Phil Kline - Around the World in a Daze

Leading new music composer Phil Kline debuts a major work, Around the World in a Daze, on a new surround sound DVD released by Starkland. The 65-minute studio composition was commissioned by Starkland specifically for high-resolution surround sound and to premiere on DVD. Daze opens with the multi-channel ambiance near Kline’s home in New York City’s lower East Side, begins a “long journey” performed by the string band Ethel, peaks with a massive climax of hundreds of thousands of “falling pennies” that dramatically explores the psychoacoustic possibilities of surround sound, shifts to the soaring violinistics of Todd Reynolds, and concludes by placing the listener inside multiple layers of a field recording of 15,000 chattering, African gray parrots. Along the way, listeners are also seduced by some 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.” Daze