Phil Kline

Phil Kline did the mixage for Nan Goldin's epic slide show The Ballad of Sexual Dependency and has written music for films by Wim Wenders and Sara Driver. With Jim Jarmusch and Luc Sante he founded the rock band the Del-Byzanteens and since 1988 he has been a member of the Glenn Branca Ensemble. In 1990 he began creating a body of work using large numbers of boombox cassette machines to create complex phase patterns and sound masses, often in non-traditional performing spaces such as Central Park and the Brooklyn Bridge Anchorage. His outdoor Christmas piece Unsilent Night for 100 boomboxes has been performed in the streets of Greenwich Village every year since 1992.

“Itıs not that unusual to see dead people. Often the difficulty is separating them from the living. The Housatonic at Henry Street is a vision of enfolded time flowing through a place on Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where successive waves of migrant humanity have overlapped for three centuries. Background and foreground are blurred as street sounds are recorded, then mixed with ‘musical’ material from computer and tape which is then replayed on boomboxes in the street and recorded again, remixed and reconstructed to create a landscape in which ghosts pass each other on the street with a recognizing glance.”