pantomime of a concert than a concert itself. Not just any concert, but the sludgiest, beefiest, most ridiculously heavy metal concert imaginable. Myers and Cashman slam their instruments up and down as though in the throes of the most virtuostic of Sabbathian guitar solos—only there are no golden riffs to be heard. Hartford emits a few lusty grunts then enters into his signature full-body head-bang, his long brown hair whipping up and down fast enough to knock out a small child. And yet there is no beat for him, the drummer, to rock out to. Yes, something is definitely wrong with this picture.

The antics that follow on stage constitute less a musical performance per se than a physical performance whose byproduct is sound. Myers fiddles with the tangle of mixers and pedals hooked up to his bass like an evil scientist executing the final operations on a machine designed to destroy the world—to random, and sometimes ear-splitting, acoustical results. Cashman, playing a kind of attention-deprived teenage caveman with a guitar, serenades the audience with his usual wordless blubbering, interrupted by the occasional defamatory punch: “Fuck You!” Before long, Jeff Hartford, a kind of hard rock Barney Flintstone who has lost his sense of humor, breaks up the dissonant wall of sound with his distinctive symmetrical pounding. As the sounds coming of Cashman’s guitar and Myers’ bass threaten to swerve out of control, Hartford’s thrashing provides some order to the madness. All things considered it is only element of Greyskull’s music that comes anywhere close to a melody.

There is something strikingly Paleolithic about Greyskull’s music, something pre-verbal, pre-musical, almost. A group of three cavemen friends receive a gift of a guitar, a bass and a drum set, along with a letter describing what rock music is and what a rock concert generally consists of. Suspecting that this might be a way to sway the gods in their favor, they attempt to recreate “rock and roll” without ever having experienced it for themselves. Except that they never made it through to the end of the letter, where the writer describes the basic tenants of melody and rhythm. Nor to the stipulation in bold explaining that even though this thing called rock and roll might make them feel very excited—uncontrollably so, even—and that while they might be tempted to throw some punches over the course of the performance, they should probably refrain from throwing their equipment. But don’t tell that to Myers, who tosses his bass guitar off the stage towards the end of the set and breaks it in half. He would probably just shrug you off with a grunt, crank up the gain and hurl his amplifier on top.

Grand finale à la Grey Skull: Dan Cashman hurls himself off the stage, detonating an explosion of animal howling in the audience before climbing back up and collapsing in exhaustion. As the final feedback fades out, a voice from the rear of the bar pipes up: “Enough of this crap. Why not a little Beatles for a change?” A blaspheme to match Greyskull’s 13 minute blaspheme, but also kind of the group’s point all along. You will not hear anything like the Beatles at a Greyskull show, but you will certainly get an idea of what they might of sounded like if the group had been founded at Stonehenge in 2200 bc. Oogachaka.

Words: Emilie Friedlander, 2008

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online cultural magazine. Link to original article here.

Friday March 21st, Nantes. The Grimault, a cramped, dim, saloon-style bar tucked away along the Eastern bank of the Erdre, was packed by 8pm. Tom Carter (Austin, Texas) and two of the members of the New York trio GHQ (Marcia Basset and Steve Gunn) sat down to dinner at around 9 and picked leisurely at their salads as they conversed over the din of an increasingly impatient crowd. The two-hour delay between the announced time of the concert and Carter’s arrival on stage set the tone for the evening – Carter and GHQ offer us a music that is patient, unhurried, a sonic exaltation accessible only those who know how to sit down, tune in, and drop out (of waking reality) for an hour or two.

Hypnotic, yes. But repetitive, static, minimal, no. The poster for the soirée, which was coordinated by Yamoy, perhaps sells Tom Carter (Kranky) a bit short with its label of “psychedelic drone”. Far from creating a music based on the repetition of static notes (drone, in the traditional sense), this Texan guitar wizard brocades a rich tapestry of extraterrestrial sounds and fleeting melodic inflections. His improvisation-based compositional process hinges on the vertical layering of sounds through looping, reverb and delay–a process no doubt facilitated by the bird’s nest of pedals, mixers and loop-stations at his feet.

