Phil Kline's Unsilent Night: 3rd Annual Boulder Edition December 11th, 2009, 7:30 pm, Pearl Street Mall
Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night is a free outdoor participatory sound sculpture of many individual parts, recorded on cassettes, CDs and mp3s, 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 1992, this 45-minute work has grown into a worldwide annual communal event that has become an essential part of many winter holiday celebrations.
A video from our first Unsilent Night in 2007:
"Every year since 1992 I've presented UNSILENT NIGHT, an outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It's like a 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 RSVP via e-mail: cupendulum@gmail.com. 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.
CDs and Cassette tapes will be available at the event, though please RSVP, because it will help us calculate how many copies to make.
If you are using an mp3 player, you can also just download any one of the four "voices". Right click (or ctrl click) and choose "save link as" (or something to that extent - the exact instruction depends on your browser).
To amplify an mp3 player, the best option is to use battery powered speakers. Check out these sites if you need to shop:
CNET's Top 10 Portable Speaker Systems
Portable Speakers on Yahoo Shopping
Portable Speakers on Google Shopping
Also, thrift stores are a great place to find old boomboxes. Here are some map searches to help you find thrift stores in the Boulder area:
Boulder Thrift Stores on Google Maps
Boulder Thrift Stores on Mapquest
Please visit the Unsilent Night Around The World page.
UNSILENT NIGHT has spread around the world. In addition to Boulder, UNSILENT NIGHT is presented in cities such as New York; Los Angeles; San Francisco; San Diego; Santa Barbara; Philadelphia; Atlanta; Cleveland; Tallahassee; Tucson; Houston; New Haven; 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.