Phill Niblock likes large, dense slabs of sound, the larger, denser, and louder the better.
G2, 44+/x2 (check the song titles for an explanation of the album's title) consists of two versions of a single piece, "Guitar too, for four." The first is a solo performance by the Spanish guitarist
Rafael Toral. The instructions for the piece appear to be quite simple but require an enormous amount of concentration and physical tension. Using an E-Bow (a small electronic device capable of magnetically vibrating the guitar's strings), he must hold it as close as possible to the strings without touching them, while manipulating his tremolo arm in an extremely subtle manner so as to educe the maximum amount of richness and volume from his instrument with a minimum of means. For the listener, this results in a deep, resonant, and multi-layered drone that oscillates from speaker to speaker, filling the aural space like a horde of chanting Tibetan monks. It's hypnotic, ravishing, and endlessly fascinating. The second rendition ups the ante considerably, taking samples from
Toral,
Robert Poss, Susan Stengler, and
David First and adding in performances of the piece by
Kevin Drumm,
Lee Ranaldo,
Thurston Moore, and
Alan Licht, all mixed by
Jim O'Rourke. While in a sense sounding substantially the same, the ambience has greatly thickened, the already busy hive now super-compressed with buzzes, gargantuan hums, and seismic sizzles. The listener feels as though plunged into a complex, vibrating crystal the size of the Earth. As with many of his pieces,
Niblock suggests playing the disc as loudly as possible. Do it, but warn the neighbors. Highly recommended, this is one of the finest examples of high-energy drone music around.