The Roundhouse, Camden, and #Longplayer
Yesterday so nearly didn't happen. Last minute rehearsals had been arranged, and perhaps a 2 hour gap had been squeezed in for a break, but then due to random events - the whole day cleared up! So, yesterday, I was lucky enough to experience Longplayer Live - a 1000 minute section of a 1000 year long, non-repetative, generated piece of music played on Tibetan Singing Bowls for our pleasure at The Roundhouse, Camden. Actually, I was even luckier (than what, I'm not sure ;)), and massive thanks to @Documentally for the ticket - it was more than gratefully received and enjoyed.
What was it like? It's hard to describe it without using the most popular words of yesterday, which seem to have been 'sonorous', 'mesmerising' & 'resonant', but the sound of apparently randomly timed outbursts and drones from (at any one time) around 12 of the singing bowls was, if anything, utterly captivating; this was the one thing I really wasn't sure the event would manage. @StuartWitts did point out (amongst all his wisdom) that the procession of time was extremely difficult to gauge in there - certainly hours seemed to vanish into minutes, and if you left the round for a while, you could never be quite sure that anything had actually changed when you wondered back in. But it certainly was magical. There's tons of material out there from the days staging - a quick Twitter Search for #Longplayer, and a gander through @Documentally's Longplayer Posterous (live blogged on the day) will feed you some of the buckets on media that was pumped out on the day - there's plenty of audio, audioboos, video and stills if you fancy venturing into Longplayer (Flickr is also rammed with some of the most lovely photography I've seen in ages). For me, I'm just glad that I managed to spend longer than the hour or two I might have had in a venue I love experiencing something totally new. Marcus du Sautoy was, as expected, a joy to listen to - exceptionally happy I managed to catch his section in the talks. Oh, And also to the lovely people who kept me entertained - thank you! See, it's dangerous for a musician to actually have a day off ;). PS - my own flickr set, with the images from this post in high res, can be seen HERE!
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