David Toop along with CRiSAP PhD student Irene Revell will take part in the second Longplayer Day. This biannual arts festival takes place around the summer solstice from midday to midnight, at a series of locations along a walking route from Deptford to Trinity Buoy Wharf. Taking place on the eve of the summer solstice, the programme is inspired by ideas connected to Longplayer, curated by research staff at Goldsmiths, University of London.

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.

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DAVID TOOP

13:30 | OLD DEPTFORD POLICE STATION | SE14 6LG | 51.47942, -0.0319

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.

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

18:15 | ISLAND GARDENS PARK | E14 3FA | 51.48725, -0.0075

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.

More information available on the Longplayer Day microsite