Longplayer: One Song, A Thousand Years, No Intermission

A quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry ago, a for­mer Celtic punk musi­cian start­ed a per­for­mance of a song so absurd­ly long that it has still not fin­ished play­ing. Mea­sured against his­tor­i­cal aver­ages, it should still be play­ing cen­turies after most coun­tries as we know them today will have ceased to exist.

Jere­my Max “Jem” Fin­er is best known as a found­ing mem­ber and gui­tarist of The Pogues, the band that blend­ed Irish tra­di­tion­al music with punk feroc­i­ty and poet­ic self-destruc­tion. He recalled his years in the band and work­ing with its front­man, “Shane [McGowan] could be mad­den­ing. He could take a few weeks to final­ly get around to doing some­thing but once we got down to work­ing he was always fun­ny and inspir­ing and a gen­er­ous col­lab­o­ra­tor.” Fin­er said.

“There was end­less pro­cras­ti­na­tion. But then, great focus,” he explained. The impor­tance of patience in such a time and that oscil­la­tion between chaos and intense con­cen­tra­tion, between delay and pro­duc­tion, may have been, in hind­sight, a rehearsal for what came next.

In 1995, while still tour­ing with The Pogues, Fin­er had begun exper­i­ment­ing with dif­fer­ent ways of com­pos­ing music in real time. As the year 2000 approached, he found him­self increas­ing­ly pre­oc­cu­pied with a much larg­er ques­tion: how to make sense of a mil­len­ni­um. How could one ren­der sen­si­ble or tan­gi­ble a span of time that is triv­ial in cos­mic terms yet vast­ly exceeds any human life? How could atten­tion be shift­ed away from the fre­net­ic pace of late 20th-cen­tu­ry cul­ture toward some­thing slow­er, deep­er, and more expan­sive?

The prob­lem was not musi­cal at first. It con­cerned time as it is expe­ri­enced and time as it is under­stood through phi­los­o­phy, physics, and cos­mol­o­gy. At extremes of scale, time appeared baf­fling to Fin­er: fleet­ing and gran­u­lar at the quan­tum lev­el, yet unfath­omably vast in geo­log­i­cal and cos­mo­log­i­cal terms, where a human life is reduced to a bare­ly per­cep­ti­ble blip.

That sin­gle idea imme­di­ate­ly opened a flood of ques­tions. How do you com­pose music that no one can ever hear in full? How do you account for chang­ing cul­tur­al per­cep­tions of sound that seem to become ever more rapid with each pass­ing decade? Where do you place such a work? What tech­nol­o­gy do you trust to sur­vive cen­turies? How do you plan for its sur­vival across polit­i­cal, tech­no­log­i­cal, and envi­ron­men­tal upheaval? And most impor­tant­ly: how do you ensure that peo­ple will come lis­ten and want it to con­tin­ue?

The work that emerged from these ques­tions was Long­play­er, a sin­gle audio piece con­ceived and com­posed by Jem Fin­er between Octo­ber 1995 and Decem­ber 1999 with the cru­cial sup­port of Artan­gel, which com­mis­sioned and facil­i­tat­ed the project. The devel­op­ment of Long­play­er was man­aged and guid­ed by a think tank that includ­ed fel­low musi­cian Bri­an Eno, Direc­tor of Per­form­ing Arts & Head of Music at the British Coun­cil John Keif­fer, land­scape archi­tect Georgina Liv­ingston, Artan­gel co-direc­tor Michael Mor­ris, dig­i­tal sound artist Joel Ryan, archi­tect and writer Paul Shep­heard, and writer and com­pos­er David Toop.

Sound design­ers Ryan and Toop advised on acoustic prop­er­ties and struc­tur­al integri­ty, while exten­sive test­ing of algo­rith­mic com­bi­na­tions was car­ried out to ensure that the system’s per­mu­ta­tions would avoid rep­e­ti­tion over cen­turies. Lat­er, the audio was spa­tial­ized in col­lab­o­ra­tion with engi­neer Simon Hendry. A full account of this devel­op­ment was lat­er pub­lished in the 2003 book Long­play­er by Artan­gel.

