s a recent transplant to the Midwest, there's a few things to which I'm still struggling to adapt, chief among them the noise -- or lack of it. See, the last place I called home was a dirty corner of Brooklyn, where the ambient noise of sirens, multi-story parking lots, and street clatter meant that every walk through the neighborhood brought a new, distinct, and distinctly loud sonic experience that would trounce any musique concrete piece you'd care to throw at it. In contrast, my beautiful new riverside apartment is all restful, quiet, and calm -- to my New York-trained ears, disturbingly so.


At least, that's what I thought until a recent evening smoke on the porch introduced me to one of the most ear-pleasingly alien sound sensations I've ever experienced -- the Tornado Warning System Drill. I knew something was up when the minute-long alarm kicked in, but I could never have anticipated the corruscated drone that followed. A two-note sustained chord suddenly rang clear before slipping gradually and gracefully from harmony to discordance, then slowly building a stunning acoustic depth from the natural reverberation of the urban outdoors. It sounded like an ethereal distant cousin to Tony Conrad's tinny and abrasive "Four Violins," spacious and contemplative instead of harsh and invasive. In short, it sounded stunning, and when the drill abruptly finished twenty minutes later, I felt vaguely numb, as if awoken too early from a particularly pleasant slumber, or perhaps just plain kicked in the chest.


Since that unexpected late night concerto, I've found myself craving something to replicate the experience, and the only thing I've discovered that does the trick is Phill Niblock's newest double CD work, "Touch Food," a two-hour long collection of processed recordings of clarinet, saxophone and electric bass. Which is perhaps not too surprising: after all, the now seventy year old composer has made a long and productive career delving into the musical possibilities of the timeless continuum. Though his reluctance to release his work in recorded format in favor of live performance has made him less of a household name than the likes of LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, Niblock is perhaps the most interesting of the American minimalist composers because of his staunch commitment to craftmanship (that, plus he never succumbed to the bid-for-popularity bug that resulted in so much cheeseball Philip Glass bunk). Like the sonic equivalent of a Rothko painting, Niblock's work (given its first comprehensive overview in the compilation CD A Young Person's Guide to Phill Niblock (Blast First)) focuses intently on microscopic, almost undetectable shifts of density and tone within an immersive whole. It's an aesthetic that truly unfolds with the kind of undivided attention that opens up the subliminal motion churning beneath the surface.


It's also an aesthetic that benefits from Niblock's own instructions (from the liner notes of G2, 44 +/ X2 (Moikai)) to "play very loud. If the neighbors don't complain before the piece ends, it's probably not loud enough. The ones that live a mile down the road, that is" Niblock isn't joking: "Touch Food" sounds good loud but better LOUDER, particularly in the case of the cascading tonalities of the first CD. The opening track "Sea Jelly Yellow," which draws from source recordings of Ulrich Krieger on baritone saxophone, begins inauspiciously enough with the same note repeated on left and right speakers, but gradually Niblock introduces a lower octave, then the tones begin to quaver a little, then a discordant note slides sneakily into the mix, until soon the piece has built into a quivering mass of molten energy that, yes, could quite easily irritate your neighbors. "Sweet Potato", constructed from Carol Robinson's bass clarinet, basset horn, and E-flat clarinet, achieves a similar but sweeter weight, plying sustained harmonics that swell into moments of almost melodramatic grandeur before seceding into hushed reverence. Played quiet, it's hard to appreciate the masterful subtlety with which Niblock manipulates the component parts, but play it REALLY FUCKING LOUD and the whole achieves an engrossing, restless resonance that's overwhelming, and overwhelmingly beautiful.


Of course, the cynical listener may criticize Niblock's work for sounding the same, and on a superficial level they'd be right: play a thirty second excerpt of any Niblock piece back-to-back and you'd be hard pressed to name the track from which it came. But Niblock's pieces aren't built for instant gratification: God really does lie in the details. The third track of the first disc, "Yam Almost May," built from Kasper T. Toeplitz's electric bass, demonstrates the kind of differences that open up to deep listening, building not over the course of twenty minutes but instead in a series of thirty second cycles, rotating in slow crescendos of high and low harmonics that begin to run out of phase to devastating effect. The second CD, composed of one long track, "Pan Fried 70," divided (seemingly arbitrarily) into five movements, is more strikingly dissimilar, built from samples of Reinhold Friedly bowing a piano string with nylon. The metallic texture that results is stern and commanding, a million miles from the soft flutter of the wind instruments of the first disc, but Niblock's manipulations range in tone from more contemplative passages to all out sturm-und-drang, all with the tightly controlled confidence of the master technician.


Make no mistake: "Touch Food" is a demanding chunk of sound, and one that repels the kind of hyperspeed channel-surfing mentality that results in all those Kid606 and Donna Summer records. But with patience, the meticulously arranged drones of these two discs unfold into things of wonder. For those who thought Kevin Drumm's Sheer Hellish Miasma could use an orchestral makeover -- or for those who won't be able to make it to the next Tornado Warning Drill -- Phill Niblock will fit the bill quite nicely.