Curled up like a boy of three on the sofa one Saturday night you drift forward in a slowly spiraling movement through the weather forecasts on the TV, which you are not consciously aware if in your sleep, but which none the less provide the grammatical base for your sensual feeling of moving along the curvature of the Earth like a cloud, suspended, yet heavy with potential precipitation, casting your shadow on the fields below: “Five More String Quartets” by Phill Niblock; such are the visions this music may induce…

To realize that this music is no electronic music, but in fact the sound of a string quartet – is amazing! In the very detailed and comprehensive booklet you can learn a lot about this vibrant music, which transforms the act of hearing into a swooping breathlessness of vertigo… The string quartet is recorded in its unprocessed state to multitrack tape, as the musicians are tuned to specific pitches – individually – by calibrated sine tones fed to them by headphones. The individual tuning to the sine waves in the headphones explains the minute microtonal deviations that bend this progression of outstretched tones out of shape and wack, as if reflected in a slightly indented or protruding piece of polished sheet steel… In the booklet you can also learn that the two violins, the viola and the cello were miked separately and assigned to either of the two channels in the stereo mix, “to obtain maximum separation of the microtonal intervals”.
It is better to hear this soaring, slicing, relentless beauty over speakers at loud volumes, than through earphones, because the nature of the microtonal compressions through your air space make the perception of the music change when you are moving in the room, or even just turning your head!
All kinds of analogies fly through your mind on listening; like “swarms of bees” or “a fleet of bombers on the way to Berlin in 1944” or “sheer energy sweeping around the celestial bodies of our solar system” or “the sound of 2° Kelvin; the average temperature of the Universe” or “the sound of sundown at Antarctica” - the limitation of your own experience or fantasy being the sole limitation of the visions and ideas this downright grasp for breathables might induce… in a jingle jangle morning… in an out-of-the-body sensation of sorts…
You’re in a copper sphere, suspended in its midst, as these copper colored vibrations glitter and shine from all around, in myriads of minute brittle quirks and jolts on the level of sub-atomic jitter, carrying you around yourself in an utterly slow revolution, according to phase shifts of un-chartered universal laws of perception…

David Soldier of the Soldier String Quartet is also assistant Professor of Neurology and Psychiatry at Columbia University. This puts him in a unique position to further dwell on perceptual peculiarities of Phill Niblock’s music on this CD. He says –and I quote him in full on this (from the CD booklet): “Exactly what are the unplayed pitches you might hear in this music? The highest pitch played in ‘Five More String Quartets” is roughly a G-sharp resting on the top line of the treble staff. The lowest note is played by the cello, around a G-flat at the bottom of the bass clef. If you hear higher or lower pitches (or pitches in the middle that are not centered around G-natural) and are listening on distortion-free speakers and you are in a non-reflective room, you are hearing auditory hallucinations produced inside your ear. These pitches, called sum, difference, or combination tones, are determined by the played (fundamental) tones. For instance, if a violin is playing a pitch close to a G-sharp above middle C, say 420 Hz (cycles per second), and a viola plays a flatter pitch an octave lower, say 200Hz (a little above G), the sum tone is f1 + f2 = 620 Hz (close to a D-sharp above the violin note), the difference tone f1 – f2 = 220 Hz (an A below middle C), and the combination tones derived from harmonic frequencies, for example 2f1 – f2 = 640 Hz (between the sum tone D-sharp and E-natural). These auditory hallucinations are audible at sound pressure levels from about 20 dB to 65 dB.
The physiological mechanism underlying this phenomenon is partly understood. The fundamental pitches stimulate mechanoreceptive cells, the so called ‘hair bundles’ in the cochlea of the ear, by deflecting a mechanically sensitive ‘hinge’ on the cell. This mechanical force results in the opening of electrical ion channels, producing a change in cellular voltage that contributes to the vibrations of the bundles. Stimulated at a single frequency, a hair bundle will normally vibrate only at that frequency and its first harmonic (the octave). However, since the ion channels jump back and forth from open to closed states and modify the bundle’s movement, there is a nonlinear relationship between the auditory stimulus and the force of the bundle’s vibration. With the addition of a second frequency, the cells vibrate not only at the frequencies of the fundamentals and their harmonics but also at the frequencies of sum, difference and combination tones. The vibrations at these new frequencies do not occur after a similar stimulation of an inert object such as a glass fiber or if the ion channels in the bundle are blocked by drugs; the pitch hallucinations are apparently the result of the opening and closing of cellular ion channels. The hair bundle’s new ‘hallucinatory’ vibrations are transmitted through the ear’s basilar membrane, activating other hair bundles in the region of the cochlea responsive to the new frequencies. The auditory nerve, and the cerebral cortex are therefore unable to differentiate between ‘real’ played frequencies and those arising from this special characteristic of the frequency responsive cells in the ear.”

In contrast to “Five More String Quartets” “Early Winter” constitutes a mix of recorded instruments, computer controlled electronic instruments and live instruments in the studio, resulting in a total of 38 sampled and synthesizer voices on the tape. An 8 track tape of a bass flute is incorporated in the mix. Finally, in the studio, the string quartet and the flutist played as they were monitoring the mix of electronic instruments and recorded bass flutes on headphones. Niblock says: “To hear the cloud of high frequency harmonics, the playback sound level must be loud. In performance, with speaker systems in the corners of the performance space, the sound levels for ‘Early Winter’ are normally about 100dB.”

“Early Winter” is a magnificent magnifying glass towards that sparkling sheet of freshness of the first snow in sunlight or moonlight, in a very cold climate. The snow crystals are intact in their myriad of variations; shape upon shape built on the same crystalline principal of nature; all the same and each and every one different from all the others, and in this music you can experience the sum of the sounds or the un-countable variations therein, inside this standing wave through the world, vibrating, dancing, flowing forth in its standstill like a curtain by the window, slowly shifting with the wind, its surface traveling in waves, itself indeed remaining positioned – and so “Early Winter” asks questions about motion and stillness, about sound and silence – and about motionless motion.