Unsilent Night

Unsilent Night 2009, the ambient holiday boombox symphony, is about to descend on the streets of East Lansing for the third year running on Fri., Dec. 11, 2009. What better way to count down the 12 days of Christmas? No singing required! What is this, you might ask?

Written by downtown NYC composer Phil Kline, Unsilent Night is an outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. When performed in the confines of a city, Unsilent Night reverberates off the buildings and streets, resulting in a drifting cloud of ethereal undulating sound. In effect, performers become a single element in a two-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 East Lansing, the Unsilent Night tradition has been carried on by a diverse collection of participants, anchored by the students of the MSU College of Music, and including participants from Lansing and Ann Arbor. This year, we’re looking to get lots more people involved from the MSU, and EL/Lansing/Okemos community. Want to get hip to the holiday spirit with our boombox symphony? Download your part of the music at unsilentnight.com/download (burn to CD or MP3 that you can play aloud on any ol’ contraption!). Also be sure to visit Scenemetrospace.com for further details, or contact the organizer, Geoff Deibel, for more information. Hoping to see everyone at our hometown gallery, Scene Metrospace in East Lansing on December 11 at 7 pm! We’ll take an hour to organize, hand out tapes/CDs and let people check out the great exhibits at Scene Metrospace. The parade begins at 8 pm sharp!! So dig your old boombox out of the closet, and bring it along! You can even play the music off your iphone!

Since its debut in 1992, Unsilent Night has become a cult holiday tradition in NY and around the world, drawing crowds of up to 1,500 participants. This year will see repeat presentations in San Francisco, Philadelphia, San Diego, Vancouver BC, Middlesbrough (England) and Sydney, Australia, as well as the first ever performances in Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Baltimore, Charleston, Rochester, Milledgeville (Georgia), and Banff (Alberta, Canada). In February 2006, a new version of Unsilent Night was presented at the Winter Olympics in Turin, Italy, as part of a sound art festival in the Alps.