SE14 6PP | 51.47441, -0.03639

Gavin Starks

Introduction

Gavin helps solve complex, multidisciplinary, collective action challenges.

He has co-created over a dozen organisations, building multidisciplinary teams fit for a digital age. He explores the impact of data and the web on business, society and culture to address our shared data infrastructure, policy, science, communications, innovation and skills across sectors.

Gavin co-chaired the development of the Open Banking Standard and was founding CEO of the Open Data Institute. He is currently convening federated partnership programmes to help address the Sustainable Development Goals.

He has worked across fintech, climate change, supply-chain management, modern slavery, the circular economy, digital media, telecoms, machine learning, blockchain and the internet of things (including: as Chairman at blockchain company, Provenance.org; Non-exec at circular-economy IoT company, CupClub; Trustee at environmental charity, Blue Ventures; Chairman at Rinse Media Group; strategic advisor to governments, for-profit and non-profit companies who create global impact).

dgen.net/

SE14 6PP | 51.47441, -0.03639

Lindsay Seers

For Whom the Bell Tolls

A self generating talk possibly based on John Donne, the Immediate Data of Consciousness and Tibetan Book of the Dead, amongst a multitude of other things that will spontaneously arise.

Lindsay Seers works in London and lives on the Isle of Sheppey. She studied at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London (BA Hons, Sculpture and Media 1991-94) and at Goldsmiths College, University of London (MA Fine Art 1999-2001), where she now works as a lecturer on MA Fine Art (0.2). Her works are in a number of collections including Tate collection, Arts Council collection, Artangel collection and the collection of MONA, Tasmania. She has won several prestigious grants and awards such as the Sharjah Art Foundation Production Award, UAE; Le Jeu de Paume production award for the Toulouse Festival, France; the Paul Hamlyn Award; the Derek Jarman Award; AHRC Award; a number of Arts Council and British Council Awards in support of her works and she also received the Wingate Scholarship from The British School at Rome 2007/8. She has shown her large scale works internationally at a number of museums and art centres including SMK (National Gallery of Denmark); Venice Biennale 2015; Hayward Gallery, UK; MONA, Tasmania; Bonniers Konsthall, Sweden; Smart Project Space, Amsterdam; Kiasma, Finland; Turner Contemporary, UK; Tate Triennial, UK, TPW, Canada, Sami Centre for Art; Norway; Centre for Contemporary Art 'Poland and Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art. She has forthcoming solo shows in UK, Germany and UAE

lindsayseers.info

SE14 6NW | 51.47323, -0.03647

Rhodri Davies

Wound Response

Wound Response forms an attempt to find fluid pitch and rhythmic relationships: to work with multiple voicing that don’t settle into a groove but stay around long enough to tumble into another set of compound parts. The two main techniques used here are to over-articulate the strings (which harpists are taught not to do) and to attack the strings with a plectrum, forcing the tuning into new relationships until the strings eventually snap.

Rhodri Davies was born in 1971 and lives in Swansea. He plays harp, electric harp, live-electronics and builds wind, water, ice, dry ice and fire harp installations. He has released four solo albums: Trem, Over Shadows, Wound Response and An Air Swept Clean of All Distance. His regular groups include: Common Objects, HEN OGLEDD, a duo with John Butcher, Cranc and a duo with DANE LAW. He has worked with the following artists: David Sylvian, Jenny Hval, Derek Bailey, Mark Fell, Kahimi Karie, Laura Cannell, Lina Lapelyte, Sachiko M, Bill Orcutt, Jim O’Rourke, Christian Marclay and David Toop.

rhodridavies.com

Photo Credit: Heiko Purnhagen

SE14 6NW | 51.47323, -0.03647

Hither Green Drone Orchestra

Pauline Oliveros - ‘Horse Sings From Cloud’

"Horse Sings From Cloud" is based on a simple text score that involves deep listening, self control and a curbing of the desire to constantly change. For this realisation of the score the Orchestra will be walking from one venue to the next.

The Hither Green Drone Orchestra was formed in 2017 by Richard Sanderson to perform at the Hither Green Festival. It is a collective of musicians from experimental music, classical, folk and free improvisation. They perform in the open air, sometimes moving, sometimes stationary - their performances relate to the holding of long tones, gradual changes, deep listening and interacting with the existing sonic environment. They have performed works by Pauline Oliveros, John White, Robert Barry and Richard Sanderson.

SE14 6LG | 51.47942, -0.0319

DAVID TOOP

Time & Paper Studies

David Toop will be doing time, sounding flaking skin of time, intravenous time, rusty dirty decomposing not fit for purpose pond weed time heard from below the surface, time as disturbance and withdrawal, time that he himself being human can’t comprehend, a resonating time that Sly Stone once said only takes a minute that thought a nostalgic time that comes up again and again, time and paper studies and research into the time cracked voices that hang around as ghosts in old places, locked up and yearning to be released as pure unmeasured time like marks that sink away into nothing.

