In Drumming, Japanese powerhouse percussionist Kuniko delivers a tour-de-force performance of the work, which is often considered minimalism’s first masterpiece. Performing all thirteen parts herself, and adopting the live multi-track approach employed in Reich’s classic Counterpoint works, Kuniko possesses the  technical virtuosity and creative musicianship that makes her one of the world’s leading and most fun to watch percussionists.

Kuniko Kato plays Steve Reich Drumming

BRIC Ballroom

Drawing on their passion for experimental, industrial, contemporary and electronic music, NOMON’s music is at times fierce, intense, serene and calm. Utilizing a blend of percussion, drum machine, and synthesizers, sisters Shayna and Nava Dunkelman design seemingly endless layers of electronics, touching on fragments of memories from their lives in Tokyo, Oakland and now New York, where they both currently reside.

NOMON

BAM The Adam Space

Adam Rudolph is an eminent post-bop, world fusion, jazz composer and percussionist whose most recent project, Hu Vibrational, is deep spiritual music that draws on the links between jazz and avant-garde Hip Hop, featuring dusu’ngoni, gimbre, udu drums, kalimbas, cajon, voice, and electronics.

Hu Vibrational

Rafiq Bhatia and Chris Pattishall join forces to write their own musical language that is more than meets the eye that gets stranger the deeper you dig. Rafiq is a guitarist who refuses to be pinned to one genre making him one of the most intriguing figures today (NYT). Most know Chris Pattishall as a pianist with a forthright relationship to the jazz tradition (NYT).

Rafiq Bhatia with Chris Pattishall

Laurel Halo is a composer, producer, musician and DJ based in Los Angeles. Drawing inspiration from a range of musical traditions, her output is singular yet stylistically diverse, with releases traversing ambient, leftfield club, experimental pop and film score. Since 2012 she has released a number of critically-acclaimed albums and performed in venues, festivals, clubs and institutions across the world! In September 2023 she released her latest album, Atlas, as the debut release on her new record label, Awe.

Laurel Halo presents Atlas Live w/ Leila Bordreuil

This past year our friend Robert Black passed away.  One of the great bass players of our time and a founding member of the Bang on a Can All-Stars, he was a part of everything we did, from our first concert in 1987 until this year. No-one on the planet could make the double bass sing, dance, sound like a drum, spin like a top, like Robert Black. And no one dedicated his life to the new with as much invention, musicality and passion.  We are all blessed to have been his friends.

Robert Black Tribute Concert: John Luther Adams’ Darkness and Scattered Light

BRIC

Jessica Pavone is a composer and master violist whose work communicates deep experiences in the sonic world of vibrating strings and wood. J. Pavone’s String Ensemble features a natural expansion on the themes of her extensive solo work for viola while incorporating recent research into the effects of sonic vibration on human physiology and emotional health.

J. Pavone String Ensemble

The Ligeti Quartet named themselves after the Hungarian composer György Ligeti (1923-2006), inspired by his kaleidoscopic musical outlook and tireless invention.

Gyorgy Ligeti wrote two massive and massively influential string quartets, about 15 years apart. In those 15 years Ligeti transformed from being Bartok’s uncontested successor to becoming the guru of a new world of micro-sonic discovery. Both of these quartets changed the musical landscape, for everyone else, forever. Hear them at Long Play!

Ligeti Quartet plays György Ligeti String Quartets

Mivos Quartet will perform music by Ingrid Laubrock, George Lewis and Henry Threadgill. Mivos is invested in commissioning, premiering, and growing the repertoire of new music for string quartet, striving for rich collaborations with composers over extended periods of time.

Mivos Quartet performs Ingrid Laubrock, George Lewis and Henry Threadgill

William Parker is a bassist–improvisor–composer–bandleader–griot–shaman–community leader and a veteran of Bang on a Can festivals over the years. For Long Play, Parker anchors his own band to perform “The Blinking of the Ear”.