On Jan­u­ary 1st, 2000, pre­cise­ly at mid­night, Long­play­er began its per­for­mance by the Thames in the “relax­ation zone” of the new­ly-con­struct­ed Mil­len­ni­um Dome (now the O2 Are­na), a gaudy Blair-era assort­ment of exhibits and attrac­tions cel­e­brat­ing the city and its entry into the new mil­len­ni­um. “My zone was full of all the peo­ple fraz­zled from the oth­er zones,” Fin­er recalls. “It became the chill-out space.” Iron­i­cal­ly, the Mil­len­ni­um Dome shut down just a year into its exis­tence, hav­ing large­ly been con­sid­ered a fail­ure and fac­ing numer­ous finan­cial and man­age­ment issues. As a result, Fin­er’s work was relo­cat­ed across the riv­er to Trin­i­ty Buoy Wharf, home of Lon­don’s only remain­ing light­house, an 1864 land­mark once used by Michael Fara­day for his exper­i­ments in optics and light­ing.

Admit­ting the imper­ma­nence of any one loca­tion, Longplayer’s ulti­mate ambi­tion exceeds any sin­gle phys­i­cal site, or even a sin­gle medi­um, designed to per­sist whether Lon­don ends up under­wa­ter or reduced to a scorched imprint on the land. Adapt­abil­i­ty is the core prin­ci­ple: “The score can be real­ized in dif­fer­ent sources of ener­gies and tech­nolo­gies, and in the revival of per­for­mances. It’s trans­lat­able into many dif­fer­ent forms. There is always a means. You can even sing it. If there is noth­ing else left, there is our breath”

At the heart of Long­play­er is what Fin­er calls the “source music”, last­ing exact­ly 20 min­utes and 20 sec­onds. This orig­i­nal com­po­si­tion was record­ed in 1999 under Finer’s direc­tion, per­formed by a small ensem­ble and designed specif­i­cal­ly around the tonal qual­i­ties of Tibetan singing bowls. From this source, six relat­ed pieces were derived, each a har­mon­ic trans­po­si­tion of the orig­i­nal: the orig­i­nal pitch, an octave below, sev­en semi­tones below, five semi­tones below, five semi­tones above, and sev­en semi­tones above. These six pieces are the­mat­i­cal­ly linked, pre­serv­ing har­mon­ic uni­ty while exhibit­ing dis­tinct tim­bres and pro­gres­sions. They func­tion as the atom­ic units of the larg­er work and are seg­ment­ed for recom­bi­na­tion, with the stip­u­la­tion that no piece is ever per­formed sequen­tial­ly in full.

Long­play­er oper­ates accord­ing to sim­ple but pre­cise rules. “What you’re hear­ing,” Fin­er explains, “is a super­im­po­si­tion of six dif­fer­ent sec­tions. Each plays for two min­utes, and then the start points move on. The amount each start point moves on is dif­fer­ent for each of the six pieces.” Each of the six pieces advances through its length at a unique rate, rang­ing from once to 96,541 times per full cycle.

Because each lay­er moves at a dif­fer­ent speed, the com­bined super­im­po­si­tion of these sec­tions nev­er repeats. There is no ran­dom­ness involved what­so­ev­er. The algo­rithm is entire­ly deter­min­is­tic and math­e­mat­i­cal, guar­an­tee­ing pre­dictabil­i­ty while ensur­ing that no com­bi­na­tion of lay­ers will recur until exact­ly 1,000 years have elapsed. Only at the final moment of the year 2999 does the com­po­si­tion end, at which point Long­play­er is planned to com­plete its cycle and begin again.

The Long­play­er site explains the struc­ture through a plan­e­tary metaphor. It asks you to imag­ine the solar sys­tem, with plan­ets orbit­ing the sun at dif­fer­ent speeds. Once in a very long while, they may all align, but it takes an enor­mous span of time before that con­fig­u­ra­tion occurs again. “Long­play­er is pre­de­ter­mined from begin­ning to end – its move­ments are cal­cu­la­ble, but are occur­ring on a scale so vast as to be all but unknow­able.”

The choice of Tibetan singing bowls as the sole sound source was cen­tral to the project. These bowls, stand­ing bells made of met­al alloys, have been in use for cen­turies and pro­duce rich, res­o­nant, har­mon­ic tones. Most instru­ments drift out of tune over years or decades, but singing bowls are remark­ably sta­ble and durable. They are also easy to play, both by humans and by machines, mak­ing them ide­al for a work intend­ed to last for cen­turies.

