Album Notes

Phil Kline’s “Around the World in a Daze” is a 65-minute surround-sound studio composition commissioned by Starkland to premiere on this DVD.

Daze opens with the multi-channel ambiance near Kline’s home in New York City’s lower East Side, glides into an etheral Ethel string quartet, peaks with a massive climax presenting hundreds of thousands of super-dense bells, shifts to the soaring violinistics of Todd Reynolds, and concludes with an immersive environment of 15,000 chattering, African gray parrots.

Along the way, listeners are also seduced by swirling, hypersampled Wagner, a weird madrigal about bitterness and bees, a Bach prelude eerily processed into a Zurich train station, and a mournfully multi-tracked “wailing wall.”

Offered in a custom-designed digipak, this double-DVD release adds an Extras DVD with a composer-produced music video, a 34-minute interview of the composer with John Schaefer, as well as a 24-page booklet.

The main DVD offers Daze in several formats for various playback setups: standard-DVD Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround; higher quality DTS 5.1; highest-quality uncompressed DVD-Audio; and PCM stereo. Playback of the Daze music is accompanied by over 80 images shot by Kline.

This DVD emerges as a followup to Starkland’s Immersion DVD-Audio, now recognized as a groundbreaking recording that let listeners experience new music in high-resolution surround sound for the first time.

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

From vast boombox symphonies to chamber music and songs cycles, Phil Kline's work has been hailed for its originality and beauty. "Kline has graduated from 'experimental' to 'original' - he's one of America's most important compositional voices" (Philadelphia Inquirer).

His compositions have been performed in rock clubs, art galleries, and major concert halls throughout the world. The New York Times wrote, “Magic was happening as you sat there. Here was a real original.” Kline’s Zippo Songs was one of the most widely hailed new music CDs of 2004. The CD was named “Best of the Year” by The New York Times, Newsday, and Gramophone.

A figure in the downtown New York rock scene in the 1980s, Kline founded the 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 toured the world as a veteran of Glenn Branca’s legendary guitar ensemble.