By choosing to combine for this recording two complementary but distinctly different drone-based, immersive pieces by the legendary veteran composer and artist/film-maker Phill Niblock (born 1933, USA), and the younger, Berlin-based composer/violist Catherine Lamb (born 1982, USA), Norway’s Ensemble neoN creates a perfect sense of aesthetic balance. Loud is followed by quiet; what seems like random patterning gives way to orderly design; and the opening instrumental ensemble-setting is transformed by the subsequent addition of guest voices. Listening to both pieces one after another is like experiencing thesis and anti-thesis through the medium of Side A and Side B.

The incredible wind-tunnel rush of the Niblock piece, To Two Tea Roses, can feel at first like 23 minutes of head-spinning noise. A combination of microtonal intervals, concert hall-reverb and the interplay between pre-recorded and live performance modules, sets up a maelstrom of sound where it’s impossible for the listener to separate auditory fact from auditory illusion. Lamb’s beautifully airy Parallaxis Forma, by contrast, provides a kind of balm for the soul through a delicate but no less immersive combination of voices and instruments: a quietly meditative, almost devotional acoustic world that in the accompanying artists’ note from the ensemble is described as “concreteness and chaos sitting inside a cloud of sound”.

For Ensemble neoN, the challenge of performing such physically exacting music is partly to make it seem so effortless. “The ‘charm’ or rather the power of Phill’s music lies in the physical effort required to produce the drone-y sound that he is after”, says the Ensemble’s Heloisa Amaral, who plays piano on the Niblock recording, and also took part in a recent performance of Parallaxis Forma at Phil Niblock’s Intermedia loft space in New York. “In the case of ‘To Two Tea Roses’, we are basically doing the same movement for twenty-three minutes, practically nonstop. You feel it the day after...The only way to overcome or to forget the physical discomfort is to dive as deep as one can into the sound, and just stay there until the end. Put like that, it may sound masochistic but what it does in reality is make you profoundly aware of the connection between movement and sound.” Of the Catherine Lamb, Amaral says, “What is interesting is the immense listening effort required from the musicians, on the one hand because of the unusual intonation, and on the other because our voices dovetail with each other without being precisely notated rhythmically. Playing this piece is a bit like playing Morton Feldman: the listener may experience it as a long, calm and effortless meditation while in reality we musicians are working like crazy.”