Phil Kline has been played on NTS in shows including Tafelmusik w/ Francesco Fusaro, featured first on 25 December 2022. Songs played include Unsilent Night.

Called "brilliant" and "a real original" by The New York Times, Phil Kline has freely crossed the boundaries between contemporary classical, rock, and ambient electronic music. Some of his more spectacular works have employed hundreds of boom box tape players, often mixed with acoustic and electronic instruments, to create multi-dimensional sound environments in non-traditional venues ranging from the Brooklyn Anchorage, Washington Square, and Central Park, the streets of Berlin and the shores of the Pacific in Vancouver, B.C., to the Whitney Museum, the Milwaukee Art Museum, the Kitchen, Alice Tully Hall, and London's Barbican Centre.

His compositions include Unsilent Night, an outdoor event for massed boomboxes which debuted in the streets of Greenwich Village in December 1992 and has since been presented annually in cities around the world; Bachman's Warbler for 12 tape loops and harmonicas, premiered at the Bang on a Can Marathon in 1992; Singing on the Water, presented throughout the Whitney Museum during the 1995 Biennial; The Holy City of Ashtabula, premiered at the Brooklyn Anchorage in July 1996; and the outdoor tableau Winter Music, which was performed with Ice Theater of New York in Central Park in December 1996. In 1997, Exquisite Corpses for sextet and tapes, commissioned by the Bang on a Can All-Stars, was premiered at Lincoln Center, and Kline's electric guitar concerto The Garden of Divorce was performed by Mark Stewart and the Glenn Branca ensemble at the Barbican Centre in London.

Recent works include Svarga Yatra (String Quartet No. 1), Reynolds Etudes, a series of pieces for solo violin and electronics written for Todd Reynolds, the music video triptych Meditations in an Emergency, a song cycle When I Had a Voice for soprano and viol consort, and the mixed media opera Into the Fire based on texts of Luc Sante. 2003 has seen the premieres of The Blue Room (String Quartet No. 2), Pictures of an Exhibitionist for pianist Kathy Supove, and two music theater works: Bilitis and Zippo Songs. CDs include Glow in the Dark on CRI, and Unsilent Night and Zippo Songs on Cantaloupe. The Blue Room was released on Ethel (Cantaloupe CA21017).

Kline was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and raised in Akron, Ohio. He studied English Literature and Music at Columbia and the Mannes College of Music before embarking upon a career as a composer. A member of the "new wave" downtown New York rock scene in the 1980s, he cofounded the art-punk band the Del-Byzanteens with filmmaker Jim Jarmusch and painter James Nares, collaborated with photographer Nan Goldin on the soundtrack to her "Ballad of Sexual Dependency," and was a veteran of Glenn Branca's notorious guitar ensemble.

Phil Kline is an American composer. Many of his works are moving sound sculptures include boomboxes.

[edit] Discography

* Ethel, "Blue Room and Other Stories", Ethel (2003) * Glow in the Dark (1998) * Unsilent Night (2001) * Zippo Songs (2004)

[edit] External links

* Phil Kline's Website * The Housatonic at Henry Street surround sound recording