Listening in a chapel, an archive and an armadillo
A new Longplayer listening post; a trip to the archives; and some words on Ansuman Biswas's performance last month
Photo credit: Michael Depestele
Did you know that, beyond our flagship location at the Trinity Buoy Wharf Lighthouse, Longplayer has, since its conception, played at listening posts across the world? Right now, Longplayer can be heard in a chapel in Poperinge, Belgium, as part of the Arts Festival Watou 2024, Landscape of the Imagination. It will be open to the public to visit until 1st September, throughout which time you can listen to Longplayer resonating through the singing bowl and throughout this unique space.
We are very excited to be part of this brilliant festival which invites 40 artists, and more than 20 poets, to explore the power of imagination and the interconnectedness between the village, the landscape and artistic practice. The festival is organized by the city of Poperinge, curated by James Putnam and Michaël Vandebril, and inspired by Koen Vanmechelen who set up the preliminary ‘Patchwork’ project. For more on the festival and how to visit see here.
Earlier this month, members of the Longplayer Trust visited the archives at Goldsmiths, which holds around 30 years of material from Longplayer, from its conception to the present day. The archive contains a wealth of notebooks, drawings and writing related to early conceptions, developments and experiments, papers relating to scores and software, hand-drawn graphic scores, press, recordings and correspondence about the composition and related projects. Jem even found the specs for the original speakers, a detail we thought lost to history!
The creation of the archive was led by Longplayer Trustee, James Bulley, and was catalogued by Lorenzo Prati, you can find out more about his work here: http://lorenzoprati.com/
The archive is accessible to all by appointment. Follow this link to find out more about the collection and how to access the material: https://longplayer.org/visit/
We’ll also be highlighting specific holdings on our Instagram in the coming weeks, so make sure you’re following us @_longplayer_
Photo credit: James Bulley
On Sunday 9th June, Ansuman Biswas, pictured above within the circle of singing bowls at the Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse, performed with the composition from 9-5, an ‘one millionth of the length of Longplayer’. His performance drew on principles of Dhrupad, a musical form and a branch of Nada Yoga whose major concepts Ansuman described as:
Swara - the tuning of oneself in relation to the environment
Samaya - the resonance of a particular moment of time
Raga - a particular pattern of notes or tones which evokes a state of mind.
Dhrupad, Ansuman writes, ‘is the science of these moods. It is a way of exploring the vibration of oneself in relation to the environment.’ The traditional instrument in Dhrupad is a tampura, to generate a ‘drone against which to discern oneself’. On Sunday 9th June, Ansuman ‘calibrated a tampura against the background of Longplayer, which is itself set against the cosmic background’, a ‘drone stretched out over time’, against which ‘we can measure other frequencies’. At the foreground of these patterns Ansuman performed the vibrations of his self, ‘surfing on a constantly unfolding wavefront, riding all the currents’.
Ansuman kindly invited visitors to join him in an exercise in Dhrupad at the CLT sound pavillion hosted throughout the summer at Trinity Buoy Wharf as part of the London Festival of Architecture, nicknamed the ‘Armadillo’. To find out more about the Armadillo, see here; and to find out more about Ansuman’s work, see here.