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Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night in Memphis
12/21/21
7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Crosstown Arts invites you to join us for Boombox Holiday Caroling with Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night!
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 (phones with Bluetooth speakers are fine, too!) 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. This is the first time for the event to take place in Memphis!
With your help, we will create this roving sound installation, where boomboxes replace voices in a holiday caroling event like no other! You bring a boombox, cassette tape player, iPod/iPhone/iPad with speakers, or any other media-playing device you wish, and Crosstown Arts will supply a CD or digital download of one of the four parts of the piece. We all press play together and walk around the Concourse campus and through the neighborhood, creating a cacophony of bells, voices, and reverberant joy that will make heads turn on every corner.
All ages are welcome to participate! We do ask that all participants who are able to carry a boombox or other sound-making device bring one.
How to participate:
1. Sign up for free on Eventbrite. Participants are also welcome to arrive without signing up, but registering in advance helps us have an idea of how many carolers to expect!
2. Go to http://unsilentnight.com/participate.html to learn more about the piece and download the free App if you want to use an electronic device.
3. We will meet at 7 pm at Crosstown Brewery. We will get organized, then walk at 7:30, ending at Art Bar at Crosstown Arts!
4. Join our Facebook event, share it with your friends, and help spread the word!
Note: The success of the piece very much depends on having quality speakers (either line-connected to your device or battery-powered devices). Please do not plan to simply play the audio off of your iPhone/iPad/laptop speakers. Thanks!
Unsilent Night sounds best with boomboxes or powerful speakers. As more and more participants are using smartphones, we strongly recommend the use of external or bluetooth speakers to enhance the phone’s fairly weak sound output. Many powerful bluetooth speakers are available online for quite cheap. The louder the better. Be creative— anything goes! We’ve seen speakers mounted on a wagon, golf cart, backpack, custom-made as helmets, covered in sparkling lights … Austin does their Unsilent Night on bicycles!
IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT USING THE APP
Because the iOS or Android mobile apps include downloaded copies of all four tracks, the size of the apps is fairly substantial. For this reason, the app may only be downloaded using a WiFi connection. This means that your participants must download the app before coming to the event! For those who haven’t downloaded the app, they can stream or download individual tracks by visiting unsilentnight.com/participate.
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