Performance – Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse

I’m hugely looking forward to performing as part of Longplayer Live at the Roundhouse, London on 5 April 2025. The performance of 1000 minutes of Longplayer’s score is 0720–midnight and celebrates the 25th birthday of Longplayer.

You can find tickets and further information here, and a lot more about Longplayer itself here.

“Spend one unique day with Longplayer, live at the Roundhouse.

A 1000-year-long piece of music, Longplayer has been playing continuously since the first moments of this millennium and is composed to continue until the final moments of the next.

On 5th April 2025, Longplayer will return to the Roundhouse for a performance of the 1000-minute section of its score, as written for that particular time and date, from 7.20am to midnight.

Longplayer’s duration means that, given the unknowability of the future, its score was written so as to be independent of any one technology. For most of its life it has been performed by computers, while its caretakers, the Longplayer Trust, explore alternatives which have included the use of the human voice, vinyl records, code, a beam of light and, as first heard at the Roundhouse in 2009, live performance by musicians.

Akin to what Longplayer’s composer, Jem Finer, calls a ‘vast, Bronze Age synthesiser’, Longplayer Live is performed on a large orchestral instrument comprised of 234 singing bowls, arranged in six concentric rings and played by shifts of six to twelve people at any one time, reading from a graphic score.

Audiences can spend as long as they wish listening and watching, and are invited to move around or find a space to rest, with the possibility to leave and return to the venue throughout the performance’s duration.

Longplayer hopes to enrich intergenerational conversations about how we can imagine the future. For this 25th anniversary performance, 18 young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community will join the orchestra of musicians and artists: a meeting of present and future custodians who will shape Longplayer’s next 25 years.

Longplayer Live is generously supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust and Urban Space Management. Thanks is also due to Universal Works for their generosity in supporting, designing and making the performers’ clothing.”

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Jem Finer

Longplayer Live. Photograph: © Bruce Atherton and Jana Chiellino

'Sonic Ray' by Jem Finer

Last night I attended a launch for Jem Finer’s Sonic Ray — it is a mesmerising thing to see a laser beam of sound traversing the river Thames, journeying back and forth across darkened waters beneath it. The work opens to the public from 30 September–21 November 2021 and you can book tickets here.

Sonic Ray – a new installation produced by Artangel, celebrating the 1,000 year-long musical composition Longplayer, created by artist Jem Finer. Originally scheduled for 2020, Sonic Ray was commissioned to mark the 20th anniversary of Longplayer, which began playing from the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf at midday on 31 December 1999 and will continue to play until 2,999 when it completes its cycle as the longest piece of music in history.

From the lighthouse, a bridge of light is beamed across the river to North Greenwich, encoding and transmitting the sound of Longplayer to a new temporary listening post aboard Richard Wilson’s nautical sculpture Slice of Reality. A short ferry ride will connect the two locations, allowing visitors to experience Longplayer as a bridge of light across the river at both locations.

Built in 1864 the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in East London was known as the “Experimental Lighthouse”, a landmark housing the workshop where Faraday conducted his optical tests. It has been the home of Longplayer for 21 years

Sonic Ray transmitting Longplayer from Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse

The receiver at Richard Wilson’s Slice of Reality

Drawings by Jem finer in Richard Wilson’s Slice of Reality

'Longplayer' partnership with Goldsmiths

Over recent months, I've been fortunate to have been involved in the creation of a partnership between Goldsmiths, University of London (where I am currently completing my PhD) and 'Longplayer', a beautiful work by Jem Finer that currently finds physical presence at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London. 

A memorandum of understanding has recently been publicly announced, which will be the start of many exploratory projects surrounding the ideas that underpin the piece, and its longterm preservation.

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