Much-needed repress. In the vast landscape of American minimalism, Phill Niblock stood apart. Where La Monte Young pursued infinite sustain and Steve Reich explored phase relationships, Niblock carved his own path: monolithic slabs of microtonal sound, built from multitracked recordings of acoustic instruments, dense enough to alter the architecture of any room they filled.
Rhymes With Water – originally released in 2017 and now back in print – captures Niblock at his most elemental. Two extended compositions commissioned by the performers themselves: DreGliss (2015) for Erik Drescher's glissando flute, and Nataliawork (2005) for Natalia Pschenitschnikova's bass flute and voice.
The glissando flute – a telescoping headjoint that allows continuous pitch-bending – becomes in Niblock's hands a generator of slowly shifting harmonic fields. Drescher's tones, recorded in Cologne and layered in ProTools, create interference patterns that seem to breathe and shimmer, hovering between consonance and dissolution. Pschenitschnikova's contribution adds the grain of human voice to the bass flute's dark resonance, recorded in Berlin and assembled into another of Niblock's signature sound masses.
There is no melody here, no rhythm, no narrative arc. What remains is pure sonic architecture: dense, immersive, demanding to be experienced at volume. The microtonal intervals beat against each other, generating phantom tones that exist only in the listening space – different in every room, changing with every movement of the head.
Niblock, who passed away in January 2024 at the age of 90, leaves behind a body of work remarkable for its consistency and uncompromising vision. From his first compositions in 1968 to his final recordings, he pursued a single idea with absolute dedication: sound as physical presence, music as environment. His New York loft hosted over 1,000 performances; his Experimental Intermedia foundation championed generations of avant-garde artists; his films documented the poetry of manual labor across the globe.
Rhymes With Water stands as essential Niblock: austere, monumental, and profoundly beautiful in its severity. A rare chance to experience one of the true originals of American experimental music.
