Contemporary music

Philip Blackburn’s Another Intensity: Listening as an Act of Devotion

Many, or most composers, write music you’re meant to “follow”. Philip Blackburn writes music you’re meant to “inhabit”. That distinction has defined his work for decades, and it’s the first thing that strikes you about Another Intensity, released for Neuma Records, the label he himself has steered since 2020, after nearly a quarter-century running innova Recordings and rescuing Harry Partch’s scattered archive from oblivion. Blackburn has spent a career listening on other people’s behalf, as producer for more than 800 artists across two labels. Another Intensity is what happens when he finally turns that same patient, forensic attention back onto the world itself.

The album gathers six works that don’t so much play in sequence as accumulate, like pressure building before a storm. “In Praise of Clouds” opens the record by reworking one of Blackburn’s own teenage choral pieces into something closer to a memory of a choir than a choir itself, voices arriving from somewhere just out of reach, more felt than heard. It’s a genuinely disarming way to start an album: intimate, faintly ghostly, and immediately establishing the record’s central idea, that music can behave like weather rather than architecture.

“Dawn Chorus, Still Life” follows with Australian sheng master Wang Zheng-Ting locked into a slow, humid duet against Blackburn’s own bowed bicycle wheels, an instrumental pairing so unlikely on paper that it shouldn’t work, and yet the result is genuinely mesmerizing, closer to two creatures communicating across a rainforest canopy than two musicians in a studio.

Then comes the record’s most striking gesture, “Sounding Xibalba”, recorded not in any conventional studio but deep inside Mountain Cow Cave in Belize, a sacred Maya underworld site surrounded by ancient human remains. Blackburn plays the cave itself, coaxing tones from its stalactites and stalagmites and summoning a ceramic bat-flute into the mix. It’s archaeoacoustics as composition, using a space’s own resonant history as an instrument, and it gives the album a genuine sense of place that studio-bound ambient music almost never achieves.

“Between Two Waves of the Sea”, the album’s second teenage-composition reworking, spreads a small original gesture into a vast, spectral orchestral wash, while “Floating Beneath the Surface” does something even more radical with time, stretching a fleeting musical moment out into something closer to a sonic float tank than a conventional piece of music.

The album closes with “An Illegible Stone”, a searching dialogue between percussionist Patti Cudd and cellist Madeleine Shapiro built from Blackburn’s “Unearthing” method, performers listening back to a recording of a previous performance and trying to recreate exactly what they hear, a feedback loop that turns memory itself into a compositional tool.

Listeners who spent time with us and Blackburn’s remarkable 2CD set ORDO (review on Paris-Move) will recognize the DNA immediately. That set drew on more than four decades of work to build a genuinely singular personal cosmology, one that moved freely between plainchant, Partch-inspired tuning systems, raga, and deeply personal meditations on grief, technology and mortality. Another Intensity feels like a direct continuation of that same project, but with the aperture narrowed and the focus sharpened: where ORDO was a sprawling, career-spanning anthology, Another Intensity is a tighter, more unified meditation built almost entirely around a single theme, nature not as backdrop, but as an active collaborator and co-composer.

The two “Unearthing” pieces here connect directly back to a technique Blackburn has been refining since ORDO, and the reworked teenage compositions perform a similar trick to that album’s use of very early and very late material side by side, treating a whole creative lifetime as a single continuous conversation with itself rather than a tidy chronological arc. If ORDO was Blackburn taking stock of everywhere his imagination had travelled, Another Intensity is him choosing one destination, the natural world, in its full unpredictability, and going there with total commitment.

What ultimately makes Blackburn’s music so hard to categorize, and so rewarding to sit with, is that it refuses the easy binary between “ambient” and “composed.” As he’s put it himself, he’s never seen a straight line in nature, and Another Intensity is built entirely around that conviction, dynamic, balanced chaos, rendered with a level of craft and patience that pure ambient music rarely bothers with. Having studied under avant-garde figures like Kenneth Gaburo and Pauline Oliveros and counting the wildly idiosyncratic Harry Partch among his key influences, Blackburn writes from a lineage that has always prized deep listening over easy resolution, and Another Intensity is one of the clearest, most fully realized expressions of that lineage he has yet produced.

Few composers working today can move this convincingly between a Belizean cave, a teenage choral sketch, and a duet for sheng and bicycle wheel, and make all three feel like chapters of the same book. Another Intensity confirms Blackburn not just as a gifted composer, but as one of the genuinely essential voices in contemporary sound art, someone whose influence, both as an artist and as the steward of Neuma’s catalogue of adventurous music, continues to expand what “composition” is even allowed to mean. Highly, warmly recommended. A must!

Frankie Pfeiffer
Editor in chief – PARIS-MOVE

PARIS-MOVE, August 25th, 2026

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To order the album

Tracklisting:

1. In Praise of Clouds 9:29
2. Dawn Chorus, Still Life 9:29
3. Sounding Xibalba 5:17
4. Between Two Waves of the Sea 6:33
5. Floating Beneath the Surface 9:43
6. An Illegible Stone 9:27

>50:00<

Musician:
Philip Blackburn, instruments, electronics, composition

Special guests:
Wang Zheng-Ting, sheng (track 2)
Madeleine Shapiro, cello (track 6)
Patti Cudd, percussion (track 6)