While belonging to the early minimalist generation, Niblock deliberately chose to limit the number of his recordings, believing that his real composition is the live performances and his real instrument is the tape. One can play a tape anywhere, but, like any instrument, the way it is played (back) depends on the player. Ideally, Niblock's tape should be played back by Niblock himself in an environment of his choice. Thus a recording that can be listened in any room is only an approximation of Niblock's music. In fact, it is a form of cheating (it's like hanging a Beethoven score on the wall and pretending that you have just listened to Beethoven's music).

His earliest recordings were Nothin' To Look At Just A Record (India Navigation, 1983), which contains two pieces for trombone with Jon English and James Fulkerson (later improved and revised on Young Person's Guide), and Niblock for Celli (India Navigation, 1987). Reportedly frustrated by the sonic limitations of vinyl recordings, Niblock refused to record anything else until the CD format came along.

Four Full Flutes (XI, 1990), four compositions from the 1980s performed by Peter Kotik, Susan Stenger and Eberhard Blum, is a good introduction to Niblock's droning art, to his structures that originate from the massive interference of different fields of sound. Niblock's music sounds plain, linear, even monotonous on the surface, but at the end it leaves the feeling of a violent shock. A thick drone sets the stage for PK, as the flute whispers intermittently like a distant lighthouse's siren. Then it becomes, in turn, the reference drone for another line of undulating breathing. The mobile tone that opens SLS has a majestic quality. Again a repetitive pattern in the flute is superimposed to the drone, and, again, it metabolizes slowly. Those two pieces were created as complementary to each other, so that they can be combined to obtain another Niblock composition, PK & SLS, in which the monolithic drones of the two pieces originate a trascendental polyphony. Winterbloom Too for bass flute is another intriguing case of ambiguity: repetition, metamorphosis, evolution, decay and immanence are aspects of the same process. The protagonist is, again, the interaction between an ever-present cosmic drone and the intermittent voice of the flute.

Music By Phill Niblock (XI, 1993) contains two pieces that summarize many of Niblock's obsessions. Five More String Quartets (1991) is a piece for five multi-tracked string quartets. While the instrumental format may be unusual for him, the multi-tracked technique is the usual one. The result, though, is almost chaotic, a departure from his linear and monodimensional textures. Here the listener "moves" in a number of disorienting dimensions. The colossal Early Winter (1991) is a solemn, agonizing piece for flutes, string quartet and synthesizer (for a grand total of 51 "voices"), and it represents a real departure in technical terms because it uses a much more complex mixing process and it involves both live/recorded instruments and electronics. The dense texture projects a melodramatic feelingS, halfway between the suspense for the coming of the apocalypse and the beginning of a requiem. The bass tones, in fact, seem to play the role of a grave male choir. It is like the amplified still picture of an instant in time, an instant that will last an eternity. It is not a simple still, though: it has features, it carries a message. It has meaning.

Young Person's Guide to Phill Niblock (Blast First, 1995), reissued as YPGPN (XI, 2002), is a two-CD set that spans 20 years of compositions. Held Tones (1982), with Barbara Held on flute, is music of mathematical precision, but that seems to breathe like the human performer, and to resonate with a universal mind.
A Trombone Piece (1978), for James Fulkerson on trombone, is a sequence of simple tones, but the recording and mixing turns it into a dramatic, menacing premonition. A Third Trombone (1979), for Jon English on trombone, is a calmer, softer and subtler sequence of tones. Unmentionable Piece for Trombone and Sousaphone (1982), for George Lewis on trombone and Barbara Held on sousaphone, is another sinister piece, whose immobility and whose accelerations project a cosmic grandeur, a sense of universal tragedy. Niblock's music feels "terminal": it sounds like the last words of a dying man, or the last words of a dying civilization. Or the first words of a new civilization.
Didjeridoos and Don'ts (1992), for Ulrich Krieger on didjeridoo, is one of his most direct compositions: the drone is manipulated so as to sound like a very delayed and dilated melody, but it maintains a humane quality that most of his music seems to reject. The quiet and soothing Ten Auras (1978) is presented in two versions, the original one for Ulrich Krieger on tenor saxophone, and a newer one, live in the studio. Compared with the intesity of the other pieces, there two (three) are almost new-age music.

