LONG PLAYER

[FAY]

Chatting briefly with Jem after one of the Fillmore shows, he mentioned that an installation of Longplayer would soon becoming to San Francisco... Ft. Mason, I believe he said.

Yet a quick google search reveals no info.

Does anyone have an info on this?

Also, I meant to ask Jem if one of his favorite band's, the Faces, was partial influence to choosing the name, "Longplayer?" (Although I realize that if a song is 1000+ years long(!), Longplayer is an obvious choice of name despite any reference to the Faces, or otherwise.)

Does any one have any insight and care to comment?

If I'm over-analyzing, I apologize. Without any new material to exhaust and disect, what else is a die-hard fan to do?

[CraigBatty]

Somewhere, in the deep dusty recesses of my memory banks, is a neuron that seems to think it is a reference to something by a SF writer. Robert Heinlein maybe? Not sure. Someone will know undoubtedly...

[FAY]

Someone please answer... Jem, Marcia, Ella, Phil????

Jem said Long Player would be coming to San francisco "soon" (October)

What's the deal????!?!?!?

I'm merely wanting to support this project and pay tribute to the artist and the Arts.

Shane????

Joey??????????????

Um, Victoria?

[DzM]

The Long Now organization has taken up residence at Fort Mason ( http://www.fortmason.org/residents/resi ... g_now.html http://www.fortmason.org/features/2006/ ... re01.shtml ). I suspect this means that a listening post for Longplayer can't be far behind.

Fay - If you happen to be local, perhaps you can pop in and ask the Long Now stewards for more information on the schedule?

[FAY]

dzm - great, helpful information - thanks so much!
Yes, I'm local (in the east bay) and I will make it a priority to go check it out and once I do I will report it on this forum.
Again, thanks

[territa]

I can't get the stream. Is the player down?

[DzM]

I can't get the stream. Is the player down?

The URL the m3u file points at is:

http://icecast2.spc.org:8010/longplayer

That server is happily returning "File not found" errors. Looks like something is fubar on that server.

[territa]

It's back! Yay! (some days need to end with a few minutes of this)

[philipchevron]

I can't get the stream. Is the player down?

The URL the m3u file points at is:

http://icecast2.spc.org:8010/longplayer

That server is happily returning "File not found" errors. Looks like something is fubar on that server.

Hmm....so how do we know for sure that Long Player was still playing during the fubar episode? How do we know it did not cut itself off to have a well-earned fag break? I hope these minutes will be added on at the end if that turns out to be the case.

[DzM]

Hmm....so how do we know for sure that Long Player was still playing during the fubar episode? How do we know it did not cut itself off to have a well-earned fag break? I hope these minutes will be added on at the end if that turns out to be the case.

I have faith that the composition advanced as appropriate, but that the "outtake" will only appear on the extended collector's set after the initial (shortened) commercial release.

[philipchevron]

Can I do the 'b' side?

http://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/p ... -live-3543

[fluke]

Can I do the 'b' side?

http://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/p ... -live-3543

offcourse you can! You have to..

The question remains what are the special tracks that will be on the ep...

[territa]

down again.

[Zuzana]

How to play music that lasts 1,000 years

Mark Espiner
Friday 4 September 2009
Guardian Music Blog
Full URL

Jem Finer's Longplayer began at the millennium and will finish in 3000. But don't worry if you can't wait that long, he's about to perform a 1,000-minute 'snippet'


Don't change the record … Jem Finer in the lighthouse where his Longplayer is working through its cycle. Photograph: Martin Godwin

You have to admire Jem Finer's pluck. Not literally, of course, although as the banjo-pickin' founder member of the Pogues he co-wrote perhaps the best Christmas song ever. No, it's the brave laugh-in-the-face-of-obstacles kind of pluck I'm talking about, the kind that fuels a musician to attempt crazily ambitious musical projects (as if working with Shane MacGowan wasn't demanding enough).

In the late 1990s Finer started writing a piece of music that was 1,000-years long. I wrote about it just before Longplayer's first notes sounded at the dawn of the new millennium. It's been playing away continuously ever since in a lighthouse near Canary Wharf, and at various other listening posts around the world. It's a beautiful piece of ambient music that uses the chimes and harmonics of a series of standing bells played back in a changing sequence by a group of Apple computers. It takes 1,000 years to complete itself.

