Saturday 15 April 2023, 1pm
Delighted to welcome back Phill Niblock in his 90th year, this time in a duo alongside video artist, Katherine Liberovskaya, followed by a solo music and film set from Phill featuring many new music pieces not performed in London before, alongside newly edited video from Sumatra 1990.
Phill Niblock is a New York-based minimalist composer and multi-media musician and director of Experimental Intermedia, a foundation born in the flames of 1968's barricade-hopping. He has been a maverick presence on the fringes of the avant garde ever since. Niblock constructs big 24-track digitally-processed monolithic microtonal drones. Changes are almost imperceptible, and his music has a tendency of creeping up on you. He says: "What I am doing with my music is to produce something without rhythm or melody, by using many microtones that cause movements very, very slowly." Niblock's performances are almost always accompanied by his films - painstaking studies of manual labour, giving a poetic dignity to sheer gruelling slog of fishermen at work, rice-planters, log-splitters, water-hole dredgers and other back-breaking toilers. Since 1968 Phill has also put on over 1000 concerts in his loft space, including Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O'Rourke.
Katherine Liberovskaya (CA) is a video/media artist based in Montreal and New York. Involved in experimental video since the 80s, she has produced numerous videos, video installations and performances shown at various events and venues around the world. Since 2001 her work predominantly focuses on collaborations with composers and sound artists notably in live video+sound performance where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes. Frequent collaborators include Phill Niblock, Al Margolis/If,Bwana, Zanana, Kristin Norderval, Hitoshi Kojo, David Watson, David First and o.blaat (Keiko Uenishi). Recent projects have involved: Leslie Ross, Shelley Hirsch, Chantal Dumas, Richard Garet, Dorit Chrysler, Emilie Mouchous, Erin Sexton, Corinne Rene and Philippe Lauzier. Concurrently she curates and organizes the Screen Compositions evenings at Experimental Intermedia, NYC, since 2005 and the OptoSonic Tea series at Diapason, NYC, since 2006. In 2014 she completed a PhD in the Study and Practice of Art entitled “Improvisatory Live Visuals: Playing Images Like a Musical Instrument” at the Universite du Quebec in Montreal (UQAM).
