The winter solstice has long held deep significance for cultures dating back to as far as the Neolithic period. Some of civilisation's oldest monuments, from Stonehenge to Newgrange, are carefully aligned on sight lines pointing toward the winter solstice sunrise and sunset. And it's no surprise for the day marked the middle of winter, giving early man a crucial indicator – a signpost that guided food consumption for the remaining winter months – but on an even deeper level, the winter solstice signified for ancient pagan peoples the beginning of a rebirth, marking the resurrection of a beloved sun god and the gradual reawakening of nature.
American composer and multi-media artist Phill Niblock marks the winter solstice with a unique annual ritual of his own. On the evening of the shortest day (and longest night) of the year, Niblock has, for years, hosted a marathon-length concert of his music and films at his famed 224 Centre Street loft in SoHo, a space that has been at the centre of New York City's downtown experimental music scene for over four decades. Recently, Niblock has moved the event to Roulette, a much larger venue able to accommodate the consistently sizeable turnout, and with good reason; his ‘Winter Solstice’ has become a staple of the holiday music season – a transformative evening of ear-splittingly loud drones paired with hypnotic scenes of manual labourers that offers New Yorkers hungry for a transcendent musical experience (other than Handel's Messiah), a meditative respite from the hustle and bustle of capitalism come Christmastime.
Yet there's little silence to be had. Consisting of 15 works (each around 20 minutes in length) over the course of six hours, there's virtually no break in the performed sound, no clapping, no intermission, no distractions, nothing outside of oneself to break inadvertently the flow of attention – a rare experience for most New Yorkers, even for those few mindful concertgoers. Each work unfolds like the next out of eight loudspeakers placed strategically around the hall, creating the sensation of being submerged in the inescapable presence of sound. The pieces themselves consist of radically sustained sounds often rich in overtones, from accordion to harmonium, organ to bagpipe. While ‘drone’ may pejoratively conjure a static quality, Niblock's drones are always evolving, as if he were gradually and artfully pulling the stops out on a grand pipe organ. His dense, often microtonal, clusters, pumped out at exceedingly loud volumes, create a myriad of combination tones, beatings and other psychoacoustic phenomena in the ears of the listeners, prompting an almost physically arresting sensation in the body. Aside from the purely fixed media works, three pieces in the six-hour long evening were performed with live accompaniment from David Watson (bagpipes), George Kentros (violin), and Tom Chiu (violin). Each musician played an individual part on top of a layered fixed media track, whilst walking slowly around the hall. These were perhaps the most sonically engaging moments of the evening, as the beautifully unpolished element of the live performer was introduced on top of Niblock's rich sound masses.
The films playing throughout the night were displayed simultaneously on three large projector screens: one on the stage, and one on either side of the audience seating area. At stage left and right, two smaller video screens showed a further two films (giving five films in total). Each film played continuously, concurrently and independently of the others, featuring a loop of three-to-six 16 mm films taken at various times between 1983 and 2015, and lasting between 30 minutes and four hours respectively. The films were all made by Niblock himself, who travelled to Peru, Japan, China, Brazil, Romania and South Africa (to name a few) to film long, largely unedited takes of labourers performing such everyday menial tasks as hand-sewing, tilling fields, washing clothes, fishing, picking berries, kneading dough and milking goats. Some activities stood out from these more mindless work-oriented tasks: for example, one film showed a group of African girls dancing on their knees, of babies being baptised, and of women joyfully playing football on a dirt field. Other standout films were the most recent ones, filmed in 2015 and, tellingly, in high definition. These films, which appeared to be of close-ups of flowers – each bloom appearing almost static, completely still, yet moving ever so slightly – were evocatively suggestive of Niblock's musical textures.
What was perhaps even more striking than the music or the films themselves was the juxtaposition of the two. The questions such a pairing creates in the mind of the listener when these two worlds collide are vast and unending (similar to the overall experience of an intense spatial six-hour audio-visual experience). Questions about the interaction between man and machine, pleasure and work, the human body and motion, rhythm and form are all conjured in this evening of nearly non-stop sound and film. While Niblock claims that his pairings are free from specific anthropological or sociological aims, there's no doubt that his choice repeatedly to present such a large body of his own work on the evening of this deeply significant and anciently celebrated astronomical event, speaks to his continued search for a deeper connection to the rituals that have driven humanity and its soul-searching for millennia.