David Toop has been developing a practice that crosses boundaries of sound, listening, music and materials since 1970, encompassing improvised music performance, writing, electronic sound, field recording, exhibition curating, sound art installations and opera. It includes seven acclaimed books, including Rap Attack (1984), Ocean of Sound (1995), Sinister Resonance (2010), Into the Maelstrom (2016) and Flutter Echo (2019). His solo records include New and Rediscovered Musical Instruments on Brian Eno’s Obscure label (1975), Sound Body on David Sylvian’s Samadhisound label (2006) and Entities Inertias Faint Beings (2016). His 1978 Amazonas recordings of Yanomami shamanism and ritual were released on Sub Rosa as Lost Shadows (2016). In recent years his collaborations include Rie Nakajima, Akio Suzuki, Tania Chen, John Butcher, Ken Ikeda, Elaine Mitchener, Sharon Gal, Camille Norment, Sidsel Endresen, Thurston Moore and Ryuichi Sakamoto He is currently Professor of Audio Culture and Improvisation at London College of Communication.

davidtoopblog.com

SE8 3DQ | 51.48192, -0.02274

RYOKO AKAMA

so no ma ma

A solo performance in response to the long player day, with objects found in the markets, streets or skips everywhere - rustic, damaged and dysfunctional. St Nicholas’ Church will become a very quiet and equal experience where nothing seems to be happening, but perhaps one may find something.

Ryoko Akama is a sound artist/composer/performer, engaging with mundane objects and invisible energies such as magnetism and gravity, composed into kinetic contraptions or small islands of tiny occurrences that magnify silence - ‘almost nothing’ aesthetics. She runs melange edition label, amespace and co-edits mumei publishing.

ryokoakama.com

Performance hosted in collaboration with DeptfordX

SE8 3DQ | 51.48192, -0.02274

JENNIFER WALSHE, ÁINE O’DWYER and LEE PATTERSON

Performance

Walshe, O’Dwyer and Patterson have spent many years working together and apart to investigate the nature of time through their work, including performances in the UK and Europe both as a trio and as part of a nine-piece ensemble performing the experimental opera TIME TIME TIME, co-written by Walshe and the philosopher Timothy Morton. For Longplayer Day they will continue their idiosyncratic explorations, encompassing Walshe’s fast-paced digital time, Patterson’s deep geological rhythms and O’Dwyer’s liminal eternal drones.

“The most original compositional voice to emerge from Ireland in the past 20 years” (Irish Times) and “Wild girl of Darmstadt” (Frankfurter Rundschau), composer and performer Jennifer Walshe was born in Dublin. Her music has been commissioned, broadcast and performed all over the world. She has been the recipient of fellowships and prizes from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts, New York; the DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm, the Internationales Musikinstitut, Darmstadt and Akademie Schloss Solitude among others. Recent projects include Aisteach, a fictional history of avant-garde music in Ireland, and EVERYTHING IS IMPORTANT, a work for voice, string quartet and film commissioned by the Arditti Quartet, which has toured to critical acclaim.

Áine O’Dwyer creates live and recorded events which embrace the broader aesthetics of sound and its relationship to environment, time, audience and structure. The notion of a holding space as-extension-of-instrument is a cornerstone of her artistic investigation and the crux of her live performances and recorded works to date: Gallarais, Beast Diaries, Sound Walks from Medjugorje, Music for Church Cleaners, Locusts and Gegenschein, and her most recent publication Poems for Play.

By using sound recording as a form of ear training, Lee Patterson has devised and performs with a selection of amplified devices and processes. Whether working live with amplification or recording within an environment, he has pioneered a range of methods to produce or uncover complex sound in unexpected places. From rock chalk to springs, from burning nuts to aquatic plants and insects, he eavesdrops upon and makes a novelty of playing objects and situations otherwise considered mute. His collaborators have included Mika Vainio, Vanessa Rossetto, David Toop, Rhodri Davies and John Butcher, Greg Pope, Benedict Drew, Luke Fowler, Lucio Capece, Rie Nakajima, Angharad Davies and many more. His works have featured on UK TV, BBC Radios 3, 4 and 6, Resonance FM and on radio stations worldwide. He lives and works in Prestwich, Manchester.

milker.org

Performance hosted in collaboration with DeptfordX

Photo Credit: Thor Brødreskift courtesy of Borealis Festival

SE8 4SA | 51.477089, -0.021008

JOHN LELY

Site-specific performance

A solo set on the EMS VCS4, a unique & very characterful synthesiser prototype which never went into production. This will be its first public airing in 20 years. Thank you to Simon Desorgher, Goldsmiths EMS and the Goldsmiths Alumni and Development Fund.

