"Godfather of Ambient" (Brian Eno)

Phill Niblock is an intermedia artist using music, film, photography, video and computers. He was born in Indiana in 1933. Since the mid-60s he has been making music and intermedia performances, a.o. at: The Museum of Modern Art, The Wadsworth Atheneum, the Kitchen; the Paris Autumn Festival, Palais des Beaux Arts, Bruxelles, Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Akademie der Künste, Berlin, Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts at Harvard, World Music Insitute at Merkin Hall, and on radio in the U.S., Germany, France, and Belgium. Phill Niblock's intermedia work addresses technical and aesthetic issues in four artistic disciplines that combine various levels and diverge in others. The music explores the texture of sound resulting from multiple tones in very dense tunings performed in long durations. The combination of static surface textures and extremely active harmonic movement generates a highly original music that has influenced a generation of composers. The pieces are created on tape from unprocessed recordings of precisely tuned long tones played on traditional instruments. In performance, live musicians may play, wandering through the audience, changing the sound texture through reinforcement of, or interference with, the exisiting tunings.
"Phill Niblock's music and films are concerned with detail and simplicity ... dense, imposing sound mass ... sum and different tones pile up until they sound like an orchestra of strings or an immense chorus of voices." Robert Palmer, New York Times
At the Viennese performance, Niblock will perform with the Berlin saxophone player, composer and improviser Ulrich Krieger. Special guests: Werner Dafeldecker, Alan Licht, Dean Roberts, Burkhard Stangl, and Martin Zrost.