Each year as Christmas approaches, strangers gather after dark in an ever-growing number of cities, lift high their old boomboxes and MP3 players, battery-powered radios and other sound sources, and participate in composer Phil Kline‘s Unsilent Night. There are four different audio-track components to the work (available for download at unsilentnight.com), all seasonally appropriate slices of ambient haze with echoes of carillon bells and lush pop. And when played on a variety of equipment, those individual tracks join together like voices in a heavenly robot choir.
The festivities are already underway, having started on the first of the month in Manassas, Virginia — and so, before another such opportunity passes, I wanted to publish, below, the Unsilent Night itinerary for 2007. I’m disappointed that I won’t be home in San Francisco on December 22 — I’ll be in Tokyo, where, I’m a little surprised to discover, there is no scheduled Unsilent Night. It seems like a communal event in which anonymous people use machines as vocal prosthetics to enact a secular rendition of a spiritual ritual would be, well, just perfect in Akihabara. Perhaps next year…
- December 01: Manassas, Virginia
- December 06: Santa Barbara, California
- December 08: Charleston, South Carolina
- December 08: Hattiesburg, Mississippi
- December 08: Houston, Texas
- December 09: Middlesbrough, UK
- December 13: New Haven, Connecticut
- December 14: Boulder, Colorado
- December 14: Detroit, Michigan
- December 15: Asheville, North Carolina
- December 15: New York City, New York
- December 15: San Diego, California
- December 15: Seattle, Washington
- December 15: Sydney, New South Wales (Australia)
- December 16: Los Angeles, California
- December 17: Hamburg, Germany
- December 17: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- December 20: Melbourne, Victoria (Australia)
- December 21: Baltimore, Maryland
- December 21: Fredericton, New Brunswick
- December 21: Santa Rosa, California
- December 22: San Francisco, California
- December 23: Vancouver, British Columbia