Unsilent Night December 20, 2008

Unsilent Night
Phil Kline's free outdoor participatory sound sculpture of many individual parts, recorded on cassette tapes, CDs and Mp3s, and played through a roving swarm of boomboxes carried through city streets. Bring your own boombox and drift peacefully through a cloud of sound that is different from every listener's perspective. If it's not happening in a city near you, start your own! E-mail [email protected].

Phil Kline talks about UNSILENT NIGHT:

Every year since 1992 I've presented UNSILENT NIGHT, an outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It's like a Christmas caroling party except that we don't sing, but rather carry the music, each of us playing a separate track that is a "voice" in the piece. In effect, we become a city-block-long sound system!

Join us and bring a boombox, or anything that will blast a cassette, CD or Mp3. (Cassettes sound the coolest, but we realize cassette players are getting scarce now.) The more tracks we play, the bigger and more amazing the sound is. In recent years, UNSILENT NIGHTs in New York and San Francisco have attracted crowds of over a thousand people, with hundreds of boomboxes… it's spectacular. If you'd like to participate, please e-mail the contact listed for your city for instructions. If you'd like to participate but don't have a boombox or a music player with speakers, you can just show up and join the parade. Everyone is an important part of the procession. Help us make a BIG (and joyful) noise. This is always a free event and all ages are welcome.

UNSILENT NIGHT has spread around the world. In addition to New York, UNSILENT NIGHT is presented in cities such as Los Angeles; San Francisco; San Diego; Santa Barbara; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Cleveland; Tallahassee; Tucson; Houston; New Haven; Boulder; Baltimore; Charleston; Asheville, NC; Manassas, VA; Milledgeville, GA; Bowling Green, OH; Banff, Alberta; Vancouver, BC; White Horse, Yukon Territory; Hamburg and Berlin, Germany; Middlesbrough, England; Melbourne and Sydney, Australia.
About Phil Kline:

Phil Kline is a unique artist whose work employs music in many mediums and contexts, ranging from experimental electronics, performance art and sound installations to songs, choral, theater and chamber music.

Raised in Akron, Ohio, he came to New York to study English Literature and Music History at Columbia College. After graduating, he became part of the vital downtown New York arts scene: He founded the rock band The Del-Byzanteens with Jim Jarmusch and James Nares, collaborated with Nan Goldin on the ever-evolving soundtrack to The Ballad of Sexual Dependency, and for many years played guitar in the notorious Glenn Branca Ensemble.

His earliest compositions grew out of his work as a solo performance artist and often used boombox tape players as a medium. Bachman's Warbler for harmonicas and 12 tape loops was performed at the 1992 Bang on a Can Marathon, and the walking sound sculpture Unsilent Night debuted in Greenwich Village later that year. Unsilent Night is now performed annually in cities around the world.

The widely acclaimed Zippo Songs, a quasi-theatrical song cycle based on poems Vietnam vets inscribed on their Zippo lighters, had its first run at HERE in NYC in 2003. Locus Solus, a suite of songs and chamber works based on the proto-surrealist novel of Raymond Roussel, was first presented at the bizarre Ryerss Mansion Museum in Philadelphia in 2006.

Among his chamber works, Exquisite Corpses was commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars and premiered by them in 1997; The Blue Room and Other Stories was premiered by the string quartet Ethel at the Kitchen in 2002; and The Last Buffalo was commissioned by the trio Real Quiet and premiered at the Music3 Festival in San Diego in 2004.

Recent works include the full-length choral Mass John the Revelator, commissioned by WNYC and premiered at the World Financial Center's Winter Garden in 2006; and scores for two evening-length dances by Wally Cardona: Everywhere and Site. The sound installation World on a String opened the 2007 season at the Krannert Center in Champaign-Urbana, Illinois.

Kline’s work has been heard in every imaginable type of venue, from the streets of Greenwich Village, CBGB and the Knitting Factory, to the Kitchen and BAM, Alice Tully Hall, London's Barbican Centre and the Amsterdam Concertgebouw. Major awards include grants from the Rockefeller New York State Music Fund, Meet the Composer, NYSCA, American Composers Forum and the Mary Flagler Cary Trust. Recordings of Unsilent Night, Exquisite Corpses, The Blue Room and Other Stories, and Zippo Songs are available on the Cantaloupe label, with John the Revelator due in early 2008.

Official Website: http://www.unsilentnight.com/