By my reckoning Longplayer must be the most epic piece of music ever. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it beats everything in terms of length that I can think of. It trumps John Cage's 639-year-long organ piece currently playing in the church of St Burchardi in Halberstadt, Germany; it dwarfs Wagner's Ring Cycle (a mere 15 hours of playing time); and it laughs in the face of Pink Floyd's 23-and-half-minute-long Echoes on side two of Meddle, which, before I opened my iTunes to Longplayer's streaming audio, was the longest piece in my record collection.

In keeping with the concept of the project, Finer is preparing to perform a 1,000-minute section of Longplayer live. On a purpose-built stage he will assemble an orchestra of 26 players, including J Maizlish Mole of the wonderful Marseille Figs, art musician hermit Ansuman Biswas and music guru David Toop. All will be playing what has been dubbed by Finer as a "giant synthesiser built of bronze-age technology". It should also prove that the piece can sit beyond a digital hard drive, as it was always meant to do.

When I chatted to Jem about going live with the project he was upbeat. "I always meant for Longplayer not to be bound to the computer or any other technological form. Right from the start I wanted alternative methods of performance, including mechanical, non-electrical and human-operated versions. At last we're getting a chance to do that."

If you want to listen to the piece before it takes the stage try one of the streaming links. It's not available to download in its entirety – not until the year 3000 anyway. By which time, no doubt, there'll be enough disc space on your iPhone to accommodate it.

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guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2009

[Zuzana]

Millennial music

Richard Holledge
September 05, 2009
The National

Full URL

Jem Finer created his Longplayer piece using traditional eastern singing bowls and a computer. Ray Kilpatrick / Redferns

On the banks of the River Thames, in the lee of Canary Wharf’s towers, Trinity Buoy Wharf is a mix of wasteland and empty buildings rubbing up against ship containers that have been converted into living spaces and a thriving subculture of artists’ studios. There’s even an American-style diner. It is the home of London’s only lighthouse, built in 1864 to carry out experiments in light. Now it is the home for an experience in sound.

On Jan 1, 2000, as the clock ticked into the new millennium, Jem Finer, the banjo player with the shock ’n’ roll group The Pogues, pressed a computer button and launched a piece of music he wrote to last 1,000 years.

“For a long while I had been pondering how to make a piece of work that engaged with time,” he says in his memorably cluttered office near the lighthouse, just across the river from another millennium project, the Dome.

“What sparked the eureka moment was thinking about the millennium. What is 1,000 years? Ultimately, it is a very arbitrary figure based on the coincidence of having 10 digits on the end of our hands and certain agreements about when calendars start and stop. It occurred to me that to make sense of it to myself I’d like to make 1,000 years of something.

“It didn’t have to be a piece of music, but then it popped into my head when I was playing around with an old-fashioned laptop letting routes of music of different length run in and out of phase. I thought, ‘Hang on, if I calculate this right I could make a piece of music which would last precisely 1,000 years.’ ”

The result – appropriately called Longplayer – was created with a computer, an array of Tibetan singing bowls and his own powers of invention and imagination.

Finer composed six short pieces of music that are played simultaneously. The computer chooses and combines these sections in such a way that no combination is repeated until exactly 1,000 years has passed. Longplayer can be heard in the lighthouse and five other listening posts around the world, including one in the new Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Egypt, as well as at http://www.longplayer.org. This month, Finer is holding a live performance of the work – 1,000 minutes of it – at London’s Roundhouse.

He has lined up 26 musicians, including the fellow Pogue Darryl Hunt, to play the singing bowls – used in eastern rituals for meditation and religion – which will be set out on tables in six concentric circles. As the music plays, a Long Conversation will take place involving a relay of talks by such celebrity writers and academics as Marcus du Sautoy, Susie Orbach and Jeanette Winterson.

“It is all well and good using a computer to create the piece, but if you are trying to make something last for a long time it is pretty stupid to tie it to one technology because you don’t know what’s going to happen,” says Finer.

As he unpacks a bundle of short-sleeved cotton shirts and matching trousers that he had specially made in India for the performers, because “it is important what you wear in a performance”, he explains: “As soon as you get beyond one generation of technology, you really start not knowing. I had to be very careful that the computer wasn’t doing anything other than the emulation of simple physical actions because if the computer started doing all sorts of spectral manipulations, you’d be stuck.

“Longplayer is not a piece of computer music because it can be reduced back to an original score, a set of instructions that are predictable. The computer is a cheap, efficient, convenient way to start off the music’s life, but the point is that there are a finite number of combinations.”

