Unsilent Night 2008 in San Francisco

Unsilent Night, a mobile ambient music public art installation produced by Phil Kline, returns to San Francisco this Saturday, December 20th at 7pm in Dolores Park.

Every year since 1992 I’ve presented UNSILENT NIGHT, an outdoor ambient music piece for an infinite number of boomboxes. It’s like a Christmas 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 e-mail the contact listed for your city for instructions. 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.

Here’s a video Scott Beale made of Unsilent Night 2006 in San Francisco.

photos by Anjuli Ayer