Bang on a Can has always been defined by its open approach to genre. Sure, classical minimalism can coexist with serialism, and maybe no wave isn’t so different either! Their late-80s marathons famously put all the sounds of experimental New York in one room together and let them mingle. They’re still doing this, but what does it mean in 2025 when genre walls seem to have already been toppled over? At the Long Play Festival, the answer was to get deeper, to go under the hood and tinker with the machinations and find what else is possible.
This was the fourth annual Long Play, Bang on a Can’s spring music festival taking over downtown Brooklyn with three days of eclectic music (May 2-4, 2025). Each venue was tailored to a different style. At Public Records, you could hear dance, electronic, noise, and ambient music; at Irondale, whispering experimentations with sound, instrumentation, and technique. More than any other year, I found myself weaving a targeted path through the program: Saturday was a day of guitars and Sunday was a day of free improvisation. The choice seemed fair to me, as someone who listens to (and writes about) a lot of guitars and improvisation. The result was a fuller understanding of both.
Beyond pushing the boundaries of genre, this year’s program foregrounded the idea of playing within structure, or using an instrument in ways previously unimagined. Take Saturday, during which “guitar” never really meant the same thing twice. The day began with an intimate set of sweet lullabies by guitarists Mary Halvorson and Bill Frisell and bled into the dreamy flow of Dither Quartet’s electric guitar performance of Michael Gordon’s Amplified (which sounded like his ambient piece for seven bassoons, Rushes, translated to the bristle of the electric guitar). Both pieces worked within their chosen structure of songs and minimalist composition, but diverged; Halvorson and Frisell’s songs had moments of dissonance that resolved into winking sweetness, while Gordon’s piece felt most successful in its surprising softness, inviting us to listen closer to each repetition.
Later in the day, Fred Frith broke down conventions of the guitar by placing it flat on his lap and rolling beads in a bowl on its strings, or body, or strumming it in a way that it felt like razors slicing the air rather than sound waves. His set traversed the many crevices of the instrument, showing that music can be made from its every part — not just fingers along frets. Just an hour later, Kim Gordon and Bill Nace took the stage as Body/Head, a noise duo focused on blowing out the sound of their instruments into cathartic fuzz. Their set was my favorite of the weekend’s. It was an opportunity to hear guitar once again pushed to its volume limits and feel the way soundwaves in the body have a way of transformation. But despite the explosion, their noise was made of detailed layers, harmonies that shifted with delicacy, fuzzy distortions that grew and receded with time. The best noise is effortlessly full, a means of blowing up an instrument and putting it back together in real time. (sometimes literally…)
Sunday asked what it means to improvise. The day began with flutist Nicole Mitchell, bassist Luke Stewart, and drummer Tcheser Holmes in a lively and joyful meditation, while just one room over, electronic musician Ikue Mori, pianist Craig Taborn, and cellist Tomeka Reid investigated the power of silence, moving between scraping sounds and pure quietude. Extended techniques abounded, with Taborn’s inside-the-piano plucking offering a metallic swirl. Reid placed a pencil among her cello’s strings, muting and mutating its resonance. The day closed with a blazing set from trio drummer Tomas Fujiwara, cellist Tomeka Reid, and saxophonist Immanuel Wilkins who gave relentless energy for over an hour, filling the space with the sound of rhythm and melody uninhibited, echoing, resonant. It was a day of improvisation that had it all: moments to appreciate technique, to ride the roller coaster of spontaneity, to bask in sheer joy. Genre, after all, is a concept made up to try to better explain the indefinable, and Long Play 2025 was a reminder that the magic of live music binds us instead.