At the heart of Tom Carter’s music lies a fascination with the acoustical possibilities of the guitar—not as a single instrument, a single voice, but as a multitude of voices, all waiting to be discovered through a little expert handiwork. The hypersensitive minefield created by his use of various electronic devices allows him to experiment with novel ways of coaxing the sound of out of his instrument – at points, he “plays” his guitar simply by fluttering a finger over the strings near the bridge, hitting the body of the guitar with his left hand, or, at extremely quiet moments, by abandoning the right hand altogether and simply placing his fingers on the frets. What results is a breadth of tones ranging from wah wah to baby’s breath, from Chinese violin to bells, a diversity so surprising that the listener is bound to wonder whether his long-time collaborator Christina Carter (Charalambides) isn’t hiding somewhere backstage.

But Carter doesn’t experiment for experimentation’s sake alone. Rather, he undertakes these acoustic explorations with the aim of enriching his melodic transports. His goal is less to show us which sounds he can pull out of his instrument than to show us what a given sound can do. The result is a hallucinatory counterpoint of echoes and faraway melodies, a music that scatters throughout the room and gathers in corners before dissolving into the air.

Next up, Marcia Basset and Steve Gunn of GHQ (Three Lobed). Bassett (Double Leapords, Hototogisu, Zaimph), shrouded in a generous cascade of long blond hair, drones away raga-style on a ragged-looking viola, while Gunn (Moongang, Magik Markers) summons a few glistening gemstones from his electro-acoustic guitar. They are New Yorkers, sure, but their music is as far removed from that land of subway trains, flashing lights, 24-hour bodegas and Dow Joneses as we are, over here, on the other side of the Atlantic—perhaps even further. Evoking the title of their most recent full-length album, Crystal Healing (2007), their music insinuated itself into the two rooms of the Grimault like a heady, medicinal incense, bringing with it florals and musks from lands as far and wide as East Asia and the deep South, Appalachia and Persia.

Here, as in the music of Tom Carter, reverb and delay reign supreme. GHQ’s instrumentation (viola and guitar, guitar and guitar, guitar and voice) is deceptively sparse; heavy distortion, like witchcraft, transforms whatever two instruments they might happen to be using at any given time into several. Basset, clutching her viola to her chest, summons an unearthly tremor with the wood of her bow—an Indian sound, the sound of a Sitar, no, of a dozen Sitars playing at once. Her cyclical riffing, restricted to a limited number of notes (one of the foundations of the Indian Raga) confirms this evocation of the far East, while Gunn’s melodic picking transports us into yet another mind-state: John Fahey takes a trip to the Orient and weaves strains of the local music he encounters into an ode to the country that he loves, lowering his hat to Sir Richard Bishop and his Spanish guitar along the way.

In Gunn’s playing, we encounter a sound that cannot be called anything other than American; not “American” in the sense of the America of the present, but “American” in the sense of an America removed, a wide open, fecund, honky-tonk America of yore, trapped beneath the rubble of distance and time. And while we cannot decipher the adventure stories he recounts when he steps up to the mic, we hear the ghosts of dead, pre-war bluesmen welling up from his voice. Gorgeous.

Like many of the other artists who fall under the somewhat pell-mell category of the “New Weird America,” Tom Carter and GHQ provide a compelling, homegrown antidote to modern occidental life. And even if it is hard to say exactly where their music transports us, when it transports us, we can rest assured it is not here. Oh no, not here.

Words: Emilie Friedlander, 2008

French version available on Fragil.org, a Nantes-based online cultural magazine. Link to original article here.

Visitation Rites : Six organs of Admittance a récemment fêté ses 10 ans. Quel bilan fais-tu de ces années de travail ? Le projet a-t-il évolué ? Comment a-t-il commencé, et qu’est-il devenu aujourd’hui ?

Ben Chasny : Ma musique a peut-être un peu changé sous certains aspects, mais sous d’autres elle est restée la même. Aujourd’hui, je suis beaucoup plus à l’aise avec les studios d’enregistrement, alors qu’auparavant, je n’enregistrais qu’à la maison, sur un quatre pistes. J’ai aussi voyagé un peu plus, rencontré plus de gens. Au début, je voulais seulement enregistrer une sorte de disque mystérieux venu du Nord de la Californie. Au fil des années, le mystère s’est estompé, mais j’ai commencé à prendre conscience de la profondeur réelle de la musique. J’imagine que c’est aussi bien comme ça.

