Can’t stop the music

Giving a whole new meaning to the term “extended re-mix” Longplayer is a piece that is – wait for it – a thousand years long, a musical composition which has been devised to play continuously and without repetition from 31 December 1999 to 31 December 2999.

Composed and developed by Jem Finer, a long-time member of The Pogues, the piece has been running without hitch since it kicked off on the eve of the millennium and has already been playing continuously for 22 months in the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London,

“I first thought of it in the mid-’90s in the back of a bus while touring in Germany,” Finer explains. “The idea was a very simple one – to make a piece of music that was 1000 years long. Well, it seemed simple in theory and I thought I knew how to do it.

“Time was an abiding fascination with me and I was thinking about the millennium coming up and how crazy it would be do something like this. I had an old Mac laptop and I was whiling away the time playing around on it using a sequencer writing the music from my head, trying to work out what it sounded like.

The music is generated by Tibetan singing bowls of various sizes recorded onto six computer loops. The constant shifting of these loops creates ever-changing textures and harmonies. “I’d have one loop say 11 seconds long with three or four notes, then another loop seven seconds long. In that time they’re moving against each other, never repeating the same sequence.”

A thousand year long piece of music might well be a worthy experiment but clearly only a tiny fraction of the complete piece will be accessible to anyone. Is there any possibility that it might become available in a more er, manageable format, a radio edit perhaps? “I’m afraid not,” Finer says. “It’s important that it exists in its long-term form. I spent a lot of time trying to make something that would not only work, but something that I would be able to defend as a piece in its own right. The idea of music being contained by time constraints is just a consequence of technology over the years from 78rpm records to 45s and now compact discs. You look at other traditions like Indian music ragas that are played all night long and people like Brian Eno have worked in the whole area of creating extended loops.”

To date Longplayer has been widely aired. During 2000 there was a listening post in the Millennium Dome and by the end of 2002 there are expected to be listening posts in Egypt, Australia, Slovenia – and for the duration of the Belfast Festival.

“Before people start thinking I’m trying to make a fortune out of it let me say that I’m not,” Finer insists. “We signed over any royalties to a trust which will keep it playing until the end. The aim of myself and the trust is that it should exist for as many people as possible – we have to look for income to keep it going.”

Longplayer can be heard on the web at www.longplayer.org or at the upcoming Belfast Festival where the installation is sited at the top of the Albert Clock Tower.