Normally, for the sake of preserving what little journalistic integrity we can claim, us music writers tend to try to avoid writing about projects we’re directly involved with. Phil Kline’s Unsilent Night, billed as “a heartwarming musical creation of twinkling percussion, ethereal voices and resonating bell sounds”, is really ‘performed’ by its audience members, who are each given one of four prepared 45 minutes pieces on cassette, CD or mp3 to play on a device of their choice while promenading through the centre of the city in which it’s being performed. It’s an idea explored in the mid-1990s by the Flaming Lips with their Boom Box Experiments, culminating in the four-CD Zaireeka album whose four CDs are designed to be played simultaneously on four different stereos, but while that was acknowledged by the band as an experiment for hard-core fans Unsilent Night is much less a work in progress, most likely carefully honed over its two decades of performance. So while it can be argued that we were, in fact, performing, we were really just following orders, doing what we were told and going where we were led.

The crowd who assembled at Radcliffe Square, round the corner from the Broad Street stage where Lewis and Hathaway had illuminated Oxford’s Christmas lights less than two hours earlier, were more a family day out crowd than a gig-going group, generally either side of the fashion-conscious early twenties. Matt Winkworth gave us an introduction with a little of the history of the piece, first performed in New York in 1992 and this year landing in many cities around the world, before the countdown began for the starting of the performance, at which point we all pressed ‘play’ on our respective devices and headed off down Queens Lane.

It was hard to tell exactly what was different about the four pieces, which was probably for the best as the resulting wash of sound, while well choreographed, wasn’t discernibly in unison or coming from one place, ending up like an art-house version of Oxford street band Horns of Plenty. There’s a strong Steve Reich influence evident in the music with chiming repetition which, while not apparently sticking to an obvious musical key, is never dissonant either, juxtaposed with movements of more ambient washes of sound akin to Bedouin Ascent, Aphex Twin or a beat-free early Orbital. The dynamic is always changing, with the gradually shifting movements of the prepared recordings as well as the drifting of the ‘performers’ within the crowd and the different acoustics of the streets as we pass through them, though it’s always soft and melodic; the nearest it gets to feeling ‘loud’ is in the underpass on Castle Street which, in the cold, graciously manages to smell much less of piss than usual.

But the music is, rightly, not the focus, and merely an accompaniment for what is basically a guided wander, crossing the High Street in a couple of places (with lollipop people to stop the traffic) and ending up under the fake snow of the Oxford Castle Christmas market. The atmosphere is happy and friendly and everyone seems to be enjoying being part of the experience; it’s hard to know what it will have been like for the many people who stumbled upon us or whose windows we passed under, but it felt like a fitting addition to the town’s Christmas festivities. The route was well-planned and very well paced, taking us through the most atmospheric of Oxford’s publicly-accessible side streets under a cold clear sky, and the music itself was beautifully suited to the place and the time. Oxford Contemporary Music have, yet again, opened our eyes and ears to the most unusual of performance locations, this time by taking music to the places we see as the most commonplace and bringing people together to share it.