It’s been a bit of gap since our last newsletter, for which apologies. After the great flurry of celebratory activity that defined the first months of our 25th anniversary year, for the last few months the focus of the Longplayer Trust has been on future-proofing: on what a firm footing for the next quarter century looks like, and how it might be achieved. This is the essential tension that (we hope) will keep Longplayer playing: between outward experimentation and projection, and inward consolidation; between going big, and coming home.

Below you’ll find news of the Longplayer Conversation for 2026 (which will be taking place on 9 March to make up for fact we didn’t have one this year), instructions for building your own Longplayer player, and a Boxing Day treat. But first, we’re going to make like every other email newsletter you’ve received over the last few weeks and lead with …

Ideas for Christmas Presents

We won’t go on about this, but Longplayer’s Moleskine notebooks and Oona Grimes-designed anniversary tote bags would make very nice last-minute stocking fillers. And if you’re rapidly running out of Christmas shopping time, we encourage you to buy it instead: that is, to buy time itself. This is a truly unique gift (in a world of remarkably un-unique gifts claiming the same) that also supports Longplayer in a transformational way.

Buying Time gives you the opportunity to sponsor a day of particular significance to you or your recipient, for £100 a year. After you claim your day, Jem Finer will send you a signed Longplayer score from that date, and we invite you to display a personal object in the Buying Time Cabinet at the Longplayer lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf. If every day of the year was sponsored, Longplayer’s annual running costs would be covered in full. Now that really would constitute a firm footing.

Here are some especially glamorous days that are yet to be claimed: 1 January, 29 February, 1 April, 1 May, 4 July, 5 November, even 24 December. The very day you might decide to buy time for someone, if you’re leaving it really late.

The Longplayer Conversation for 2026

The Longplayer Conversation for 2026 will be on Monday 9 March at 7 p.m. at Swedenborg Hall in central London. We are delighted to announce that Selma Dabbagh, the British-Palestinian writer and lawyer, will be in conversation with the actor, author and icon of alternative comedy Alexei Sayle. Tickets available in the new year.

Build Your Own Longplayer Player

Instructions for building your own autonomous Longplayer Player are now online! Developed and coded by Daniel Jones, this includes optional time sync via GPS which will keep all versions globally playing almost perfectly (to tiny decimal places of a second) in time. No internet connection is necessary – as long as the RPi knows the correct time and date when started up it’ll play from the correct place. Read the document for more details.

Boxing Day

Radio 4 came to the lighthouse to listen to Longplayer and speak to Jem about the work turning 25. The interview will be a part of the Boxing Day episode of PM, from 5pm GMT (then available on catch-up on BBC Sounds).

In the meantime, you could read Imogen West-Knight’s wonderful FT feature about Longplayer Live from May of this year.

And with that, we’re out for 2025, a big birthday year that saw us revive Longplayer Live for 1000 minutes at the Roundhouse and create an installation for Exeter Cathedral with an imaginative timespan of almost 2000 years; connect with a new generation of future custodians and make the technology behind the project accessible to all; pop up in Madrid and North Yorkshire, and forge new bonds with long-term art projects around the world. It has been a series of treasured moments, connected as ever by Longplayer’s unbroken thread. We are so grateful to you for joining us throughout, and supporting our mission of keeping Longplayer playing, in this year of years especially.

Longplayer turns 26 at noon GMT on 31 December. On we go.

What does it mean to be a custodian, when what you are caring for has been composed to continue for many human lifetimes?

An Ethnography of Longplayer: Year 25 is a new work by artist and animator Jess Mountfield which takes up this question.

Open to the public at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse from this Saturday, Mountfield’s installation is an eloquent reflection on how commitment to the distant future reshapes our sense of the past and present.

A collage of the voices of Longplayer’s present custodians will play on an acetate disc that deteriorates with every spin. Each voice considers Longplayer in the context of their understanding of, and relationship with, time.

Accompanying the recording is an animated loop of acetate prints, showing light passing through the windows of the lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf and other non-human long flows of time –projected through Longplayer’s shadowscape of singing bowls.

Jess Mountfield is an artist, animator and ethnographer interested in unstitching the word ‘time’ to see what, exactly, we mean by it. Her cross-media works explore and ask questions of the varied temporalities we are enmeshed by.

The installation will play during regular opening hours at the lighthouse, where Longplayer has been playing for 25 years, throughout October – or until the disc becomes inaudible.

Please be aware that on occasion, there may be other events taking place in the space below the lighthouse which may mean external noise is audible for brief periods of time. See here for more information and to plan your visit accordingly.

What do you hear when you listen to Longplayer?

We had such a brilliant time during Open House Festival at Trinity Buoy Wharf last week. Our Trustees and friends came to the lighthouse, home to Longplayer’s London listening post, to welcome visitors and provide unique insight into Longplayer’s past, present and future. It was especially lovely to meet some young visitors, who enjoyed drawing what they heard when they listened to Longplayer. They even had a go at playing the singing bowls themselves!

Our brilliant youth facilitator, the artist, Kitty Finer, ran these children’s activities with support from Katie Evans, a young artist who performed in the Longplayer Live orchestra earlier this year.

