#jem finer

[xollii]

[ex-plain]

quarter of a century ago, a former Celtic punk musician began a performance of a song so absurdly long that it has still not finished playing. Measured against historical averages, it should still be playing centuries after most countries as we know them today have ceased to exist. Jem Finer, best known as a founding member of The Pogues, had long been preoccupied with time: its instability, its scale, and the problem of how to put into perspective the sheet length of a millennium. While still touring in the 1990s, he began experimenting with real-time composition, gradually arriving at a question that was philosophical before it was musical: how to create a work that exceeds a human lifespan. The result was Longplayer (@longplayer), conceived between 1995 and 1999 with support from Brian Eno and David Toop. At its core is a 20-minute source composition for Tibetan singing bowls, transposed into six interrelated layers that move through time at different rates. Their superimposition never repeats, governed by a deterministic algorithm that will only complete its cycle at the final moment of 2999, before beginning again. The piece began playing at midnight on January 1st, 2000, and continues without interruption. Designed to withstand technological, political, and environmental change, Longplayer has migrated across formats to include computers, analog systems, live performance, encoded light transmission, and human voices. More than a piece of music, Finer has described it as a living, social organism, dependent on care across generations. If all machines fail, the score can still be sung. “If there is nothing else left,” he says, “there is our breath.”

Photos from a live performance of Jem Finer's Longplayer, 2009.

Source

[musicmags]

[all-rock-and-roll-is-homosexual]

Select Magazine February 1992/the Pogues with Joe Strummer

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[driftglazz]

The Pogues • If I Should Fall From Grace With God

[spilladabalia]

The Pogues - Summer in Siam

[cbjustmusic]

The Pogues perform “Fairytale of New York” with Kirsty MacColl on Top of the Pops in January 1992. ____________________________ Fairytale of New York Songwriters: Jem Finer and Shane Macgowan

It was Christmas eve, babe In the drunk tank An old man said to me Won't see another one

Then he sang a song The rare 'Old Mountain Dew' I turned my face away And dreamed about you

Got on a lucky one Came in eighteen to one I had a feeling that years For me and you

Said, "Happy Christmas I love you, baby I can see a better time When all our dreams come true"

They got cars, big as bars They got rivers of gold But the wind blows right through you It's no place for the old

When I first took your hand All your fingers were blue Well, I promised you Broadway Was waiting for you

I was handsome, you were pretty Queen of New York city When the band finished playing They howled out for more

Sinatra was swinging All the drunks, they were singing And we kissed on a corner Danced through the night

And the boys of the NYPD choir Were singing, 'Galway Bay' And the bells were ringing out For Christmas day

Be a bum, it was a clutter And smell like the gutter While sad broken promises Lay with the trash

Every cold chilly night We'd end up in a fight And I'd pray as you'd yell That as train rattled past

And the boys of the NYPD choir Still singing, 'Galway Bay' And the bells were ringing out Christmas day

I could have been someone Say, so could anyone That I took your dreams from you When you first found me

But I kept them with me, babe I put them with my own Can't make it all alone Built my dreams around you

It's Christmas eve again In the drunk tank I'm an old man now I won't see another one

So I'll sing a song And sleep when I'm through Dream of another life Where all our dreams came true

[the-entangler]

The Longplayer