Fin­er, on the pro­jec­t’s web­site, has described them as a “bronze age solu­tion to a new mil­len­ni­al chal­lenge,” a choice that dig­ni­fied the mil­len­ni­um rather than try to com­mod­i­fy it. Reflect­ing on the deci­sion, he has not­ed that he unknow­ing­ly employed the same strat­e­gy he had used with The Pogues’ call­back to tra­di­tion­al Celtic music: going back to some­thing old and ele­men­tary in order to avoid sound­ing like a prod­uct of the time. “if we used sounds that were 1990s sounds,” he has said, “they would have imme­di­ate­ly sound dat­ed.”

Long­play­er will con­tin­ue with­out rep­e­ti­tion until the last moment of 2999. It ini­tial­ly ran as a record­ing on a sin­gle Apple iMac, which was suf­fi­cient to start the piece but nev­er intend­ed as a long-term solu­tion. Fin­er was acute­ly aware that per­son­al com­put­ers, oper­at­ing sys­tems, and stor­age media are tran­sient. Over time, the sys­tem has been migrat­ed to more robust and trans­par­ent tech­nolo­gies, as well as oth­er, non-dig­i­tal medi­ums.

Today, Longplayer’s source mate­r­i­al runs in the Super­Col­lid­er pro­gram­ming lan­guage on Rasp­ber­ry Pi hard­ware, cho­sen for its sim­plic­i­ty, reli­a­bil­i­ty, and ease of replace­ment. Yet from the ear­li­est stages of the project, it was clear that Long­play­er could not depend sole­ly on dig­i­tal tech­nol­o­gy if it was to sur­vive for cen­turies. Mechan­i­cal, non-elec­tri­cal, and human-oper­at­ed ver­sions have been con­sid­ered and employed as accom­pa­ni­ments to the per­for­mance.

Fin­er’s wider artis­tic prac­tice, span­ning instal­la­tions, film, pho­tog­ra­phy, and music, has long focused on the broad­ness of time and space. In July 2005, Jem Fin­er won a PRS Foun­da­tion New Music Award for a pro­pos­al that treat­ed weath­er itself as a com­po­si­tion­al force. The work, titled Score for a Hole in the Ground, imag­ined a land­scape rid­dled with ver­ti­cal voids: wells, mine shafts, fis­sures, bunkers, cul­mi­nat­ing in a deep shaft fit­ted with instru­ments sus­pend­ed at dif­fer­ent heights: bowls of vary­ing sizes and tun­ings, each piv­ot­ed del­i­cate­ly on its cen­ter of grav­i­ty. Falling water became the per­form­ers, strik­ing the bowls like bells; as they slow­ly filled, their tim­bres shift­ed and their slight sway­ing mod­u­lat­ed the sound, before over­flow­ing into ves­sels below. The result­ing music was car­ried upward through a tube to a brass horn ris­ing twen­ty feet above the ground, ampli­fy­ing the sub­ter­ranean activ­i­ty while dou­bling as a sculp­tur­al land­mark from above. Mechan­i­cal­ly, it’s not unlike the bam­boo tube of a suikinkut­su, a dec­o­ra­tive music device usu­al­ly installed in tra­di­tion­al Japan­ese gar­dens. The piece was real­ized in King’s Wood near Chal­lock, Kent, and installed over the sum­mer of 2006.

In March 2012, Fin­er launched Mobile Sin­fo­nia, a glob­al com­po­si­tion dis­trib­uted as mobile phone ring­tones, intend­ed to func­tion as a sound piece on a glob­al scale, per­formed in tan­dem by any­one who installed the ring­tones to their phone. Devel­oped dur­ing a year as a non-res­i­dent artist at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Bath, the work explored the mutu­al inva­sion of sound­scapes as thou­sands of phones col­lec­tive­ly formed a dis­persed, con­tin­u­al­ly reac­ti­vat­ed piece of music. Fin­er lat­er received an hon­orary doc­tor­ate from the uni­ver­si­ty. He con­tin­ues to devel­op projects that reflect his inter­est in the inter­sec­tions of music, sci­ence, long-term sus­tain­abil­i­ty, and the repur­pos­ing of old­er tech­nolo­gies, includ­ing Spiegelei, a spher­i­cal cam­era obscu­ra using his own 360-degree pro­jec­tion sys­tem, and Super­com­put­er in Cam­bridge, a five-bit mechan­i­cal sculp­ture designed to com­pute min­i­mal musi­cal scores using mar­bles.

