SYDNEY, Australia (Fuse Music/ www.fusemusic.com.au) - It is strange to think that now of all times the protest song has such a small profile in our mainstream music culture. Conjuring images of the 1960s folk scene, it may seem to many that the anti-war song has become an outmoded idea from a less cynical era. Phil Kline, a key player in the the New-York avante-garde music scene, has responded to this problem in creating a deeply moving, intense look at poetry American GIs inscribed on their lighters in Vietnam. Kline has set these profound and desperate poems with a calm and sacred spaciousness. They echo through the listener as if the soldiers themselves were singing to us from the afterlife. Coupled with Rumsfeld Songs, Zippo Songs is Kline's statement on war and the politics of war, in a fresh and new take on the age old tradition of the protest song.
Available from retailers everywhere via Fuse Music, Phil Kline's Zippo Songs (#CA21019) is produced by the New-York based Canteloupe Music.
Best of 2003 "Phil Kline scores an experimental winner…" - K. Leander Williams, Time Out NY
"Some of the most disturbing and compelling [songs I've heard in ages." - Philadelphia Inquirer "Eloquently hits the mark" - Seattle Stranger
"...a moving and memorable suite." - John L. Waters, The Guardian
"Running an emotional gamut from anxiety to ferocity, from long-distance desire to helpless despair..." - Alan Lockwood, New York Press
"It is memorable stuff with a pointed sense of humor... almost cinematic" - Tucson Citizen
"It all makes for a confused, unsettling and often dizzying atmosphere, surely appropriate to the texts and the times." - James R. Oestreich, The New York Times
About the Music
A few years ago I read a story about the poems that American GIs inscribed on their lighters in Vietnam. It seemed to me that buried somewhere in this small body of literature was the basis for a song cycle. Since military issue Zippos are highly collectible they were easy to find and there were hundreds of poems to work with. It was a matter of culling them. Of course, a poem on the side of a lighter can only be so long, two or three lines, a dozen or sixteen words, and one can only extend them by theme. Two or three poems about hell became one lyric, four or five poems about dying became another. Zippo Songs then began to take shape as a sequence of varied moods and activities, getting bummed, getting high, getting horny, getting bored, dying, finding god.
In this era of recalcitrant 60s radicals, it feels all the more necessary to admit that my earliest goal in life - formulated during a 1968 trip to San Francisco with my parents - was to be a hippie. Subsequent visits to my aunt's Ann Arbor commune only confirmed this aspiration, which was only later replaced by the marginally more respectable goal of composition. That being said, it's clear to me that almost everything I've done that's been worth doing musically... was made possible by the period. Among other things, everyone who was anyone was reaching out to non-western music - not just Stockhausen and the Beatles but also such cultural luminaries as B.J. Thomas and the Partridge Family, who were using sitars and tablas in their music. Much of my work is built around the anomalies and contradictions of cross-cultural exchange, but this piece attempts to pretend there are no such problems.
It combines gestures from a variety of genres as if all that were needed to make them get along were good will and positive energy. Would that it were so...
About Phil Kline
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.