Does he ever contemplate the idea that the computer will take over, such as the wayward Hal in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, and make its own music?

“The computer’s not bright enough to do that yet,” he insists. “One day, maybe. In a sense, Longplayer is already a Hal because although I’ve made the system and I know how it began and how it ends, I don’t know what combinations will occur in between. That’s unpredictable. There could be whole sections that are absolutely horrendous, maybe a section lasting 100 years which is totally unlistenable because of the combinations.

“It will have its ebbs and flows, its climaxes and moments of relative peace and tranquillity, day by day, week by week, month by month. It will always be familiar, like the sky – sometimes incredibly surprising in a beautiful way or a boring way. I could work out how many combinations there are – if you sit there long enough.”

He taps at his calculator.

“It comes to 15,000,000,000. Or something. What I’m doing with the show is returning something which has been conceived using digital technology to something that is physical and tactile.

“If I had thought it out properly in the beginning, I could have sorted it out without a computer, though I would have needed a lot of people on standby for 1,000 years and the music written out in hundreds of thousands of books.”

Easier to assemble and certainly more reliable are his singing bowls.

“My friend Darryl Hunt suggested I use them and it was a revelation. Once I was pointed towards them, I couldn’t understand why I’d missed them.”

The floor of his space is covered with the bowls, fighting for room with two pianos, a large desk, music consoles and clutter including a guitar, shelves of cassettes and CDs, and a drum high on a ledge. He pings away to prove the bowls’ versatility and variety, running a stick around the lips of one to make a high-pitched sound like a finger on a glass. A rap or a tap from a little leather-wrapped mallet produces a range of sharp notes, interjections and warm bell tones.

“These instruments are so robust they are they are not going to go out of tune,” he says. “What is so pleasing is that when you play a number of them together you don’t necessarily hear them separately. Their sounds combine symphonically to create new sounds.

“I came to the idea of using them very slowly. One of the reasons was that in composing Longplayer, it had to be translatable into other forms and easily reproducible. If I had used the strings of a piano, they would have gone out of tune. They would have rusted and broken. And there was the problem of keeping the music from being culturally out of sync by using very contemporary forms and idioms which would soon sound out of date. These bowls provided a great answer because they are already old and the sounds don’t have a date attached to them – not like a drum sound that you would hear and say: ‘That’s very Eighties.’”

Longplayer Live will be the first time the work will be played by people, without any electrical or mechanical aid.

“Once it had started to play, it raised all sorts of cultural ideas about music and the physics of sound. It became a huge, all-encompassing project and, of course, it wasn’t a case of ‘OK that’s the end of it’, it was more a sense that it was the beginning – how do we keep it going and how move it on in these different forms. In that sense by going live it has taken 10 years to realise the first stumbling step into a possible different route for Longplayer to take.”

Meanwhile, a steady stream of pilgrims make their way by road, rail and river every weekend to the lighthouse to listen to the steady drone, hums and harmonies, discordant, jangling interruptions and moments of silence that characterise Longplayer – a mix of extra-terrestrial warblings and eastern mysticism with a dash of whale music and a touch of the whimsical sounds of Enya. The noise grows louder and more intense as you walk up the stairs to the lighthouse gallery with its views along the Thames.

“It is still very young people who come along and look at the visitors’ book, rather in the way people used to carve their names in a bus shelter,” says Finer. “There are regulars and there is always an element of referring back and people saying: ‘I heard something like this before in 2003 or 2007’. It’s already accruing a history and a meaning for people, which seems to be about their feeling of looking forward. Some people just stumble about, some people think it’s mad, others are totally fascinated and get taken in by it.”

A small screen clocks off the hours, minutes and seconds, while a wavy line reflects the changes in notes. It is impossible not to stop and listen and be aware that someone else could well be doing the same thing in 991 years’ time.

Will the Dome still be there, Canary Wharf, the lighthouse itself? Look back 1,000 years and history tells us that King Canute was preparing to conquer England, the Norwegian Leif Eriksson had discovered America and the first statues were being erected on Easter Island. Maybe the dirty old town of London will have fallen into ruin by 3,000, but perhaps Longplayer will still be making music and some chronicler will be peering at the 31st-century equivalent of Wikipedia to discover just who was Jem Finer. The Pogue might still be in vogue.

Longplayer Live is at the Roundhouse, London, on September 12. http://www.roundhouse.org.uk.

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