Should you find yourself at electronic-music pioneer Phill Niblock's St. Andrew's–Wesley Church concert tonight (March 8), feel free to get up and move around. Just don't expect good reviews.

According to one critic, reporting on a Niblock performance during New York City's annual Bang on a Can festival, the combination of the artist's glacial compositions and the crowd's laggardly perambulations looked like nothing so much as “a concert of zombies”.

Niblock doesn't mind one bit. In fact, he tells the story with relish, perhaps because his aim is to upset the conventions of concertgoing: his multimedia presentations feature music in which very little seems to happen and films with no obvious narrative flow. And if his audience gets restless and wants to explore the hall, he thinks that would be a good idea.

In fact, to get the most out of Niblock's compositions, you won't want to stay put. A degree of sensual pleasure can be found in simply listening to his long, slow dronescapes, in which acoustic sound sources are replicated, filtered, and electronically reharmonized, often to dreamy effect. But Niblock's real interests are as much architectural as compositional: what fascinates him is how microtonal pitch fluctuations can animate a room.

“Where the music doesn't work is playing in your living room, on a CD,” he says, reached at the Manhattan loft he's occupied for nearly 40 years. “And where it does work is in a concert with a big speaker system and a fairly good acoustic space.

“It's very architectural,” he continues, “because the sound changes drastically. If you move around the space, you find completely different patterns in different places—and of course over time it changes anyway. And that's a big part of it: actually using the space you're performing in.”

The 73-year-old Niblock—a frequent collaborator with much younger musicians, including Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Lee Ranaldo—started developing his signature style in 1968. “I was doing some live performance pieces with film and dance and projected images, and I needed music,” he explains. “I'd had a couple of bad experiences collaborating, but I knew what I wanted to make; I knew sort of what I wanted to come out. So I just began making music, and it's always been the same basic music, the same intention.”

The means have changed, however: Niblock is an enthusiastic exponent of computer-based recording, which he says has allowed him to radically up his output at a time when most of his peers are slowing down.

“It's fantastic,” he says, noting that between 2003 and 2005 he composed 13 new works. “It's thicker. It's richer. The sound is very clean, without any of the tape hiss and garbledness that occasionally happens with tape. And I can work very fast in Pro Tools, so in just a few days' time I can finish a piece.”

Many of those new pieces can be found on the excellent Touch Three, a triple-CD set issued last year. But take it from the source: this music really must be experienced live.