Phill Niblock

Phillip Earl Niblock (October 2, 1933 – January 8, 2024) was an American composer, filmmaker, and videographer. In 1985, he was appointed director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for avant-garde music based in New York with a parallel branch in Ghent, Belgium. Early life and education Niblock was born in Anderson, Indiana on October 2, 1933, to Herbert and Thelma Niblock. He attended Indiana University and graduated with a BA in economics in 1956. He served a brief stint in the U.S. Army after graduating, and in 1958, he moved to New York, where he worked as a photographer and filmmaker. Career Niblock’s first musical compositions date from 1968. Unusually, even among the avant-garde composers of his generation, he had no formal musical training. He cited the musical activities of New York in the 1960s (and occasional memorable performances, such as the premiere of Morton Feldman’s Durations pieces) as a stimulus. All of his compositions were worked out intuitively rather than systematically. His early works were all done with tape, overdubbing unprocessed recordings of precisely tuned long tones played on traditional instruments in four, eight, or sixteen tracks. Since th