Comment catégoriserais-tu ta musique en termes de genres, et pourquoi ?

Difficile à dire. Six Organs of Admittance, ce sera parfois une guitare acoustique solo, parfois un assaut noisy, parfois quelque chose entre les deux. Le problème, avec les gens qui essaient de catégoriser la musique, c’est qu’ils induisent des attentes forcément déçues. Parfois, ceux qui viennent à un concert de Six Organs of Admittance s’attendent à un truc de hippie mielleux, parce que c’est ce que leur a asséné une source désinformée, et ils sont découragés par tant de feedback. Ou bien, ils s’attendent à du noise et s’endorment parce que c’est un concert très calme. Alors je ne sais pas.

Tu as joué avec des musiciens d’horizons très différents, et l’on parle souvent de ta musique comme faisant fusionner noise et folk. Te considères-tu comme venant du noise, ou bien du folk ? Comment décrirais-tu la parenté de ces deux traditions ?

Je ne vois pas de distinction entre les deux. Qu’est-ce que le noise, le “bruit”, de toute façon ? Est-ce que Cage n’a pas redéfini ce paradigme ? Il y a un tas de solos de guitare acoustique que je considérerais comme du “bruit”, tout simplement parce que je n’ai pas envie de les entendre ! Je ne crois pas que l’on devrait considérer tout cela en terme de “bruit”. J’utiliserais plutôt le mot “intensité”. Ou “texture”.

Quelles sont tes influences présentes ? Ont-elles changé au cours des années ?

Mes influences présentes sont les mêmes que celles de mes tout débuts. Bien que je les aie mentionnées par le passé, personne ne s’en souvient, soit parce qu’on ne me croit pas, soit parce qu’on est trop occupé à écouter ce que les autres disent à propos de mon projet plutôt que ce que moi, j’en dis ! Tout le monde parle de Fahey <http://www.lastfm.fr/music/John+Fahey>. Faux. Dites plutôt Organum, Nurse With Wound, Talking Heads, This Heat et Sun City Girls. Si je devais mentionner une influence nouvelle, ce serait sans doute David Allan Coe <http://www.lastfm.fr/music/David+Allan+Coe>.

On te considère souvent comme l’un des pionniers du revival psychédélique actuel, qui coïncide également avec un regain d’intérêt pour les traditions musicales orientales. Comment expliquerais-tu ton attirance pour ces traditions musicales ? De manière plus large, comment expliquerais-tu l’attirance d’une grande partie de notre génération pour ces musiques ?

Je ne sais pas pourquoi les gens sont attirés par cela. Sans doute parce qu’un faiseur de modes quelconque a décidé que c’était cool. Demain, ce même faiseur de modes entraînera l’opinion dans une autre direction, personne ne s’en souciera, et rien ne changera. Je me fiche bien de tout cela. En ce qui concerne la musique psychédélique, je crois que cela vient plutôt du fait de collectionner les vinyles. Les meilleurs vinyles, les plus sacrés et les plus chers sont généralement ceux de musique psychédélique, et en particulier ceux à faible pressage. Quand mes amis et moi étions plus jeunes, et écoutions quelque trésor que nous avions trouvé, c’était cool de se dire, “hé, formons un groupe comme celui-là !”. Aujourd’hui, n’importe quel disque peut se trouver sur Internet, presque sans chercher. L’idée du disque “trésor” n’a plus lieu d’être. Je n’ai donc pas la moindre idée de pourquoi quelqu’un voudrait former un groupe psyché aujourd’hui. Ça me semble plutôt rétrograde.

À quelle formation pouvons-nous nous attendre pour ton prochain concert à Nantes ?

Cette fois-ci, je serai avec Elisa Ambrogio à la guitare lead, et Alex Neilson à la batterie. La dernière fois que j’ai joué à Nantes, c’était en solo. Je suis vraiment impatient de revenir avec cette nouvelle formation.

Propos recueillis par Sophie Pécaud et Emilie Friedlander

Photo : Delilah Winter

Publié dans Fragil, octobre 2008.