Phil Kline; Torino, Italy
During the XX Winter Olympic games this past February composer Phil Kline led a parade of boombox toting participants through the mountains around Torino for his piece “Chinook,” a sound sculpture recorded on audio tapes and CDs.
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Torino's Echoes From the Mountains series asked eleven Italian and international artists, including Mr. Kline, to create specific sound works that responded to the unique characteristics of the project such as its geographical location, the Winter Olympic Games framework, and the diverse and heterogeneous audience that was going to interact with their installations.
In addition to his boombox composing, which is still in high demand even after he began doing it over 15 years ago, Mr. Kline is an accomplished composer of songs, quartets, and orchestral music. This year will see the premieres of a new violin concerto and a song cycle based on texts by Hunter S. Thompson.
MTC spoke with Mr. Kline (below left, overseeing the procession) shortly after he returned from Torino. (He received support from the Global Connections program for the project)
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MTC: How did your boombox composing start?
PK: In 1990 or thereabouts I suddenly bought 12 boomboxes and several boxes of pre-cut cassette loops. I began making live loop pieces which were really my first body of work as a composer. Then in 1992 I wrote my first big "orchestral" boombox piece "Unsilent Night" with pre-recorded cassettes played back simultaneously in an outdoor setting. I've been doing that piece annually every December since then and even while I get back to songs and string quartets, people keep asking for more boombox pieces.
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MTC: How did "Chinook" come about?
PK: I was asked by curator Ombretta Agro to take part in a sound art festival called Echoes From The Mountains, which was to be part of the cultural programming around the Winter Olympics in Torino. The idea was that I would write a boombox piece to be played in the mountain villages where the skiing and snowboarding events were to be held. She sent me pictures of the villages, Sauze and Bardonecchia, so that I could get a feel for the landscape and architecture. As a point of departure, I thought of the intoxicating warm winds which come to high mountain regions. Perhaps the most famous is the Fohn wind of the Alps, but I simply didn't like the sound of the name. Instead I chose Chinook, a wind from the northern Midwest which got its name from the bygone tribe of the Pacific Northwest. It was said that the wind, blowing from the west, came "from the country of the Chinooks." Chinook is also the name of a US military helicopter and that fact somehow stuck in my mind, at least subconsciously contributing the mournful whirring sounds of the final section.
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MTC: How is it structured/presented?
PK: The piece is about 24 minutes long and is divided into three equal sections. There are 20-some layers of sound, all electronic, sampled or synthesized. We loaded the prerecorded cassettes into 50 boomboxes, which were carried by the people who volunteered to take part. We then walked and listened to the sound we were making and shaping. The audience, some of it modern art-savvy, some of it most emphatically not, seemed to love it. In fact I was especially moved by the reaction of some folks in Bardonecchia, a nice older couple, real villagers, they said it was magical and called me "compositore," by which I felt greatly honored. And that particular night was pretty amazing. We walked in the middle of a real mountain blizzard, several feet of snow arriving in a few hours. The thick falling snow made the sound seem to hang suspended in midair.
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MTC: What was it like in Torino during the Olympics?
PK: In general, the atmosphere in Torino was festive, lively and fun. I get the impression that many people in the US thought the Olympics was a dud, maybe because so many of our skiers and skaters fell down, but over there it was a non-stop party and, somehow, not the overpriced traffic jam such events can be.
(all photos courtesy of Phil Kline)
