Press coverage: Longplayer

The Guardian, 24 May 2000:
“If infinity anxiety spawned the piece, it is performative anxiety that is now driving Finer. What if there were a power cut? What if there were a war or a natural disaster? What if the computer crashes?

“ ‘The long-term project is to translate it form the computer to something else’ he says. ‘Something sustainable – a simple mechanical device.’ He is thinking of a punch-card system, along the lines of the old pianola rolls, and a trust has been set up to oversee the switch-over. The trust is also investigating sending the sound to a string of obsolete satellites (although its lawyer is, according to Finer, more excited by the copyright issues that a 1,000-year-long piece of music introduces). Finer himself favours the idea of Longplayer occupying its own radio frequency.

Playing opposite Lord Roger’s folly, Longplayer mocks the temporary and limited zones of the Millennium Experience. It marks time like a sonic Stonehenge. There’s no real rush to catch it, it will outlive you, but listening to it in that lighthouse somehow makes you a part of its determined beam of sound. ‘The air is full of sound information,’ says Finer, ‘from the radio waves of mobile phones to an exploding star. I like the fact that its all going on around us. The fact that this piece just exists is reassuring.’ “ (Mark Espiner)

The Herald, 2 December 1999:
“Beneath Longplayer’s simplicity lies something more complex. As this computer scientist and musician, who also co-founded those punk folksters The Pogues, says: ‘It’s a wonderful thing, you can have what seems like a very simple idea and immediately it spawns all sorts of links’.

“It also raises questions. For instance – why have we been duped into thinking that the new millennium’s all about one wild night? But Finer’s Longplayer is no protest against short-termism. I rather enjoy the jump-cut world we live in,’ he says, ‘but this does not provide the opportunity to think far ahead and about what people leave behind.

“The initial idea for Longplayer came from his interest in time, rather than music, which he points out conveniently needs time to work. It was all planned to exist as a global radio wave ‘so it would become part of the forces of nature and anybody with a radio could listen to it’.”

The Guardian Weekend, 9 September 2000:
“The core of Longplayer is a 20-minute recording of Tibetan music, that has been manipulated to create a 1,000-year-long loop. He has described the process as like ‘six copies of the same gramophone record on different turntables all spinning at different speeds with different bits playing at the same time’.

“Longplayer is thus more like a soundscape, or a piece of installation art, than a conventional piece of music. You can never experience it all. It will outlive you. If you listen to a fragment of it, you can but imagine the rest: the unknowable, ineluctable expanse of time stretching before you.” (Charlotte Higgins)

The Evening Standard; Going Out, 30 December 1999:
“The intention [of Longplayer] is that its droning and parping will, like this year’s eclipse, make the hearers ponder the passing of time in a way that makes you feel both mortal and insignificant.”