William Parker The Blinking of the Ear

The Space at Irondale

Just this year, composer Courtney Bryan won a coveted MacArthur Award, for her musicality, her genius, and her innovative spirit. Her work Fanfare for Moments of Courage will be performed by International Contemporary Ensemble, one of the world’s leading forces for 21st century music. Lead support for this program comes from a generous contribution from Cheswatyr Foundation.

International Contemporary Ensemble Plays Courtney Bryan

claire rousay is a singular artist, known for challenging conventions in experimental and ambient music forms. rousay masterfully incorporates textural found sounds, sumptuous drones and candid field recordings into music that celebrates the beauty in life’s banalities. Her music is curatorial and granular in detail, deftly shaped into emotionally affecting pieces. sentiment is a meditation of the poignant emotional terrains of loneliness, nostalgia, sentimentality, guilt, and sex.

claire rousay

Michael Gordon’s Rushes for an ensemble of seven bassoonists, is an ambient journey into quasi-meditative, at times ecstatic waves of melody and sound. Referencing both the reeds of the instruments and the mental state it produces, Rushes becomes a journey through a primordial marshland featuring tonal and timbral aspects of the bassoon that you may have never heard, or knew existed, until now.

Michael Gordon Rushes

Time stops in the  music of Éliane Radigue. She  not only has the ability to transport us but also to suspend us, as if in some kind of waking dream. OCCAM HEXA V is one of her most recently composed works, co-written with one of Radigue’s closest collaborators, the composer and clarinetist Carol Robinson, specifically for the Netherlands’ own Ensemble Klang.

Éliane Radigue and Carol Robinson: OCCAM HEXA V, performed by Ensemble Klang

Born in Lima, Peru and based in NYC, Maria Chávez is best known as an abstract turntablist, sound artist and DJ. Her latest album, “Maria Chavez PLAYS Stefan Goldmann’s Ghost hemiola” was nominated for a Preis der deutschen schallplattenkritik in 1/2020. Currently, Maria is on the cover of the textbook about the history of Experimental and Electronic music by Routledge Publishing.

Maria Chávez [DJ]

Public Records - Atrium

Sam Prekop and John McEntire are two iconic Chicago artists whose work we’ve followed and drawn inspiration from across multiple bands, including the Sea and Cake (Prekop), Tortoise (McEntire) and a host of wonderful side projects each. Their inaugural record as a duo, Son Of, is a groovy, warm and danceable live set for analog and modular synths.

Sam Prekop and John McEntire

Kate NV is the multifaceted solo persona of Moscow-based artist Kate Shilonosova. A changeling that follows afflatus in all its forms, NV is a student of architecture, illustrates curious, colorful characters, and improvises live with bells and water glasses amidst compact synthesizers and cables. NV emerged in 2013 a glittering apparition set apart from her other roles: fronting Glintshake, a post-punk project, and playing a part in the Moscow Scratch Orchestra. Her debut Pink Jungle EP was followed by the frenetic pop-leaning Binasu released by Orange Milk in 2016 and the minimalist exploration of для FOR released by RVNG in 2018. As her musical pendulum swings back from playful instrumental to surreal song, NV is paired with RVNG for the second time on Room for the Moon.

Kate NV

The Soft Pink Truth is the experimental house music solo alter ego of Drew Daniel, one half of celebrated Baltimore-based electronic duo Matmos. Heavy, thoughtful, groovy, shape-shifting disco, deep house, dance-ready black metal covers….what’s next?!

The Soft Pink Truth

Josh Johnson is a saxophonist, keyboardist, multi-instrumentalist, composer and arranger. His solo debut Freedom Exercise (Northern Spy) was featured in Rolling Stone’s Best Music of 2020 and Bandcamp’s Best Jazz Albums of 2020. Pitchfork called the record “excellent, daringly melodic” and PostGenre praised it as “a songwriting marvel”.

