Phill Niblock - Muna Torso

A Closer Listen

Given the long history of collaboration between experimental music and the visual arts and film, it’s no surprise that a lot of music we cover on this site was designed in to be presented alongside a moving image.

The composer Phill Niblock self-identifies as an intermedia artist, working across music, film, and photography.  Although often used interchangeably with other terms such as multimedia, intermedia was originally coined by the artist Dick Higgins to describe work that was truly between media.  Rather than another means of describing a multimodal art like cinema, Higgins was more interested in art that fused its various media not just formally but conceptually.  Writing that strove to become painting (what he calls abstract calligraphy) or video that aspired to be music, as examples.

Intermedia is the perfect lens through which to understand Muna Torso, an audiovisual work resulting from the long-term collaboration between Niblock and the choreographer and dancer Muna Tseng.  The video and composition released earlier this year by Room40 is a distillation of a longer performance project the pair produced in 1992.

According to Room 40 label founder Lawrence English, Muna Torso is one of the only compositions in Niblock’s extensive oeuvre to use synthetic sounds.  The twenty-one minute piece is comprised of several drones with the timbral qualities of acoustic instruments like horns and strings.  Over the course of the piece their layered, sustained tones rarely modulate or break off. While their sound is relentless and ominous it is also and perhaps inevitably, absorbing.  The drone’s dissonance initially seems to exist in stark contrast to the undulating body of Tseng, the sole subject of the work’s accompanying video.  It takes a few seconds of watching to realize the object the camera pans around in the black and white video is Tseng’s torso shot in an extreme close-up.  Throughout, the camera traces the outline of her body, focusing on the torso, but also capturing the spaces between arms and torso as the body twists and shifts against a stark, glowing white.

Tseng’s sensual sway is gentle, occasionally speeding up restlessly as the instruments stretch both our, and seemingly Tseng’s, ability to maintain interest.  She, like the listener to Niblock’s drones via headphones, seems at times to struggle with what to do with her body.  At times it seems to respond more intuitively to the music, at others her body conveys a sense of hesitation.  The sustained harshness of the works’ sound is, however, mellowed by the body’s motion, which we never see in its entirety, as it fills the frame of the camera.

Muna Torso taps into the long history of collaboration between experimental musicians and dancers (thinking especially, of course, of John Cage and Merce Cunningham’s decades long partnership.) It’s fascinating to watch a body responding to Niblock’s relentless droning. The way it shifts between movement and stasis. Although it is never completely still, there’s a marked contrast between the moments in which Tseng’s body speeds up and slows down, even as the tempo of the drones remain (mostly) the same.  As Muna Torso draws to a close the camera gets increasingly lost in Tseng’s body, the light of the white backdrop often slipping from view just as her body did in earlier moments. (Jennifer Smart)