Longplayer Live
Roundhouse Three Sixty
Main Space
Thu 14 Nov 24 10am General Public Booking
Wed 13 Nov 24 10am Advance Priority Booking for Champion, Icon and Legend members
Wed 13 Nov 24 2pm Priority Booking for all members
Entry from 7.20am
Ends midnight
Audiences can stay for as long as they like to experience Longplayer between entry and end times
Age 30 or under?
Get £5 tickets here while they last
Fees & Age Guidance
Fees are 6% + a £2 restoration levy per ticket
Under-16s to be accompanied by an adult
This event is digitally ticketed.
You can access your ticket once purchased by logging in to your ticket wallet with your Roundhouse account login details. For more information, see our FAQs.
Please note: if you booked via another ticket agent and are expecting to receive digital tickets, you will receive instructions on how to access your tickets approximately 24 hours before the show.
Spend one unique day with Longplayer, live at the Roundhouse.
A 1000-year-long piece of music, Longplayer has been playing continuously since the first moments of this millennium and is composed to continue until the final moments of the next.
On 5th April 2025, in Longplayer’s 25th anniversary year, Longplayer returns to the Roundhouse for a performance of the 1000-minute section of its score, as written for that particular time and date, from 7.20am to midnight.
Longplayer’s duration means that, given the unknowability of the future, its score was written so as to be independent of any one technology. For most of its life it has been performed by computers, while its caretakers, the Longplayer Trust, explore alternatives which have included the use of the human voice, vinyl records, code, a beam of light and, as first heard at the Roundhouse in 2009, live performance by musicians.
Akin to what Longplayer’s composer, Jem Finer, calls a ‘vast, Bronze Age synthesiser’, Longplayer Live is performed on a large orchestral instrument comprised of 234 singing bowls, arranged in six concentric rings and played by shifts of six to twelve people at any one time, reading from a graphic score.
Longplayer hopes to enrich intergenerational conversations about how we can imagine the future. For this 25th anniversary performance, 18 young people from the Roundhouse’s creative community will join the orchestra of musicians and artists: a meeting of present and future custodians who will shape Longplayer’s next 25 years.
Audiences can spend as long as they wish listening and watching, and are invited to move around or find a space to rest, with the possibility to leave and return to the venue throughout the performance’s duration.
Longplayer Live is generously supported by the Trinity Buoy Wharf Trust and Urban Space Management’