Every year for the last two decades of 'em, downtown composer (and along with auteur Jim Jarmusch, ex-Del-Byzanteen) Phil Kline has gathered an ever-increasing number of friends and supporters in the heart of the West Village and given them a cassette tape made just for them.
Each person then loads his or her tape into a separate boom box and--all together now--the crowd collectively paces through the streets of New York City.
#UNSILENTNIGHT, indeed.
On the tapes are not carefully selected songs you want your Christmas crush to hear in hopes of making it onto Santa's naughty list, but bits and pieces of Kline's diplomatically roving composition UNSILENT NIGHT.
The total effect is something like The Flaming Lips' pre-Zaireeka experiments--only infinitely more striking.
As a sign o' the times, Kline offers downloads now, but not even an inert string of 1s and 0s, nor 2001's collapsed-to-stereo mix, could make this the most "unbeautiful" yule tradition in all of Gotham.
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