Longplayer Live

OK here’s a plug, for a project that I think has questioned and challenged how it can exist in the world in various ways, all at the same time. This potential relative simultaneity is an area that I’m really interested in. Indulge me here, I promise it will become clear why the project I’ll be telling you about fits this particular bill.

I came across Jem Finer as an artist, not as a musician, which is how many others no doubt first became acquainted with his work. For those whose memory is not immediately jogged by the mention of his name: Jem is one of the founding members of the band The Pogues. He is the one responsible for the dulcet banjo tones, among other things, on the band’s records, and at live performances. He is not only a gifted musician, but also an interesting artist, who, maybe because he’s not primarily trained as one, sometimes comes to his projects from completely different angles and with different questions than other artists might.

The project I want to talk about was first realised in 1999, going live in London at mid-day on the 31^st of December 1999, at exactly the same moment as midnight struck in Sydney, Australia. Since then it has been running along quietly: not only here in London, where you can visit it in a lighthouse along the Thames, far beyond the city’s East End, but also at four other sites in different places around he world, including the new library in Alexandria, Egypt.

Running simultaneously at various listening posts (the first one was in Australia, hence the mid-day London start), the work is basically generated by six individual soundtracks that interfere with each other, which in turn generates a new soundtrack. The source for all is a single 20-minute-long track. Running through this source at six different speeds, the six separate tracks interfere in such a way that the sound we eventually hear will never be the same over a period of exactly a thousand years. The title of the project is as simple as it is apt: Longplayer. Now, rather than explaining the background behind the project (for that you can go to the website), I want to focus on how the work exists in various ways, one alongside the other. So, here goes.

When you go to the listening post in London, you don’t actually see much. Once having arrived at Trinity Buoy Wharf, you go up the narrow steps of a defunct lighthouse and you end up in the large attic of the building it is attached to. There you see a simple wooden garden shed. Through its window you see an old Mac, with on its screen the representation of time passing at various speeds through six sound tracks. You can go further up, into the actual lantern of the lighthouse, where the sound generated by the interference of the six separate tracks, is broadcast via a set of speakers. There’s some chairs, so you can sit down and listen to the work, whiling away your time, quietly, removed from the hustle and bustle of the city, overlooking the Thames, the Dome and Canary Wharf a little bit further back.

Those who are not able to visit the work physically by going to a listening post, can listen to it in the privacy of your their home, via the live audio stream on the website: www.longplayer.org. They don’t have to travel to barely used DLR stations, or spend money on a cab from tube stops they would otherwise never visit, or spend hours on a bus that meanders East from what for most people is already deep down East London.

Several years after Longplayer launched, the organisation that originally commissioned the project, Artangel, published a book that captures the development of the project in depth through texts, as well as a mind-map, notebook facsimiles etc. The package comes with, how could it have been anything else, an LP. Of course the LP only gives you a total of 40 minutes of listening pleasure, with two fragments on either side, carefully selected from the nearly three years the project had been running by the time the LP was pressed. But you can listen to it nonetheless, in the comfort of your lounge without having to sit in front of your computer. That is, of course, if you still own a record player.

However, our means of access don’t stop there, although the latest incarnation was probably a one-off, certainly not something that will be repeated soon. On a sunny Saturday afternoon in September, you could go and see the work being performed live. ‘Live?’ you may ask. Something that now runs through a computer and is intended to last for a thousand years, surely cannot be translated back to mere instruments and physical performance? The funny thing with Longplayer is that that it is exactly what happened. Being able to somehow play the soundtrack of Longplayer live had always been part of Jem’s thinking around the project, right from the moment he started thinking about it, around 1994 or so. Bearing that in mind, fifteen years later, it was about time…

Of course Jem didn’t execute this incarnation single-handedly. It required an extraordinary array of fellow artists and musicians to collaborate. In small teams they played the Tibetan singing bowls, using stopwatches to make sure they’d follow the ‘score’ in minute detail. A series of wooden concentric circles, h with markings that helped the musicians track time, the bowls were placed here and there individually, here and there in clusters. They were the same bowls Jem used to generate the original soundtrack that is the source of Longplayer as a sound piece. The live performance took place over a total of 1000 minutes in the vast circular space of the Roundhouse, in North London, where during the day the sunlight added its own spark to the installation and its players.

It made for a wonderful sight, and sound. The audience could wander in and out, so some people made themselves comfortable on the floor and stayed for ages. Other simply nipped in and out quickly. Some kept pacing – quietly – up and down, as if they were part of another, extra circle around the structure that generated Longplayer here live, without computers, without synched time devices, just through pure and simple handwork.

So there you are, Longplayer is available to us at all times and in a variety of different formats and contexts: via our computer and the project’s website; by physically visiting a listening post, be it London or any of the others; via a book and an LP; and, to top it, we now had a chance to experience it live. Of course these various means of listening all make for different kinds of experiences, but each one of them is generated by what is indisputably the same work.
GvN