I met Phill Niblock in New York in 1988 and worked with him in the first half of the 90s.

I helped him with some of his long tone pieces. He paid me $15 an hour to sit with him and a computer. I basically showed him how to make his pieces with a MIDI setup.

You’d have a note that was playing for an hour or something, and every couple of minutes, we would increment these tiny little pitch bends with the MIDI pitch bend wheel. Phill would go, “Oh, well that’s two minutes, let’s bend it to 0.01.” So I’d make that adjustment.

The whole point of Phill’s music is is you stop listening to the pitch after a while and you’re just listening to the wavering, the beating. When two notes are really close, but not actually in tune, they go wow-wow-wow-wow-wow-wow. The further away from each other they get the faster that beating gets. And so if you’re sitting and watching one of Phill’s films of people picking rice in China, after a while it sounds like a percussion piece, because you’re just listening to that beating sound and focusing in on that.

Invariably, at some point, we’d pack in working on the long tones and drink scotch. He would rummage around is his his office to find old black and white glossy pictures. He used to be a photographer for hire. He’d put on a recording of Duke Ellington and he’d show me all these pictures of the members of the Duke Ellington Band showing up to the studio. He’d say stuff like, “There’s Billy Strayhorn, passing out the arrangements,” as he handed me the photo.

It just turned into this whole thing, every single day – the long tones, the tiny pitch bends, the beating, the old photographs and the scotch. I think he was hiring me to show him how to do it so that he could just keep on sitting there doing it day after day after day. It was a lot of fun working with Phill. I loved it at the time.

Reed Hays is a cellist and electronic musician, composer and producer. He is one half of Reed & Caroline, and most recently appeared on Vince Clarke’s Songs Of Silence.

Words: Reed Hays

Interview: Mat Smith (October 2023)

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