John Lely is a composer, musician and curator based in London. He works with acoustic and electronic objects and instruments. Collaborators include the Bozzini Quartet and members of Apartment House. Most recently performed at the Merce Cunningham Centenary event (Barbican) with Mira Benjamin, Anton Lukoszevieze, Christian Marclay & Christian Wolff. Notable recordings on Another Timbre: The Harmonics of Real Strings with Anton Lukoszevieze; Seaside with Dirar Kalash & John Tilbury. Formerly technician & archivist in the Goldsmiths Electronic Music Studios. Co-author of Word Events: Perspectives on Verbal Notation (Bloomsbury 2012). Co-curator of Music We'd Like to Hear. Composition tutor at Trinity Laban.

johnlely.co.uk

Performance hosted in collaboration with APT Gallery

SE8 3ER | 51.48335, -0.01916

MARCUS DU SAUTOY

The Music of the Primes

How do you make a piece of music that doesn’t repeat for a thousand years? The answer…mathematics. But Longplayer is not the first to tap into numbers to create large expanses of time. Marcus will reveal how French composer Olivier Messiaen used prime numbers to create a similar effect by in his piece The Quartet for the End of Time written when he was a prisoner of war in Stellag VIII A. But it turns out that Nature has been using the same prime number trick well before composers recognised their power.

Marcus du Sautoy is the Simonyi Professor for the Public Understanding of Science and Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford. He is author of six books for the public including What We Cannot Know (2016), How to Count to Infinity (2017) and The Creativity Code (2019).

simonyi.ox.ac.uk

SE8 3ER | 51.48335, -0.01916

TESS DENMAN-CLEAVER

WritingWalking

Artist Tess Denman-Cleaver will lead a perambulatory group writing activity that invites the Longplayer audience to generate words and marks with (rather than about) the landscape they are moving through. This part of the Longplayer journey will combine sound walking and deep listening techniques with performative and collaborative approaches to writing. It will provide audience with a brief moment to reflect and respond to the programme through an act of automatic and collective writing.

Tess Denman-Cleaver is a North East based artist originally from Gateshead. Her work spans live performance, performance writing and publication, performative workshops and installation. She is currently Artist in Residence at the Sonic Arts Research Unit (Oxford) exploring relationships between radio technology, language, landscape and sound. Tess was the Artistic Director of Tender Buttons theatre and performance company between 2010-2018 and a programmer for The Northern Charter between 2015-2018. She has a PhD on landscape and performance philosophy and also works as Producer, Artists’ Moving Image at Tyneside Cinema on the Projections programme.

tessdc.com

Photo Credit: Expanded Analogue workshop at Wilkinson Gallery 2017, Tess Denman-Cleaver

SE10 9HT | 51.48345, -0.01015

BLANC SCEOL

Bells (walk as a herd)

A participatory intervention for people and bells.

Blanc Sceol is a project by artists Stephen Shiell and Hannah White. We are sound makers, improvisers and deep listeners. Our work is ‘psychosonographic’ expressing our experience of place, with field recordings, self-created instruments, found objects, voice and text. We begin by listening to our environment, observing, making recordings, writing, often making our own instruments and sound objects with found materials. Our compositions and performances are like living maps, anchored in what we find in a landscape but re-imagined into new territories, and attentive to the vibrational nature of materials and surroundings.

blancsceol.co.uk

E14 3FA | 51.48725, -0.0075

GERTRUDE STEIN’S ‘THE MAKING OF AMERICANS’ READING GROUP

Group long-durational reading of Gertrude Stein’s ‘The Making of Americans,’ curated by Irene Revell

Over New Year’s Eve of 1974/5 Fluxus artist Alison Knowles, composer Annea Lockwood and Jean Rigg, manager of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, together organised a fifty-hour ‘marathon reading’ of Gertrude Stein’s novel The Making of Americans (1903-11). It was to become an annual tradition: “increasingly large groups of well-known artists, unknown artists, Stein fans, SoHo residents, and passersby [would] come together to pass the New Year by listening to and reading this 925 page book”, explains composer Tom Johnson in his Village Voice description of the 1977/8 edition, by this point re-located from Artists Space to Paula Cooper Gallery where it would continue into the 1980s. During the afternoon of the 2019 Summer Solstice, to coincide and intersect with the Longplayer Day 2019, a group will gather in Island Gardens park on the banks of the River Thames for a ‘mini-marathon’ reading of the same book. The intention is to read/listen together to the first 100 pages in an experiment towards a full marathon in the future, exploring what might be at stake in making time together in our current moment for a book ‘too long to read’. The experiment will culminate when the walking group join, with refreshments for everyone.