When there were no children to entertain, Kitty and Katie took turns drawing with their eyes closed while listening to Longplayer. Katie then used the drawings as a score, which she used to play a singing bowl.

Next time you listen to Longplayer, why not try drawing, and perhaps even playing, what you hear?

If you can’t get to one of our listening posts, then you can always download the Longplayer app, which generates the music in real time based on the composition’s thousand-year-long score. The app, available to download for £3.99, automatically synchronises itself with every other Longplayer app across the globe, allowing you to become part of a community of listeners across space and time.

If you enjoy Longplayer and would like to help keep it playing, please consider making a donation to The Longplayer Trust, a charity dedicated to doing so.

Longplayer in the Lady Chapel, Exeter Cathedral,
4th-31st August

Last week, members of the Longplayer Trust visited Exeter Cathedral, which, founded around 1050 AD, celebrates its 975th anniversary this year. The Cathedral Library is also home to the 10^th century collection of Old English poetry, known as the Exeter Book, recognised by UNESCO as the foundation volume of English literature. After visiting, our chair, Sam Kinchin-Smith, shared a 1960s translation of some Gnomic verses contained in the book. Three lines have been looping around like an ancient earworm in our minds since:

‘The sound unstill
the deep dead wave
is darkest longest.’

The sense of an unstill sound, its enduring movement and momentum, seems to resonate with Longplayer’s project of continuity. It speaks, perhaps, to the low resonance of a long wave, to its slow journey into the future. But ‘sound’ here might not be strictly audible. A sound is also a passage between the sea and the shore, that which connects two distinct spaces, or an inlet that opens one body of water unto the other. Longplayer’s 1000-year-long composition does not simply endure: it opens up space in which to imagine distant futures, connecting us, in turn, to deep pasts.

While Longplayer is set to complete its concentric cycles of sound 975 years from now, 975 years have passed since the foundation of Exeter Cathedral.

Throughout August, a Longplayer listening post will be installed in the Lady Chapel of Exeter Cathedral, to celebrate this symmetry and to mark the cathedral’s 975th anniversary and Longplayer’s 25th.

This installation invites visitors to stand at the pivot point of a timespan of almost two millennia – nearly that of the whole history of Christianity. This is an opportunity to imaginatively inhabit the distant past through the fabric of the cathedral building, and the distant future through the Longplayer score.

We hope that their concurrent presence will offer a uniquely expressive and expansive space for reflection: for imagining better futures, enabled by art and technology, and underpinned by centuries of unbroken ritual and tradition.

Longplayer will be audible in the Lady Chapel during the cathedral’s regular opening hours, Monday to Saturday 9.15am-5pm, and Sunday 11.30am-3pm, except when there are services. Admission costs between £8-10, and children under 18 enter for free.

To read more about the installation and to plan your visit see here.

Look out for further announcements of special events inspired by and interacting with the installation later this year.

‘About Time’: Redcar Summer Exhibition
Redcar Contemporary Art Gallery, Whitby
12th July-24th August

This summer, Longplayer’s 1000-year-long score can also be heard unfolding in the main space of Redcar Contemporary Art Gallery in Whitby. Longplayer features as part of an exhibition “About Time”, curated by the brilliant Professor Susan Collins, an award-winning artist and former Director of the Slade School of Fine Art.

The exhibition invites reflection on memory, change, urgency, and cycles, offering artists a framework to explore everything from geological deep time to fleeting moments, future possibilities, and the rhythms of daily life and the environment.

It includes over 60 works from selected and invited artists working in all disciplines to interpret temporal themes demonstrating time’s layered presence in art and life. The show emphasises inclusivity and creativity across mediums such as painting, video, installation, performance and new media.

Entry to the exhibition is free, and the gallery is open Wednesday to Saturday 11am-4pm. See here for more details.

Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse

If you can’t get to one of our new installations, why not visit, or re-visit, our London listening post at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse? The lighthouse is open every Saturday and Sunday 11am-5pm throughout summer. There are many works of public art in the area, including the Time and Tide bell, which is rung by the movement of the sea at high tide daily, as well as exhibitions on the S. S. Robin. Check out Trinity Buoy Wharf’s website for updates, or our webpage to plan your visit.

There are many days left to sponsor in Longplayer’s calendar. If you’d like to support Longplayer’s continuation, then consider buying time. You can commemorate a special occasion as well as support the charitable work of The Longplayer Trust. By way of thanks, you will receive a unique signed score of your day, and will be invited to display a personal object in the Buying Time Cabinet at our Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse listening post. See here for more.

It’s been a month since Longplayer Live took place at the Roundhouse, but we cannot stop thinking about this incredible experience. We want to thank all of those who played a part in this rare event, whether as witness, listener, performer, sponsor, or facilitator. Thank you for your support - whether in person or from a distance.

