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<p><i>Experimental music doyen Phill Niblock has been making
photographs since his 1958 arrival to New York, where he cut his teeth</i>
<i>documenting
the performances of jazz greats like Duke Ellington. A decade later,
Niblock began the work for which he is best (if still under-) known:
multiscreen audiovisual installations scored by drones, built around
microtones generated by instruments from cello to bagpipe to saxophone.
“Working Photos,” a solo exhibition at New York’s Fridman Gallery on
view through Janury 5, 2020, draws on over a half-century of artmaking
triangulated between photography, cinema, and sound. Below, the
Experimental Intermedia director discusses composition, accessibility,
and card games. </i></p>
<p><b>DOING PHOTOGRAPHY</b> was extremely easy
and direct for me. Both the technology and the vision: I saw and I could
compose. I did all the things that photographers should do that people
who use iPhones to take photographs never do. Cameras are tactile, and
recording stuff can be too . . . though less so now. It goes much
faster, digital. There’s a lot of cutting in<i> China 88</i> and <i>Japan
89</i>,
two films that I edited a couple years ago and am just now releasing.
It’s amazing how different it looks now because I could color correct
and make trims of every shot. These were works that have been projected
for a long time, so there was all kinds of dust and crap on the film.
And we just take out one frame, with the dust. So maybe two or four
hundred one-frame cuts in the films. But you don’t see anything when
you're looking at it. Now the computers are much faster so you can run
them and really dissolve the images; five years ago they simply weren’t
fast enough. For recording performances at my loft, I used to love using
an Otari 5050-B tape recorder, which is a beautiful machine. I hated
switching to Digital Audio Tape (DATs) in a way. Now DATs are a real
drag because they’re falling apart. I have a huge box of concert
recordings and they’re starting to rot. I’m trying to get them to the
Lincoln Center Public Library.</p>
<p>Intermedia is not my favorite term.
But I suppose it works. I’m not sure I agree with all of the
philosophical statements of Dick Higgins, who originated the term. <span
style="font-weight: bold;">
Elaine Summers, who immediately liked the word very much, founded
Experimental Intermedia in 1968. </span>The concert series, hosted at my
loft
on Centre Street, started in 1973. I’ve been in the same loft for
fifty-one years. Who can imagine living in New York in a place like that
for fifty-one years? I try to leave it exactly the way I found it.
Everybody who came to SoHo—all the doctors and lawyers who bought
buildings or got involved in buildings—made apartments out of them. I
was interested in keeping it as bare as it was. Even the rooms that are
there now, the kitchen and the recording booth, were offices of the
company that was there before me. I expected to use it as a production
space when I moved and I never did; I never really shot anything there.
It became a performance space with other people’s music. Not everyone
has performed at my loft, but a lot of people have, that’s for sure. We
actually thought about doing something with John Cage just before he
died. I was fairly close with Cage, but Experimental Intermedia is
fundamentally an emerging composers series. Even though many of the
composers are older, they’re still fairly emerging. I hold an annual
six-hour-long Winter Solstice concert, where there would be two or three
hundred people at the loft. I can’t do that now because the landlord
sued. He’s interested in getting me out, so he sued me for being a
nuisance. We’ve kept the price to get into the Experimental Intermedia
Concerts as a donation of $4.99. I had to start doing the Solstice
concert at Roulette.</p>
<p><span style="font-weight: bold;">The music is about the movement of
the sound
in the space. My first intermedia piece with 16-mm projections, slide
projections, and sound was in December of ’68.</span> It was a Judson
Church
show. I made a thirty-six-foot wide modular screen with thirteen pieces
of two-by-two wood. You take these long bolts with a wingnut and use
triangles to hold it together. I also made a piece from Judson’s organ
and played it. The concert actually began with Meredith Monk playing the
organ as the audience arrived. At some point, she gets up, walks down
and sits in the audience but the organ continues. So I made a recording
and I played the recording and faded it in; Monk stopped playing, but
the recording was still going. I come from an era of hi-fi. The whole
idea of having a sound system do the work—that the music is reproduced
through a sound system—is the very essence of the music. I just did this
three-hour concert in Luxembourg and it was all on one file. I play the
file and then play solitaire on my phone, out of sight. I practice a
lot. If I don’t play solitaire every few days I get a little bit
jittery. It’s very concentrating because you have to really look at the
cards carefully. And when you mess up and you miss one, it’s like, Oh
shit.</p>
<p class="contrib-link"> — As told to <a
href="https://www.artforum.com/contributor/canada-choate"
title="Contributions by Canada Choate">Canada Choate in Art Forum<br>
</a></p>
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