China & Sunsets and The Movement Of People Working (Extreme) are DVDs of film and music made during the 1970s and 1980s.

Touch Works For Hurdy Gurdy And Voice (Touch, 2001) collects the superb and ecstatic 15-minute Hurdy Hurry (1999) for Jim O'Rourke on hurdy gurdy and the 21-minute A Y U (1999) for Thomas Buckner's throat singing (two versions, both multi-tracking the voice in an almost psychedelic fashion).

G2,44+/x2 (Moikai, 2002) is minimalist music for guitars, performed by a geographically-distributed ensemble including Robert Poss, Rafael Toral, Alan Licht, Kevin Drumm, Lee Ranaldo, Thurston Moore and Jim O'Rourke. The two versions of Guitar Too For Four (1996) are both sculpted by Niblock taking as input the actual performances of the guitarists. The result is a music of subliminal drones. On the surface, this is very similar to LaMonte Young's music, but the texture is somehow dense and glacial instead of light and warm.

The closer one looks at a still photograph, the more vividly one appreciates the movements that are implied by so many of its details. The illusion of stillness is a central theme of Niblock's art, and that very theme is reworked one more time, and possibly in its definitive form, throughout the monumental pieces that comprise the two-CD set Touch Food (Touch, 2003).
These are among the most "expressive" compositions of the New York-based minimalist composer. The solemn Sea Jelly Yellow, whose source is German composer Ulrich Krieger on baritone saxophone, is a good introduction to Niblock's ecosystem of slowly evolving organisms. The texture is dark, heavy and thick, but set in motion by an overdose of colors. By the end of the piece, one has the feeling not of a still photograph but of a fast-forwarding video. The sustained pattern of Sweet Potato, with Carol Robinson on various clarinets, is much more subdued, and emanates a sense of impending drama. Yam Almost May, with French composer Kasper Toeplitz on bass (sounding more like bagpipes), is perhaps a bit self-indulgent in its exploration/juxtaposition of drones.
The disc-long Pan Fried 70 (70 minutes), with Reinhold Friedl on acoustic piano (the source is a nylon string tied to a piano string), is the one Niblock composition to own. Its metamorphosis reveals Niblock at his most magic: it starts with clashing chords that seem to mimic Tibetan droning, then it weaves the piano's huge reverbs into a hypnotic stream of ambient music, then it soars higher and higher, acquiring an almost symphonic grandeur (particularly the fourth movement), and finally it curls back into its relaxed pre-natal posture.
Niblock's dense stationary waves are, ultimately, essays on Time itself. Niblock manipulates our perception of Time by disguising change as stability. As Saint Augustine said about 16 centuries ago, "If I don't think of it, I know what Time is. The more I think of it, the less I know what it is". That is precisely what Niblock does to us: he makes us think of Time. His floating galaxies of tones force us to focus on the very nature and essence of Time. The effect is, as with Saint Augustine, disorienting. We don't know who, where and "when" we are anymore. Contrary to the new-age philosophies that preach the immanence of Being, Niblock's music preaches almost the opposite: the inexistence, the very impossibility of Being. And this is where the ancient Roman philosopher and the modern American composer part ways: Saint Augustine's experience was mainly spiritual, while Niblock's is a very physical experience. Niblock's version of "deep listening" is not meditation, it is not trance, and it is not release: it is sheer panic. Rarely has a composer conveyed so clearly the feeling of sound as a force of nature, as a fundamental feature of the universe.

Besides the usual digital collage, Disseminate (Mode, 2004) contains two traditionally composed and performed pieces (one for a 60 piece orchestra, and the other one for viola, cello, bass clarinet, soprano sax, flute and trombone).

The triple-cd Touch Three (Touch, 2006) contains pieces scored for just one instrument. In each case Niblock used long notes of the instrument to create sonic mirages that never grow but simply revolve, very slowly, as if to exhibit their various sides. They are testaments to Niblock's love of sound, manic explorations of the ultimate nature of "music".

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