Oth­er works push this log­ic of unlike­ly sys­tems even fur­ther: a chart recorder repur­posed as an auto­mat­ic draw­ing machine dri­ven by the elec­tri­cal fluc­tu­a­tions of a detuned radio, in col­lab­o­ra­tion with friend and artist Ansuman Biswas, Fin­er has also staged more improb­a­ble inter­ven­tions, includ­ing a project in which they dressed as genies and float­ed in zero grav­i­ty aboard a plane at the Yuri Gagarin Cos­mo­naut Train­ing Cen­ter near Moscow. The goal? Con­ceived on a “shoe­string bud­get, men­tal dis­ci­pline, and Russ­ian hos­pi­tal­i­ty”, the project set out to “defy grav­i­ty and mil­i­tary-indus­tri­al eco­nom­ics to cel­e­brate the dream with­in us all.”

With Long­play­er, the atten­tion turns to both the process­es of sta­tis­ti­cal com­pu­ta­tion and human par­tic­i­pa­tion, as if the project was tak­ing on an intel­li­gence of its own. As Fin­er explains on the offi­cial web­site, “Long­play­er grew out of a con­cep­tu­al con­cern with prob­lems of rep­re­sent­ing and under­stand­ing the flu­id­i­ty and expan­sive­ness of time. While it found form as a musi­cal com­po­si­tion, it can also be under­stood as a liv­ing, 1000-year-long process – an arti­fi­cial life form pro­grammed to seek its own sur­vival strate­gies. More than a piece of music, Long­play­er is a social organ­ism, depend­ing on peo­ple – and the com­mu­ni­ca­tion between peo­ple – for its con­tin­u­a­tion, and exist­ing as a com­mu­ni­ty of lis­ten­ers across cen­turies.”

One of the key insights behind Long­play­er is that, because it is gen­er­at­ed by a math­e­mat­i­cal con­struct rather than a fixed record­ing, any part of the piece can be per­formed live, in per­fect syn­chrony with the ongo­ing work. In 2002, Fin­er devel­oped a graph­i­cal score for Long­play­er, arranged for 234 Tibetan singing bowls and six play­ers. The score pro­pos­es a con­fig­u­ra­tion of six con­cen­tric rings of bowls, rep­re­sent­ing the six simul­ta­ne­ous trans­po­si­tions of the source music. Using this score, per­form­ers can real­ize sec­tions of Long­play­er acousti­cal­ly, with­out elec­tron­ic inter­ven­tion. In this form, the project now had a means to make its way out­side of the bounds of Trin­i­ty Buoy Wharf.

This oppor­tu­ni­ty has since been real­ized many times. Hav­ing just spent two years as an artist in res­i­dence at the Astro­physics Depart­ment in Cam­bridge, Fin­er direct­ed Longplayer’s first spec­tac­u­lar live per­for­mance in 2009: a 1,000-minute sec­tion drawn from its vast con­tin­u­um, per­formed by an orches­tra of 26 per­form­ers using 32 pre­cise­ly tuned Tibetan bowls at the Cam­den Round­house, a large cir­cu­lar hall fit for the pro­jec­t’s unique arrange­ment, which, tak­en as a whole, assumes the form of a pur­pose-built 20-meter wide instru­ment, “a giant syn­the­siz­er built of bronze-age tech­nol­o­gy,” as Fin­er described it.

Fur­ther live per­for­mances fol­lowed, includ­ing a semi-cir­cu­lar ren­di­tion at Trin­i­ty Buoy Wharf on News Years Eve of that same year to mark the project’s tenth anniver­sary, and a per­for­mance at the Yerba Bue­na Cen­ter for the Arts in San Fran­cis­co in 2010 in col­lab­o­ra­tion with Bri­an Eno’s Long Now Foun­da­tion. In 2014, Long­play­er was per­formed by a coali­tion of voice choirs as part of ongo­ing exper­i­ments to free the work from depen­dence on tech­nol­o­gy. A ver­sion for 500 voic­es was real­ized in 2018, and the piece has also been con­sid­ered for trans­fer to 12 spe­cial­ly pressed records played on 12 record decks, to be per­formed through a new for­mat.

The per­for­mances reg­u­lar­ly con­tin­ue to this day. As recent­ly as April of last year, anoth­er 1,000-minute sec­tion of Long­play­er was per­formed live at the Round­house, unin­ter­rupt­ed, from 7:20am to mid­night, pre­cise­ly as writ­ten for that time and date. Fin­er has explained that while Tibetan bowls can be struck, they are more inter­est­ing­ly played by run­ning a wood­en beat­er around the rim, like rub­bing a fin­ger around a wine glass, draw­ing out sus­tained tones.

