Phill Niblock was an American composer, filmmaker and organiser, born in Anderson, Indiana, on 2 October 1933 and died in New York on 8 January 2024. He arrived in New York in 1958 as a photographer and filmmaker of jazz and dance, and began composing in 1968 with no formal musical training.
His method was to record long tones from acoustic instruments, then layer many of them at pitches only fractionally apart. The tiny differences produce beating and clouds of overtones that seem to move although nothing in the score does, a dense and often microtonal sound heard on works such as Four Full Flutes (1990) and Touch Food (2003). From the early 1970s he also shot The Movement of People Working, long, steady takes of manual and agricultural labour around the world, often projected during his concerts. From 1985 until his death he directed Experimental Intermedia, the non-profit founded in 1968 by the dancer Elaine Summers, hosting performances in his loft in Lower Manhattan.