But the intention of Mobile Sinfonia is that the combination of thousands of ringtones sounding all over the world forms a single piece of music, activated every time a participant receives a phone call.
#Closer song 2015 series#
Mobile Sinfonia (2012) appears, at first, to be at the other end of the spectrum: a series of very short sound pieces distributed as mobile phone ringtones. Fed by an underground stream and rainwater, the sculpture amplifies the sound of subterranean processes: “both music and an integrated part of the landscape and the forces that operate on it and in it”, as Finer describes it. Score for a Hole in the Ground (2006) consists of a seven-metre tall steel horn rising out of the earth in the middle of Kings Wood near Ashford in Kent. Unlike these previous ways of listening to the work remotely, the app does not require a physical presence or an internet connection: instead, the composition is generated on the phone itself.įiner is well-known as one of the founding members of the Pogues, but his artistic work, which includes installations, films and photography alongside music, has long been engaged with the extremes of time and space. In 2014, it was performed by a coalition of voice choirs as one of a number of ongoing experiments in freeing the work from its dependence on technology.
In 2009, Longplayer took on a live form with a 1,000 minute-long performance at the Roundhouse in London, based on six performers playing 234 Tibetan singing bowls, an ancient form of standing bell and one of the most durable instruments in the world. A series of physical Listening Posts have travelled the world, including stops at the Royal Observatory in London, and the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco, an institution dedicated to promoting long-term thinking.
#Closer song 2015 software#
As well as the ongoing performance at Trinity Buoy Wharf (which now contains a small but growing scrapheap of old computer equipment, as the software migrates from motherboard to motherboard in order to stay viable), it is also streamed live online. Longplayer was originally written in the form of a computer programme, which generates the piece in real-time. The app is just the latest incarnation for the piece. Keeping things as easily updateable as possible is what Finer refers to as “the deep space mission approach”: making something that needs minimum change over time to guarantee its survival. The app is simple because the network it lives within is so complex, and so easily disrupted by changes to the underlying operating system, or physical changes to the device. It’s deceptively simple, belying both the complexity of the piece itself, and the thought that has gone into it. Created in collaboration with Daniel Jones, a sound artist whose work includes musical pieces based on live weather conditions and Twitter conversations and the designer Joe Hales, the app introduces users to Finer’s circular score, allowing them to follow the passage of reverberating chimes as they intersect, or to slide them into the background to play out continuously. Released this week, the Longplayer iOS app brings the experience of listening to deep time to everyone’s pockets. The app version of Longplayer by Jem Finer So it might seem counter-intuitive to squeeze such an expansive concept into one of the slightest and fastest-moving of contemporary spaces - the smartphone app - but that is exactly where Longplayer is going next.
Housed at Trinity Buoy Wharf in East London, it plays continuously inside a lighthouse which for more than 100 years was used to train prospective lighthouse-keepers for their long and solitary vigils. The piece was the result of years of research into musical systems and is intended to force us to confront the reality of deep time, of environmental and social processes which play out beyond the experience of any individual. Each track moves in and out of phase with the others, like planets and moons whose orbits gradually bring them closer together and then propel them apart over the course of years, decades, even centuries. At heart, Jem Finer’s Longplayer is the application of a few simple and precise rules to six short pieces of music, but the result is an infinite composition which will not repeat itself until 31st December 2999.
A t midnight on 31 December 1999, a piece of music began to play for a thousand years.
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