Long­play­er is gen­er­al­ly acknowl­edged to be the longest sin­gle piece of music ever con­ceived. By sheer length alone, it sur­pass­es John Cage’s 639-year-long As Slow As Pos­si­ble, cur­rent­ly play­ing in the church of St Bur­char­di in Hal­ber­stadt, Ger­many. It dwarfs Wagner’s Ring Cycle, which runs for a mere 15 hours, and makes even Bull of Heav­en’s day-length songs seem com­i­cal­ly brief. As if you need­ed fur­ther per­spec­tive, The Care­tak­er’s 6‑hour long album Every­where at the End of Time is just 0.0000685% of Long­play­er’s 1,000 years.

Yet Fin­er has repeat­ed­ly insist­ed that the music itself is not the point. As he explains, “[Long­play­er] grew out of a life­long curios­i­ty about time and its dimen­sions, traced back to tem­po­ral­ly ver­tig­i­nous child­hood encoun­ters with starlight and ancient stones and the ebb and flow of time before clocks. For me it’s more about cre­at­ing a space to dream one’s way into long flows of time, an exper­i­ment in ‘mak­ing’ time. But every­one has their own take on it — which is as it should be.” Thus, as with John Cage’s com­po­si­tion, the project serves as an explo­ration of the con­cept of “deep time”, first intro­duced by writer John McPhee in his 1981 book Basin and Range, where he explores the field of geol­o­gy and ancient ter­rain from around the world.

McPhee used the idea of deep time as a way of grasp­ing the almost incom­pre­hen­si­ble age and scale of the Earth. Deep time stretch­es far beyond human his­to­ry, beyond civ­i­liza­tions, lan­guages, even species, into spans of mil­lions and bil­lions of years in which con­ti­nents drift, moun­tains rise and erode, and oceans appear and van­ish. McPhee’s intent was to trans­late deep time into some­thing men­tal­ly sur­viv­able, often by com­press­ing Earth’s his­to­ry into metaphors like a sin­gle cal­en­dar year or a long scroll unrolling beneath your feet. Nev­er­the­less, the effect is qui­et­ly desta­bi­liz­ing: human time becomes a thin, frag­ile sur­face lay­er atop an almost infi­nite geo­log­i­cal past.

Long­play­er can now be heard at lis­ten­ing posts around the world, includ­ing the Roy­al Obser­va­to­ry in Green­wich, the Orangery in Not­ting­hamshire, the Bib­lio­the­ca Alexan­d­ri­na in Egypt, and the Long Now Foundation’s cafe and muse­um at Fort Mason in San Fran­cis­co, the York­shire Sculp­ture Park in West Bret­ton (estab­lished in 2016), and the Bris­bane Pow­er­house in Queens­land, Aus­tralia. In total, there are around ten per­ma­nent lis­ten­ing posts world­wide, locat­ed in places where the sound inte­grates with its envi­ron­ment.

Select­ed excerpts of the piece, have also been released as sep­a­rate albums on the project’s offi­cial Band­camp page. The work can also be heard live via a inter­net stream, as well as through a paid app avail­able from the Apple Store. Released in 2015, the app visu­al­izes the rules of Long­play­er using con­cen­tric loops. Yel­low bars indi­cate what is cur­rent­ly play­ing, brown cir­cles rep­re­sent the 39 Tibetan singing bowls ini­tial­ly record­ed for the com­po­si­tion, and blue wave­forms show vol­ume. The app per­forms the music in real time by act­ing on record­ings of the bowls with­out requir­ing a con­stant inter­net con­nec­tion. All instances of Long­play­er remain syn­chro­nized through ref­er­ence to the cur­rent time and date. As long as the phone sur­vives, Long­play­er sur­vives with it.

One of the ear­li­est pro­posed forms for Long­play­er imag­ined a pur­pose-built, self-suf­fi­cient chip designed to play the piece and noth­ing else: cheap enough to be man­u­fac­tured by the mil­lion and scat­tered across the world “like seeds blown from plants,” a delib­er­ate­ly bio­log­i­cal strat­e­gy for achiev­ing large-scale redun­dan­cy. In this sense, the app rep­re­sents a belat­ed real­iza­tion of that idea, with Apple and its con­tem­po­raries sup­ply­ing the dig­i­tal seeds and Long­play­er qui­et­ly rid­ing the coat­tails of the near-ubiq­ui­ty of the devices they have already dis­persed across the plan­et.

