Directors: Phill Niblock & Dave Gearey
Year: 1967
Time: 7 mins
Music: Max Neuhaus
Many of Niblock's early films are "portraits" of fellow artists from different fields of expression. In his 1967 Max, Niblock films performances of Max Neuhaus, uncelebrated pioneer of live electronics, percussionist, installation artist, etc. Niblock's shots are juxtaposed and craftily edited by Dave Geary so as to create a strange sense of constant change within repetition. The soundtrack is provided by Neuhaus himself, who mixes five simultaneous recordings of Stockhausen's Zyklus (which the percussionist recorded in a more conventional fashion recently) and a feedback device called Max-Feed. The result is a noise assault in which the percussion is hardly audible under the shifting layers of distortion.