Longplayer Live at Roundhouse, 5th April 2025
On the 31st December 2024, Longplayer completed the first quarter century of its score. Throughout 2025, this milestone will be marked with an international programme of events, collaborations and initiatives celebrating the work’s unique articulation of time and its dimensions, and the engagement with the long-term that Longplayer continues to inspire.
Longplayer Live
Booking is now open for the first of our 25th anniversary events, Longplayer Live, the first live performance of the work in over a decade, which will take place at the Roundhouse in April 2025.
7.20am-midnight, 5th April 2025
Tickets: £25 standard, £5 for under 30s: enter discount code 30UFIVER.
Book here: https://www.roundhouse.org.uk/whats-on/longplayer/
On 5th April 2025, Longplayer will return to the Roundhouse for a performance of the 1000-minute section of its score, as written for that particular time and date, from 7.20am to midnight.
Longplayer’s duration means that, given the unknowability of the future, its score was written so as to be independent of any one technology. For most of its life it has been performed by computers, while its caretakers, the Longplayer Trust, explore alternatives which have included the use of the human voice, vinyl records, code, a beam of light and, as first heard at the Roundhouse in 2009, live performance by musicians.
Akin to what Longplayer’s composer, Jem Finer, calls a ‘vast, Bronze Age synthesiser’, Longplayer Live is performed on a large orchestral instrument comprised of 234 singing bowls, arranged in six concentric rings and played by shifts of six to twelve people at any one time, reading from a graphic score.
Audiences can spend as long as they wish listening and watching, and are invited to move around or find a space to rest, with the possibility to leave and return to the venue throughout the performance’s duration.
Longplayer hopes to enrich intergenerational conversations about how we can imagine the future. For this 25th anniversary performance, 18 young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community will join the orchestra of musicians and artists: a meeting of present and future custodians who will shape Longplayer’s next 25 years.
Longplayer Live is generously supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust and Urban Space Management. Thanks is also due to Universal Works for their generosity in supporting, designing and making the performers’ clothing.
Long Poem with Caleb Femi (12pm & 2:30pm)
As part of the Longplayer Live programme, award-winning writer, director, and former Young People’s Laureate for London, Caleb Femi, presents Longplayer: Long Poem, an immersive 100-minute poetry event exploring time, inheritance, survival, and the unknown. Taking place on Saturday 5 April at 12pm and 2:30pm, Longplayer: Long Poem reflects on the past, present, and future within Longplayer’s 1,000-year continuum, weaving powerful storytelling and poetic expression.
Femi first made his mark at the Roundhouse Poetry Slam a decade ago and has since become an acclaimed writer, director, and photographer. Celebrated for his debut collection Poor—which won the Forward Prize and was added to the AQA GCSE syllabus—Femi’s work continues to elevate young voices and explore deep thematic narratives.
This event is included in your Longplayer Live ticket, allowing you to immerse yourself in both poetry and music throughout the day. Read more about the event here.
Jem Finer in conversation with Transmission Roundhouse
Time: 4.30pm
Place: The Roundhouse Bar and Café (ground floor)
Jem will be in conversation with the resident youth-led podcast, Transmission Roundhouse. Join us then to hear more about the ideas behind Longplayer.
Roundhouse Three Sixty
This rare performance is part of Roundhouse Three Sixty, a brand new festival of music and culture for London taking place in April 2025, bringing people together to experience unforgettable, one-off events across the whole Roundhouse site.
Young people will be at the heart of the festival – as performers, in off-stage roles, through masterclasses and workshops and in the audience, supported by a ticket scheme offering thousands of free and discounted tickets to 18-30 year olds to ensure the festival is accessible to everyone. Enter discount code at checkout: 30UFIVER.
Sponsor a Longplayer Live bowl
Did you know that you can sponsor one of the singing bowls that makes up the Longplayer Live instrument? In order to fund the continuing work on the instrument and the production of events, The Longplayer Trust is inviting donations on a bowl-by-bowl basis.
When you sponsor a bowl, it is engraved with a word of your choice. You can record a special occasion, commemorate a person or event, or inscribe a significant word with personal resonances, which will be heard vibrating in Longplayer Live performances.
Only ten bowls of the 234-wide instrument now remain to be sponsored.
If you enjoy Longplayer, and would like to support the Longplayer Trust in our efforts to make it available to as wide an audience as possible, then please consider sponsoring a bowl or making a donation. You can find out more on how to do this here: https://longplayer.org/support/sponsor-a-bowl/
