Katherine Liberovskaya and David Watson: Compositions by Phill Niblock

Join us at e-flux on Thursday, March 28 at 7pm for an event celebrating the life and work of avant-garde composer, photographer, filmmaker, videographer, and Experimental Intermedia founder Phill Niblock (1933–2024). Katharine Liberovskaya, Niblock’s longtime collaborator, will be joined by David Watson to present three pieces of music: “Expl. Watson” (a version of “Exploratory” written by Niblock for Watson), “Bag” (another composition written by Niblock for Watson), and one piece encompassing live-mixing of field recordings that Niblock gathered on his travels with Liberovskaya. These compositions will be accompanied by guitar, bagpipe, and video. 

Katherine Liberovskaya is a Canadian artist based in New York. She has been involved in experimental video since the 1980s and has produced numerous single-channel video art pieces, installations, performances, and works in other media that have been shown around the world. Since 2001, her work predominantly focuses on the intersection of moving image with sound in various ephemeral and fixed forms, most notably through collaborations with many composers and sound artists in improvised live video and sound concerts, where her live visuals seek to create improvisatory “music” for the eyes. Her frequent collaborators include: Phill Niblock, Dafna Naphtali, Keiko Uenishi, Shelley Hirsch, Barbara Held, Mia Zabelka, Al Margolis (IF,BWANA), and David Watson among many others. In addition to her artwork, she curates events in experimental video/film, sound/music, and A/V performance, notably the Screen Compositions evenings at Experimental Intermedia Foundation, the OptoSonic Tea salons (co-curated with Ursula Scherrer), and various nomadic locations in North America and Europe as well as online during the Covid pandemic. In 2014, she completed a PhD in art practice entitled “Improvisatory Live Visuals: Playing Images Like a Musical Instrument” at the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM).

David Watson is an experimental musician who is originally from New Zealand, but has been based in New York for the past thirty-five years. His work encompasses improvisation, composition, and scoring for film and dance. In addition to being a guitarist, he has created a vocabulary for the bagpipe as a new music instrument. He has worked with and been influenced by extraordinary artists like Robert Ashley, Tony Buck, Moriah Evans, Chris Mann, Christian Marclay, Sean Meehan, Ikue Mori, Bill Nace, Andrea Parkins, Lee Ranaldo, Jamar Roberts, Yoshi Wada, Matthew Welch, John Zorn, and $75 Bill, amongst many others. His double CD for the XI label, Fingering an Idea, was praised by The Wire as “shimmering lines piling-up like an old Terry Riley piece.” Twenty years later, Foxy Digitalis wrote that his album Woven “is almost unfathomable … except that this kind of ground-shattering, forward-thinking music is just what Watson and Welch do.” In 2013-15 he was musical director for Cindy Bernard in the adaption of the seventeenth-century historical drama The Inquisitive Musician, which explored conflicts of literacy and class within music-making. Since 2016 he has organized and presented hundreds of new music concerts in New York under the auspices of WOrK, Shift, FourOneOne, and now Striped Light.

The program of sound performances at e-flux is curated by Sanna Almajedi.

For more information, please contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to program [​at​] e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom