Phill Niblock

"Features The Soldier String Quartet performing in 'Five More String Quartets', a piece for five multi-tracked string quartets and in 'Early Winter' for flute, bass flute, string quartet and synthesizer, also featuring Susan Stenger (flute) and Eberhard Blum (bass flute)." This is purely awesome drone work and one of the loudest, most commanding minimal works you could ever dream of basking within, even living up to the following: "Dense, elusive trance music distinguished by its singular methods of construction and the intricacy of the relationships of its components with a surprising flux of pulsing adjacent tones which convey a stunning range of acoustic phenomena." Music By Phill Niblock contains two pieces that summarize many of Niblock's obsessions. Five More String Quartets (1991) is a piece for five multi-tracked string quartets. While the instrumental format may be unusual for him, the multi-tracked technique is the usual one. The result, though, is almost chaotic, a departure from his linear and monodimensional textures. Here the listener "moves" in a number of disorienting dimensions. The colossal Early Winter (1991) is a solemn, agonizing piece for flutes, string quartet and synthesizer (for a grand total of 51 "voices"), and it represents a real departure in technical terms because it uses a much more complex mixing process and it involves both live/recorded instruments and electronics. The dense texture projects a melodramatic feelingS, halfway between the suspense for the coming of the apocalypse and the beginning of a requiem. The bass tones, in fact, seem to play the role of a grave male choir. It is like the amplified still picture of an instant in time, an instant that will last an eternity. It is not a simple still, though: it has features, it carries a message. It has meaning.