Phill Niblock, an influential New York composer and film and video artist who opened new sonic terrain with hauntingly minimalist works incorporating drones, microtones and instruments as diverse as bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies, often accompanied by his equally minimalist moving images, died on Monday in Manhattan. He was 90.
His partner, Katherine Liberovskaya, said he died in a hospital of heart failure after years of cardiac procedures.
Mr. Niblock had no formal musical training. Nevertheless, he came to be hailed as a leading light in the world of experimental music, not only as an artist himself but also, beginning in the 1970s, as the director, with the choreographer Elaine Summers, of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation for dance, avant-garde music and other media. He served as the foundation’s sole director from 1985 until his death, and he was also the curator of the foundation’s record label, XI.
His loft on Centre Street in Lower Manhattan served as a performance space for the foundation. It was also a social nexus for boundary-pushing musicians and composers like John Cage, Arthur Russell, David Behrman and Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth.
In an Instagram post on Tuesday, Mr. Moore wrote that Mr. Niblock’s work summoned a “collective consciousness which gave it its own genuine engagement with listener and performer alike.”
Mr. Niblock’s music was marked by densely layered sound textures consisting of tones, close to one another in pitch, that made only very small movements for extended durations. “Minimalism to me is about stripping out things, and looking at a very small segment — to get rid of melody and rhythm and typical harmonic progressions,” Mr. Niblock said in an interview with Frieze magazine last summer. He added that his pieces “don’t really ‘develop,’ as that word is used in music.”
The films and videos that usually accompanied his music were also conspicuously absent of conventions, eschewing snappy editing and narrative arcs. “In reality, the work is really stripped of most of the stuff that makes a film,” he said.
Ms. Niblock’s best-known work was the piece “The Movement of People Working,” which he first presented in 1973 and continued to update for years, and to perform around the world. It consisted of hypnotic drone music, accompanied on multiple screens by his meditative (and plotless) films, made around the world, of fishermen, agricultural workers and other laborers.
To the initiated, the effect of his work could be mesmerizing. “His performances were powerful, long-duration ritualistic experiences that take over the senses,” David Watson, a guitarist and bagpiper who performed with Mr. Niblock for decades, wrote in an email. “His uncompromising approach — no melody, harmony or rhythm, just the interacting of tones and the unleashing all the energy therein — changed the way we viewed what is possible with performance.”
Phillip Earl Niblock was born on Oct. 2, 1933, in Anderson, Ind., the only child of Herbert Niblock, an engineer in the automotive industry, and Thelma (Smith) Niblock, who ran the household.
After receiving a bachelor’s degree in economics from Indiana University, he served a stint in the Army; upon his discharge in 1958, he headed east. “I was a jazz fan, and I thought if I was going to settle somewhere, why not just come to New York,” he said in a 2007 interview with Paris Transatlantic, an online magazine devoted to new music.
He started his creative career in the city as a photographer, shooting Duke Ellington and other jazz artists, and later worked as a cinematographer filming the work of avant-garde choreographers like Ms. Summers. At that point, he had no thoughts of pursuing a music career himself.
“I was never really interested in being a musician,” he said. “I took piano lessons for about six weeks and my father didn’t think I practiced enough, so he fired the piano teacher.” He never did learn to play an instrument; he relied on tape machines, and eventually, laptops, at his concerts to play prerecorded parts while carefully positioning speakers and adjusting sound levels to accentuate the acoustics of the space.
But in 1961, he saw a performance of a piece by the experimental composer Morton Feldman, which opened a new world to him. “It was an incredible revelation, that you could have a piece without rhythm and melody, and these long tones,” he told Paris Transatlantic. “It really was in a way a permission to do music in a similar kind of way.”
While working in a decidedly noncommercial realm, Mr. Niblock also drew a salary for decades as a professor at the College of Staten Island, part of the City University of New York, teaching photography, film and, later, video. After his retirement in 1995, he toured up to eight months a year until his final months.
His work remained invariably challenging, and it was often presented at aggressive volume. In one performance at Union Chapel, a soaring church and performance venue in London, he almost literally shook the rafters.
“During the concert I felt this sort of rain,” he told Paris Transatlantic. “I felt my hair and it was crumbly. It was the plaster from the dome, filtering down through the air. It must have been over 120 decibels.”
In addition to Ms. Liberovskaya, Mr. Niblock is survived by a son, Jasper.
Even for musicians performing it, Mr. Niblock’s music could have a lingering effect. “After a spell of playing Niblock pieces, I go back to playing some regular music,” Mr. Watson said. “If it has more than three notes in it, I’m thinking, ‘What is all this rococo nonsense?’”
