The death of Phill Niblock breaks a golden thread which ran all the way back to the postwar cultural explosion on America’s East Coast. He was a composer of minimalist music, but before that a film maker, and a photographer who worked amid the jazz scene – he snapped his teenage idol Duke Ellington many times, including at the latter’s famous 1962 Blue Note session Money Jungle, with Max Roach and Charles Mingus. When you factor in Phill’s activities with Experimental Intermedia, the great XI label, his hosting of an annual music and noise all-nighter at his Manhattan loft space, a punishing tour schedule that ran well into his eighties, and the countless people he’s inspired, it marks an enormous loss to experimental music.

We brought Phill and his close collaborator/touring buddy Thomas Ankersmit into the Resonance FM studios for a radio show way back in 2010. I made my first mistake attempting to cram Phill and Thomas onto a 90 minute show which also featured some new music by kindred minimalist spirit Eleh, when I should have let their sounds stretch out to fill all the space; the second was to prerecord the show in Resonance’s small second studio, an intimate box room with all three of us crammed in, reached by a spiral staircase which Phill had to attempt slowly and steadily.

Phill sat alongside me for most of the show, telling me his main inspiration as a composer was site-specific live performances, and the kind of temporal durations which are impossible to capture on record. This openended thinking filtered down to the way he avoided editing or analysing the sounds he worked with, and just let them be. His explained all this with a logic, clarity and good humour at odds with a situation where we were almost crouched together in a cupboard. As I remember it, during the long tracks we ended up chatting a lot about his old jazz stories and favourite players, and then had to jump back to his latest compositions when we were back on air. Too much life to fit into one show.

He performed at Cafe Oto while he was in town, a longform set at loud volume in low light. A couple of times I fell asleep momentarily, and woke to find I was still locked inside the same powerful matrix of sound. Waking into the middle of a gig wipes clean the expectations and conventions that usually accrue around any kind of formal performance setting, and it was like all that was left were human beings experiencing and enduring volume and vibration.

In one of his recent email circulars, Phill was inviting people to a party to celebrate his 90th birthday party. “I want to see you all,” it said, while also noting that around 10:30pm he would have to go back to his residential facility for health reasons. The guy went home but his party rolls on.

The Wire has made Dan Warburton’s terrific 2006 cover story on Phill available to read over on its Exact Editions site – find it here.

Photo: Phill Niblock at Brown Hall, Boston, 2012 (Susanna Bolle)