Category: 2024

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we lost another giant this week – phill niblock, long-time friend and supporter of the program, passed away on monday, january 8th 2024 at the age of 90.

i first met phill here in estonia in 2006 during an art festival in the small village of mooste, and friendship was immediately kindled. this was nothing unusual – phill traveled copiously, and had friends in every corner, and kept in touch with all of us. he had a way of making every one of his friendships feel special, and was somehow able to maintain them all. soon after that first meeting, we were meeting again in the states, and then the uk, and then france. everywhere i went, he seemed to be there. i performed in his loft in new york, and helped organise his performance in london. interviewed him for resonance fm, and hosted him for a brief holiday, with plenty of red wine, in the french countryside. my time with him was always also time with his partner of 22 years, katherine liberovskaya, and often also time with other friends we had both met that summer in estonia, rie nakajima and marie roux, now of the performance group o yama o. rie and marie were kind enough to record the framework introduction for this show together (yet remotely) in tribute to phill.

and i haven’t even mentioned his music yet. his oft-quoted description of his own sound begins to sum it up: No harmony. No melody. No rhythm. No bullshit. phill’s sound was massive, and he preferred to listen to it that way, presenting is to live audiences at 110dB. he had definite favorites, which he even presented to me (and many others, i’m sure) on a home-burned cdr with ‘personal faves’ hand-written on it. but that’s not what we’re going to be listening to in this edition. next week we’ll be relistening to the show i did with him for resonance fm in 2007, featuring his own selection of favorite tracks and an extended interview. but for this edition, we’re exploring a different side of work: the pieces he gave to me over the years specifically for airplay on framework. these pieces are (almost) entirely field recording based – two were contributions for framework editions releases, our very first release, framework250, in 2009, and the follow-up framework500 a few years later. but also some other then-unreleased works (some of which have subsequently been released) and one even composed from the sounds of his own car engine recorded in mooste during our first meeting in 2006.