Visiting Longplayer, at Trinity Buoy Lighthouse in East London, evoked, for me, a sense of ‘solastalgia’ – “the grief of witnessing environmental change in a place you still inhabit”. The feeling that over our lifetimes – just a tiny part of the thousand years’ duration – so much has and will change in our environment. The piece prompts those who visit it or anyone who listens to think about just how long a thousand years is compared to our short human lifetimes – and then, further, how short a thousand years actually is in comparison to the lifespan of the universe, or to eternity. Furthermore, the fact that Longplayer has existed since before my lifetime – it prompted me to think about how much has changed in our environment in my lifetime already. How much it has changed since the beginning of Longplayer, 25 years ago (2000), and how much will change in the next 25 until the half-century.
Here is a fragment from an extended field recording I took in the lighthouse.
Longplayer as an installation is a piece of music which never repeats for a thousand years, which seems impossible given how intentional the composition of the sound in the recording feels.
In Steve Connor’s ‘Ears Have Walls’ (2003), he talks about sound’s unique ability to permeate borders, listening as constructing ‘walls’ between certain sounds like in the Sonic Boom exhibition which he references, and sound in the gallery as removing the gallery walls and bringing “the outside in”. I think this is relevant to Longplayer as a temporal sound installation, as its use of the “unsighted” rather than the “sighted”, to use Connor’s language, speaks to sound as an event rather than an object – existing in both time and physical dimensions rather than being static in space. Also, its ability to mix with other sounds in the environment such as the sounds of the weather outside of Trinity Buoy Lighthouse which shift and change along with Longplayer. “For the presence of architecture, found sounds, environmental noise, and the details of given locations loom as continual input into forms of listening. That is to say, the sonorous world always presses in, adding extra ingredients by which we locate ourselves” (Labelle, B. 2015).
In the same way that Steve Connor says that ‘Ears Have Walls’, the walls of the lighthouse where Longplayer is currently held are also imaginary. If the existence of the piece in our minds is prompting us to think about its duration of 1000 years and what that entails, then it doesn’t really matter whether it is a sounding object or not. The sound is almost irrelevant – and the walls containing the sound, preventing it from mixing with the sounds outside could just as well not exist. The physical site isn’t the point. However, the fact that it is sound and not a physical object is just what makes the dissolution of these walls, and the feeding of our temporal imagination, possible. A physical object in a gallery that were, say, designed to weather and last 1000 years wouldn’t have quite the same effect as sound. “Sound is intrinsically and unignorabley relational: it eminates, propagates, communicates, vibrates and agitates: it leaves a body and enters others: it binds and unhinges, harmonizes and traumatizes; it sends the body moving, the mind dreaming, the air oscillating. It seemingly eludes definition, while having profound effect.” (Labelle, B. 2015).
References:
Connor, S. (2003) Ears Have Walls. [online] Available at: https://www.stevenconnor.com/earshavewalls/ [Accessed 22 Apr. 2024].
Labelle, B. (2015) “Introduction” Background Noise: Perspectives on Sound Art. Second Edition. New York: Bloomsbury.