A note from the Chair of the Longplayer Trust, Sam Kinchin Smith:

If you found yourself at Longplayer Live, chances are you might already have some sense of the wider life, scope, history and philosophy of the artwork, conceived and composed by Jem Finer to begin playing in the last moments of 1999. But maybe you arrived relatively new to the project, as I am, having taken up the role of the chair of the Trust in September last year. For Longplayer, newcomers are as integral as those who have years of embodied knowledge of the work, with the action of passing on the music through intergenerational exchange explicitly underpinning this performance. Over a long day of 1,000 minutes, young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community joined artists Jem has worked with for decades in an orchestra founded on the principle of generational handover.

There is a power in duration, in its most basic sense: the way things that are just really really long disrupt and dissolve our sense of time, our temporal limitations, our routines and obligations and boredom thresholds. The result can be all kinds of new aesthetic, social, communicative and political possibilities. Being together on the 5th April, sharing in this rare durational listening event, offered an invitation to find space in time to imagine our way into long-term futures – and perhaps, what might be required of us to make them possible. My own approach to getting to know Longplayer has been and continues to be through listening: to the music; to Jem, to better understand his original vision and evolving ambitions; to my fellow trustees; and most vitally to you, Longplayer’s audiences. If you get something out of the experience of Longplayer Live, please stay in touch. The work that keeps Longplayer playing is sustained by generosity of many kinds; should you wish to know more, head to our website, or take a look at the last page of the Longplayer Live programme.

Sam Kinchin Smith

A soundtrack to life

We were honoured that Longplayer Live was featured in an article by Imogen West Knights last week in the Financial Times. Towards the end of the piece, Imogen caught up with some of the young artists that took part in the performance, including Oshin, the 19-year-old son of Ansuman Biswas (Conductor of Longplayer Live and a Longplayer Trustee). You can read the full article here, but we wanted to share this passage with you:

‘Oshin has grown up with Longplayer. It is older than he is. “It’s always been a soundtrack to my life,” he said. He finds it almost comforting to know that whatever has happened to him, at any moment of his life, Longplayer has been playing continuously. “For me, it’s the sound of everything.” To get to play the piece that has provided the sonic landscape of his life was very special to him. “All of us, we were keeping alive this giant, living machine really, all the musicians swapping in and out and trying to keep this continuous breath going.”

He wants it to survive and wants to play a part in that. And he knows that this wanting is the thing that will ensure its survival. “When you think about it, most things in the world are trying to be passed on,” he said, “languages, cultures and religion, even biology, a species’ genes. Longplayer’s a bit different, because it doesn’t feel like that. It’s only there if we want it to be.”’

Tell us what you thought about Longplayer Live

As Longplayer’s community of listeners, you are an integral part of this durational project. So if you were able to make it to the Roundhouse on the 5th of April, we’d love to hear from you about your experience.

How did it make you feel? What did it make you think of? Did it change the way you experienced or thought about time?

Click here to fill out Longplayer’s audience survery.

Your response can help shape the future of this 1000-year-long project!

Longplayer Live on Resonance FM

If you weren’t able to make it to Longplayer Live, or if you’d like to hear more about the project, head over to Resonance FM, where you can now listen to a conversation between Ilia Rogatchevski and Longplayer's composer Jem Finer on the origins of Longplayer, its custodianship and manifestation as a live piece on 5th April.

The programme also features live recordings from the performance, so you can vicariously tune into the experience!

Stay tuned for more opportunities to get involved with Longplayer, and in the mean time thank you for listening!

Longplayer Live takes place this Saturday, from 7.20am until midnight, at the Roundhouse. An orchestra of 32 musicians, playing a selection of Longplayer’s 234 singing bowls, will perform the 1000 minute long section of the score, as written for this time and date, a piece of music that won’t be heard again until 5th April 3025.

Darran Anderson describes Longplayer in his recent article for The Quietus, as ‘an act of faith that the future [will] happen, a reaching out beyond the finite human lifespan to somewhere and someone we can scarcely conceive of’. This rare live performance offers a unique opportunity, not only to experience connection in the present, but with the past, and the distant future.

In rehearsals this week, Channel 4 asked some of the young people we’ve been working with from the Roundhouse, and who will be performing on Saturday, what being part of Longplayer in this moment in time meant to them. Emily Feigen-Toner responded, ‘It’s really cool to be part of something historical, in a sense of the future, rather than a sense of the past’. Tristan Hail noted that when Longplayer began playing on the 31st December 1999: ‘quite a few of us in this room would have just been born or wouldn’t have been born at all, so to carry on the tradition, the longevity of this music, is something deeply exciting’.

Book your tickets now to spend one unique day with Longplayer, and become part of a future beyond the present. Families welcome: under 5s are free, under 30s tickets available for £5.

While the durational performance lasts over sixteen hours, we invite you to spend as much time with Longplayer as you wish, leaving and returning throughout the day, and experiencing some of the other incredible events on offer, including ‘Longpoem’, a 100 minute poem by Caleb Femi, which will be performed at 12 and 2pm (Dorfman Hub, Roundhouse). Jem Finer will also be in conversation with Transmission Roundhouse in the Cafe/Bar at 4.30pm, should you wish to hear more about the ideas behind Longplayer.

We hope to see you on Saturday!

Longplayer