Irene Revell is a curator whose work seeks out new contexts and connections for practices with challenging social and political implications. Much of her work since 2004 has been with the London-based curatorial agency Electra, where she was Artistic Director from 2011-15. She has been a member of the Cinenova Working Group, which oversees the running of the Cinenova feminist film distribution organisation, since 2006. She is the Visiting Curator for the MA Sound Arts, UAL, and previously Visiting Lecturer on the MA Sound and Image at University of Kent.

Photo Credit: Irene Revell

E14 3UX | 51.49517, -0.00581

GRAHAM LAMBKIN

Flower Training

A shoreline rite of passage for locally sourced flora/fauna in a sympathetic aural environment.

Graham Lambkin (b.1973, Dover, England) is a multidisciplinary artist/publisher whose work embraces audio, visual and text-based concerns. Lambkin first came to prominence in the early 90’s through the formation of his amateur music group The Shadow Ring, who fused a D.I.Y. post-punk aesthetic with folk music, cracked electronics, and surreal wordplay, to create a unique hybrid sound that set it apart from its peers, and continues to exert an influence today. After the dissolution of The Shadow Ring Lambkin embarked on a series of striking and highly original solo releases, including the critically acclaimed Salmon Run, Amateur Doubles, and Community, as well as undertaking a string of collaborative projects with the likes of Joe McPhee, Keith Rowe, Moniek Darge, Jason Lescalleet, Michael Pisaro, and most recently Áine O’Dwyer.

grahamlambkin.com

E14 9QS | 51.509788, 0.001574

OLIVER COATES

Performance

Oliver Coates is a cellist from London and releases music on RVNG intl.

olivercoates.com

MAX EASTLEY

Max Eastley with Aleks Kolkowski and Phil Minton

Still and Silent, Moving and Sounding.

Being an artist and a musician means that my work contains both visual and sound elements. The context in which I make work, whether Gallery, Theatre, or performance space, is an important element of my working process, so the performance for the Chain Store will be a unique event for a unique space. I will present, in collaboration with musicians Phil Minton and Aleks Kolkowski and sound engineer Dave Hunt, a work creating intersecting lines of time and space through improvisation, scored structures and objects: moving and still, silent and sounding.

Max Eastley is a sound installation artist and a musician. He has been an AHRC Senior Researcher at Oxford Brookes University investigating Aeolian phenomena through practice-lead research; City Sound Artist for Bonn, Germany; a guest of the DAAD, Berlin, exhibiting installations as well as working as musician and performer, and he is an artist with the Cape Farewell Climate Change Project.

He has played many solo concerts as well as in combinations with musicians such as Evan Parker, Steve Beresford, John Butcher, Ute Wasserman, Phil Minton and Axel Dorner. He has worked extensively with music and performance including works with dancers and choreographers such as Anna Huber and the Siobhan Davies Company.

maxeastley.co.uk

Photo Credit: Kieran Tobin

E14 0JW | 51.507643, 0.008219

SHIVA FESHAREKI

Turntable performance in duet with Longplayer

Shiva Feshareki is an internationally renowned composer & turntablist, and NTS Radio DJ. Her diverse output explores acoustic, context perspective and the sound of electricity through wide ranging practices that incorporate classical craft and experimental methodology. In 2017, she was honoured with the British Composer Award for Innovation from BASCA. 2018 saw a host of stunning performances from Feshareki across Europe including at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art (VAC), BBC Proms and London Jazz Festival. Shiva’s debut LP, NEW FORMS (released in February 2019 on ‘RESIST’), is a snapshot into her turntabling experiments: A sonic exploration of perspective and context, demonstrating how one idea can have numerous perspectives of opinion, extension, complexity and interpretation.

rayfieldallied.com/artists/shiva-feshareki

Photo Credit: Peter R Fiebig

E14 0JW | 51.507643, 0.008219

JEM FINER

Starfield (Longplayer for Stars)

Since 2003, when I first learned that stars exhibit acoustic properties and are in effect ringing like bells, I’ve been collecting sonifications of their spherical harmonics. To date Longplayer has always been played using singing bowls, a type of standing bell, in either physical or recorded form. In this experimental performance a brief excerpt will be played using the sounds of several stars, from the lows of red giants to the highs of white dwarfs with a variety of other star types making an appearance.

Jem Finer is an artist, musician and composer. Since studying computer science in the 1970s, he has worked in a variety of fields, including photography, film, experimental and popular music and installation. His 1,000 year-long musical composition, Longplayer, represents a convergence of many of his concerns, particularly those relating to systems, sustainability, long-durational processes and extremes of scale in both time and space.

jemfiner.net

Photo Credit: Jem Finer

E14 0JW | 51.507643, 0.008219

LONGPLAYER

Longplayer is a one thousand year long musical composition. It began playing at midnight on the 31st of December 1999, and will continue to play without repetition until the last moment of 2999, at which point it will complete its cycle and begin again. Conceived and composed by Jem Finer, it was originally produced as an Artangel commission, and is now in the care of the Longplayer Trust.

longplayer.org