Along­side its musi­cal life, Long­play­er has become a cat­a­lyst for long-term think­ing across dis­ci­plines, invit­ing thinkers and col­lab­o­ra­tors from a broad range of field. Since it began, it has exer­cised minds in archi­tec­ture, engi­neer­ing, land­scape gar­den­ing, arti­fi­cial life, quan­tum mechan­ics, com­mu­ni­ca­tions tech­nol­o­gy, and com­par­a­tive reli­gion. It has influ­enced the broad­er land­scape of long-term art projects and is a found­ing par­tic­i­pant in the infor­mal Long Term Art Projects asso­ci­a­tion, estab­lished in late 2022, along­side ini­tia­tives such as Katie Paterson’s Future Library in Oslo as well as the Long Now Foun­da­tion, which is cur­rent­ly work­ing on an under­ground clock designed to inde­pen­dent­ly keep time for 10,000 years.

In addi­tion to phone apps, the Long­play­er Trust has also explored alter­na­tive play­back meth­ods, includ­ing ana­log devices, radio trans­mis­sion, and con­stant human per­for­mance, to mit­i­gate the risks of hard­ware degra­da­tion. One mechan­i­cal mod­el under inves­ti­ga­tion is based on the record-play­er con­cept: six two-armed turnta­bles, each six to twelve feet in diam­e­ter, capa­ble of rais­ing, low­er­ing, and advanc­ing arms with extreme pre­ci­sion. The record­ings would then be print­ed on large vinyl records and selec­tive­ly played.

Anoth­er of these exper­i­men­tal meth­ods, and prob­a­bly the most unique, is Son­ic Ray, a project that beams the sound of Long­play­er across the Thames as encod­ed light. Fin­er learned that sound can be trans­mit­ted as light, then decod­ed back into sound at its des­ti­na­tion. “What could be bet­ter than to relight the light­house with a beam that actu­al­ly car­ries Long­play­er?” he asked. The instal­la­tion sends the music 800 meters across the riv­er to Richard Wilson’s cross-sec­tioned ship sculp­ture, A Slice of Real­i­ty, in Green­wich. Look­ing towards the long future, the Trust envi­sions a poten­tial Long­play­er Day, occur­ring annu­al­ly on the 21st of June, the longest day of the year, fea­tur­ing live per­for­mances of the piece across the world.

The strate­gies are both cre­ative and as a means of sur­vival, as it costs about £100 per day to main­tain keep the per­for­mance going. The “Buy­ing Time” pro­gram allows indi­vid­u­als to spon­sor a day of par­tic­u­lar sig­nif­i­cance for that very same amount. In return, Fin­er sends a signed Long­play­er score from that date, and spon­sors are invit­ed to dis­play a per­son­al object in the Buy­ing Time Cab­i­net at the light­house. Like­wise, sup­port­ers have spon­sored indi­vid­ual bowls that make up the project, with dona­tion sizes increas­ing in rela­tion to the size of the bowl. In return, var­i­ous phras­es of the spon­sor’s choos­ing are engraved on the side.

In many ways, per­son­al memo­ri­als and tes­ti­monies have also become part of Longplayer’s evolv­ing his­to­ry. Oshin, a live per­former of the piece and the 19-year-old son of Ansuman Biswas, now the reclu­sive con­duc­tor of Long­play­er Live and a Long­play­er Trustee, has grown up with the work. “It’s always been a sound­track to my life,” he has said. “For me, it’s the sound of every­thing.” Play­ing the piece that had begun its per­for­mance years before he was born was, for him, pro­found­ly mov­ing. Ansuman him­self has reflect­ed on how, over 26 years, Long­play­er has begun to accrue a past as well as a future, with gen­er­a­tions com­ing and going while the work con­tin­ues. While chil­dren of the pro­jec­t’s orig­i­nal cre­ators have grown up and become par­tic­i­pants in the project them­selves, some of the orig­i­nal cre­ators have since passed away.

