A milestone. T H I R - Ten Hundred Inch Radii - is among the most historically significant works in Phill Niblock's output, and one of the genuinely undiscovered jewels of American experimental film. Completed in 1972 as the fourth and final chapter of his Environments cycle - begun in 1968 - it is presented here for the first time on DVD, with two alternate soundtracks, by the Italian imprint Von.

Niblock occupies a peculiar and underacknowledged position in the history of American Minimalism. Where Steve Reich and Philip Glass moved toward public legibility, Niblock moved in the opposite direction: deeper into the physical, the microtonal, the geologically slow. His music - constructed from dense, multiply-layered recordings of acoustic instruments processed and stacked into massive harmonic clouds - demands submission rather than attention, operates through the body rather than the mind. Director of Experimental Intermedia since 1968, a loft space in New York that has hosted over a thousand concerts - Ryoji Ikeda, Zbigniew Karkowski, Jim O'Rourke among them - Niblock has also maintained, in parallel with his musical practice, a body of film work largely unknown outside a small circle of specialists. The films and the music are not separate projects. They belong to the same logic: duration, stillness, the encounter with material reality stripped of narrative.

T H I R was originally conceived as a performance work: thirty discrete static shots of nature filmed in 16mm around Keene Valley in the Adirondack Mountains of upstate New York in 1971-72, originally projected across a 36-foot wide triple-frame screen with live dance and Niblock's music. What remains, and what this DVD presents, is a single-screen version - abbreviated, but losing none of the original's hypnotic force. Each shot holds its position, locked and patient, the image becoming texture as the eye adjusts to its stillness. Light on water. A treeline. The ground. The original soundtrack, recorded and mixed at Intermedia Sound in Boston in 1971-72, sits alongside a new version: One Large Rose, recorded at Christianskirche in Hamburg in May 2008 with the Nelly Boyd Ensemble - Jan Feddersen, Peter Imig, Jens Roehm, playing piano, violin, and acoustic bass guitar with nylon strings and e-bow - and edited at Experimental Intermedia in February 2015. Two encounters with the same images, separated by four decades, neither superseding the other.

The accompanying booklet draws on Niblock's own photography from China, where he made a separate series of films: meticulous studies of manual labour - fishermen, rice-planters, log-splitters - that share with T H I R the same quality of attention, the same refusal to aestheticise or editorialize what the camera finds.