Unsilent Night 2009 will take place in more than 25 cities around the world and for the first time in London, Berlin, Denver, and Dallas.
NYC celebrates Unsilent Night's 18th year with boombox parade through Village streets on December 12 at 7pm.
Details, including each city's meeting place and time, updated daily on this site.
CD available at www.cantaloupemusic.com
Growing list of cities this year in the USA:
Albuquerque | Asheville | Baltimore | Boulder | Charleston | Chicago | Dallas | Denver | East Lansing | Los Angeles
Milledgeville | Missoula | New Haven | New York City | Philadelphia | San Diego | San Francisco | Santa Fe
and beyond the USA:
Berlin, Germany | London, UK | Melbourne, Australia | Cambridge, Ontario | Vancouver, BC | Fredericton, NB
On Saturday, December 12 at 7:00pm, composer Phil Kline will lead a massive chorus of boomboxes from the West Village to the East Village in the 18th annual holiday presentation of UNSILENT NIGHT. People gather at the arch in Washington Square Park, and less than an hour and mile later, end up in Tompkins Square Park.
UNSILENT NIGHT is Kline's free outdoor participatory sound sculpture of many individual parts, recorded on cassettes, CD's and mp3's, and played through a roving swarm of boomboxes carried through city streets every December. People bring their own boomboxes and drift peacefully through a cloud of sound which is different from every listener's perspective.
Since its debut in 1992, UNSILENT NIGHT has become a cult holiday tradition in NY, drawing crowds of up to 1,500 participants. It has also grown into a worldwide annual event, presented in over 45 cities and on three continents.
Kline says: "Every year I present UNSILENT NIGHT, which is like a Christmas caroling party except we don't sing, but rather carry boomboxes, each playing a separate tape or CD which is part of the piece. In effect, we become a city-block-long stereo system."
The Village Voice describes UNSILENT NIGHT as "a marvelously fluid, traveling spatial sound sculpture that disintegrates and reforms at nearly every stop light.” Time Out calls the event "an electro-happening" and depicts the music as "a winter wonderland of shimmering sleigh bells, chimes and grand chorales."
In NYC, it is recommended that participants arrive by 6:45 pm at the arch in Washington Square.
The event is free, and will be held rain or shine.
Phil Kline will hand out a limited number of boomboxes—and cassettes and CD’s for those who bring their own players. The public is strongly encouraged to bring their own boomboxes. Mp3 downloads of the individual tracks will be available on this website, so pod-docks and other sound-blasters can be carried. People have even brought their laptops hooked up to large speakers mounted on a wagon.
"In what is now a holiday rite, Phil Kline's boombox Christmas parade starts working its way eastward from Washington Square Park as the amplified drones and chimes and bells echo off buildings, stop traffic, baffle passers-by and encourage taxi horns to chime in. The 44-minute electronic Christmas carol is a slippery, swirling blizzard of sound that is the soundtrack to 'Unsilent Night,' an event that began in New York in 1992 and has become a seasonal classic in 15 other cities, from Australia to the Yukon." THE NEW YORK TIMES
"Kline's boombox-chorale parade from Washington Square Park to Tompkins Square Park has become a bona fide holiday tradition. Kline's luminous, shimmering wash of bell tones is one of the loveliest communal new-music experiences you'll ever encounter, and it's never the same twice." TIME OUT NEW YORK
"An annual seasonal favorite, Unsilent Night is an open procession for an unlimited number of boomboxes that starts under the arch of Washington Square Park. Musically, it begins with delicate strains of Phil Kline's composition rising as marchers turn their boomboxes up to 10 and wind their way through the streets of the East Village, enveloped in the bubble of Kline's glorious ambient score. Unsilent Night's pageant ends under the giant elm in Tompkins Square as the final notes once again reach up to the heavens, offering thanks for the past 45 minutes of joy and redemption." FLAVORPILL NYC
"Unsilent Night immerses the listener in suspended wonderment, as if time itself had paused inside a string of jingle bells.” THE NEW YORK TIMES
"Unsilent Night has been performed across the world and has been recreated in the studio for a gorgeous CD on Bang on a Can's Cantaloupe Music label. One of few Christmas albums actually worth buying, the disc is an ambient wash of heaven-sent shimmer, recognizable as seasonal mostly for its modulating bells and time-stretched hymnal melodies." THE ONION
"A dreamy fruitcake of parts, tranquil even through its anarchy." LOS ANGELES TIMES
"Unsilent Night was designed in 1992 to withstand the unreliability, playback delay and occasional quavering tones of cassettes. 'About 90 percent of people have CD players now, so I make [CDs] available as well, but there's something about the twinkling, hallucinatory effect of a warbling cassette tape that I enjoy,' says Kline." THE SAN FRANCISCO EXAMINER
"This is a holiday tradition that could give new music a good name." THE VILLAGE VOICE
"If an avant-garde Christmas record exists, this is it." STEREOPHILE
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.
