It was pouring rain in the long line to enter Public Records as I waited to hear Maria Chavez’ DJ set, but everything else sounded just fine. A cavernous open garage housed an array of vendors humming with the sound of revving engines and distant beats, the buzzing of iPhone notifications, and the screeching of tires on the concrete pavement. This is what I love about Long Play: every year I come here and I hear music where I may not have heard it before (just as Pauline intended). You really never know what or who you’ll find when you show up to a Bang on a Can weekend. After all, what is musical discovery other than being willing to go where you haven’t gone before?
The three-day festival has now taken over venues in downtown Brooklyn for the past couple of years, replacing Bang on a Can’s beloved marathon with a promise to bring even more music. And each year, it has, stuffing overlapping events inside of five+ venues all within walking distance. I attended for just Sunday’s events, which felt particularly indebted to Bang on a Can’s minimalistic history, foregrounding works by Steve Reich, a Robert Black tribute with John Luther Adams’ music, Éliane Radigue, claire rousay’s ambient experimentations, and Michael Gordon’s magnum opus Rushes. It was a lovely day for anyone who enjoys droning out and/or being consumed by noise (me).
I began my day at noon with Bang on a Can’s loving tribute to BOAC All-Star bassist Robert Black, who passed away last year. A circle of bassists gathered to perform music by John Luther Adams in tribute to Black’s life and passion for contemporary classical music. In between music, Michael Gordon and Mark Stewart gave moving speeches in remembrance; throughout, the true love of Black and his profound legacy within the community remained palpable. Other minimalist highlights from the day included Ensemble Klang’s performance of Éliane Radigue and Carol Robinson’s recently composed OCCAM HEXA V, which embraced the radical quietude of Radigue’s drones. The music whispered into every corner of Irondale’s paint-chipped walls, filling the space in colorful silence. As always, Radigue reminds us that immersion doesn’t require volume—it’s an experience given weight through attention.
Really, though, I was at Long Play that Sunday to see Michael Gordon’s Rushes live for the first time. The piece adheres to the tenets of classical minimalism, with repetition of building block phrases at its core, but expands into an ambient and immersive meditation on process. It’s composed for seven bassoons, yet at a certain point they stop sounding like bassoons and become one with the room and each other, evolving into glistening and amorphous waves of sound. Despite a technical error at the onset of the performance, it was a spectacular rendition of the work. As the bassoons swirled around and into us and each other, I found myself entering a flow state, some sort of dreamworld guided by hazy sound. To me, this is the height of minimalist repetition—its ability to take me somewhere I can’t go otherwise. We all stood up in applause at the end and left the space in a daze, slowly returning to Earth under the drizzling Brooklyn skies.
Of course, Long Play is about the music and the transcendent experiences it offers us, but that isn’t the most important part of going each year, at least not for me. If you attend enough Bang on a Can events, you’ll start to run into friends sitting in each room, soaking in whatever sounds that are put in front of them; you can meet people of all ages who have been going to shows for years in New York, learning a little more about the city’s history. Not everyone has this appetite for musical curiosity (and that’s perfectly fine by me), so finding the few who are is more special and meaningful to me than anything else in my life. At Long Play, I was lucky enough to be reminded that music is a uniter and a North Star that leads me to the people and the places that are something like home.
The last thing I felt on Sunday was my pulse as Deerhoof made a few more squeals of guitar feedback. A rush of energy jolted through my body, one that could only come from a shriek of sound piercing right to my core. The crackling noise was a simple sign of life given to me through music, by music, and from music; it was something I was lucky enough to get to experience and to experience with friends. Bang on a Can has been writing love letters to experimental music for decades, and Long Play is another one to stuff in a bottle and send out to sea. How lucky I am to be among the group of people who get to find it when it washes to shore once again.