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