On one occa­sion, Ansuman Biswas per­formed an eight-hour sec­tion of Long­play­er at Trin­i­ty Buoy Wharf, a “one mil­lionth” frac­tion of the piece’s total length. Draw­ing on prin­ci­ples of Dhru­pad and Nada Yoga: Swara (tun­ing one­self to the envi­ron­ment), Samaya (the res­o­nance of a par­tic­u­lar moment), and Raga (spe­cif­ic pat­terns of notes or tones that evoke states of mind), Biswas cal­i­brat­ed a tan­pu­ra, a tra­di­tion­al instru­ment from the Indi­an sub­con­ti­nent, against the back­ground drone of Long­play­er, itself set against the cos­mic back­ground. He described the per­for­mance as “surf­ing on a con­stant­ly unfold­ing wave­front, rid­ing all the cur­rents.”

Longplayer’s phi­los­o­phy extends into con­ver­sa­tions as well as per­for­mances. As part of its year­ly pro­gram, a series of con­ver­sa­tions is orga­nized, fea­tur­ing speak­ers rang­ing from 87-year-old his­to­ri­an and philoso­pher Theodore Zeldin to broad­cast­er and biol­o­gist David Atten­bor­ough. The pro­gram has invit­ed cli­mate activists, physi­cists, epi­demi­ol­o­gists, writ­ers, and archae­ol­o­gists, among oth­ers. There is no for­mu­la beyond the stip­u­la­tion of dura­tion (1,000 min­utes for the entire event, nat­u­ral­ly) and a shared set of ques­tions and dis­cus­sions regard­ing where par­tic­i­pants see the future is head­ing, and what their expe­ri­ences have led them to believe can be done about it.

A fur­ther series involved a series of chain let­ters sent from one thinker to anoth­er, encour­ag­ing an ongo­ing con­ver­sa­tion always added to by a new indi­vid­ual. Recip­i­ents and writ­ers includ­ed Bri­an Eno, Nas­sim Nicholas Taleb, and Alan Moore. Notably, there are no politi­cians involved in any of the con­ver­sa­tions, as a rule. As Artangel’s Michael Mor­ris has said, “quite a lot of the prob­lems we’re fac­ing in so many dif­fer­ent fields are to do with the short-term val­ues of pol­i­tics. Most of the cre­ative and imag­i­na­tive think­ing about the future is being done out­side that sys­tem.”

Through­out all of this, Fin­er has returned to a core con­vic­tion: Long­play­er is not a pas­sive art­work but a chal­lenge, a quest that requires care across gen­er­a­tions. In this light, the project is not so unusu­al as there are many his­tor­i­cal exam­ples from of sim­i­lar under­tak­ings. In the Zoroas­tri­an reli­gion, adher­ents main­tain tem­ples con­tain­ing flames that are kept per­pet­u­al­ly kept alight, nev­er going out for cen­turies. The Ise Shrine in Japan is peri­od­i­cal­ly dis­man­tled and rebuilt to pre­serve both craft knowl­edge and an under­stand­ing of imper­ma­nence. The Queshuacha­ca in Peru, the world’s last remain­ing Inca rope bridge, is rebuilt every year to main­tain its stur­di­ness. Such prac­tices may seem inessen­tial, but they are cen­turies-old exam­ples of where knowl­edge and con­ti­nu­ity sur­vives through col­lec­tive respon­si­bil­i­ty.

“If nobody is inter­est­ed, or there is no way of play­ing it, it will no longer exist,” Fin­er has said. “But so far, so good.” Over a quar­ter of a cen­tu­ry on, Long­play­er still rings out from the light­house, streams across the inter­net, plays itself on phones, and sounds from lis­ten­ing posts around the world. As Fin­er puts it, it now has a his­to­ry as well as a future. And if all tech­nolo­gies fail, if all machines fall silent, the score can still be sung. “If there is noth­ing else left,” he says, “there is our breath.”

Beyond look­ing ahead to the even­tu­al day the Long­play­er con­cludes its ini­tial per­for­mance, the Long­play­er Trust have made the effort to look at least as far back in time as well. Last year, mem­bers of the Trust paid a vis­it to Exeter Cathe­dral, found­ed around 1050 AD and home to the 10th-cen­tu­ry Exeter Book, a UNESCO-recog­nised cor­ner­stone of Eng­lish lit­er­a­ture. Here, the two insti­tu­tions joined forces and a “brief” 1,000 minute trans­mis­sion of the Long­play­er echoed through the halls of the cathe­dral. Fol­low­ing the vis­it, the Trust’s chair, Sam Kinchin-Smith, shared a trans­la­tion of Old Eng­lish gnom­ic vers­es from the Exeter Book that seem to ring uncan­ni­ly true: “The sound unstill / the deep dead wave / is dark­est longest.”