Josh Johnson - Unusual Object (NY Premiere)

In the early 90’s, Mazurek released his first recording “Man Facing East” on the HEP record label featuring George Fludas, John Webber, and Randolph Tressler, and released two more records with the addition of Eric Alexander. In 1993, he started painting in earnest after being stunned by a Mark Rothko painting at the Art Institute of Chicago. Soon after, he began creating work that would eventually become record covers for Chicago Underground Duo’s seminal works Synesthesia, Axis and Alignment and Isotope 217’s split remix. In 1994, Mazurek formed the Chicago Underground Collective, an ensemble that ranges in size from duo to orchestra, with guitarist Jeff Parker and a cast of revolving players including Robert Barry and Joshua Abrams. The Chicago Underground Collective’s first release, Playground, on Delmark Records features Jeff Parker, Chad Taylor, Chris Lopes, and Sara Smith. Isotope 217 (conceived by Jeff Parker) was consequently born at this time and also began Mazurek’s fascination with incorporating electronics/computer music into his compositions and improvisations. The mid 90’s proved to be a fertile time for many musicians and artists, with the Chicago Underground and Isotope 2017 creating and releasing 6 full length records for Delmark and Thrill Jockey.

Rob Mazurek/Chad Taylor - Chicago Underground Duo

Hip Hop and jazz have crossed paths for decades. Raw Poetic (a.k.a. Jason Moore) and frequent collaborator-producer Damu the Fudgemunk take the conversation to a transcendent universe, featuring a virtuosic band on live and programmed drums, winds, strings, vinyl scratching and synthesizers.

Raw Poetic and Damu the Fudgemunk

Du Yun has a secret life. Several secret lives, actually – she is not only a composer of socially activated opera but she is also a pop diva, an extreme improviser, a high energy new music storyteller.  OK Miss features the pop diva version of Du Yun (piano, vocals), with an all-star avant-garde chamber band including Shayna Dunkelman (drums), Grey McMurray (guitar), Aakash Mittal (winds).

EPSG:4326

Du Yun + OK Miss

YWCA Brooklyn

The Jazz Passengers have anchored New York’s avant-jazz underground for more than 30 years. In 2023, the group, and all lovers of New York experimental music, lost its founding member, the trombonist and vocalist Curtis Fowlkes, whose ever-creative spirit will be celebrated on Long Play.

The Jazz Passengers

Roulette Intermedium

Exceptional New York poet, novelist, and art journalist Eileen Myles fuses with New York guitarist Steve Gunn and drummer Ryan Sawyer for a mesmerizing performance of poetry and raw improvisation.

Eileen Myles, Steve Gunn and Ryan Sawyer Trio

Long Play is thrilled to host Deerhoof’s return to Brooklyn as the band gets set to kick-off their latest tour. One of the most highly revered experimental bands of the last 30 years, it is nearly impossible to define their sound or musical breed – indie art punk expressionist minimal radical noise pop – let’s just call it Deerhoof.

Deerhoof

This is it!  Downtown New York experimental music’s first crossover hit.  When it premiered in 1976 it was immediately clear that it would turn our world around.  The music joyously links so many different communities – process music, jazz, ambient, and world music all have a home in this piece – you hear throughout how Reich honors and extends their influences. The Bang on a Can All-Stars premiere their own new and dramatic version of this classic work, joined by an ever-expanding community of New York luminary musicians.

Steve Reich Music for 18 Musicians

Brooklyn Academy of Music

DoYeon Kim brings her musical virtuosity and deep knowledge of traditional Korean music into the 21st century, and beyond, combining her unbelievable mastery of the gayageum (a traditional Korean plucked zither with 12 strings) with her equally fierce dedication to improvisation. Her quartet sets feature a lineup of New York jazz and classical luminaries.

DoYeon Kim Quartet

Taught by his grandfather, master kora player Yacouba Sissoko comes from a family line of Malian musicians dating back centuries. Percussionist Moussa Diabaté is an internationally acclaimed dancer, choreographer, drummer and balafon player. Together, Yacouba Sissoko and Moussa Diabaté are out to expand the awareness of West African history and culture through music.

Yacouba Sissoko Duo

Of the very few concert accordionists out there, Iwo Jedynecki is a button accordion master. Visiting from Poland for this year’s Long Play festival, he’ll be playing some of his own inventive arrangements of the Philip Glass Piano Etudes on accordion.

Iwo Jedynecki plays Philip Glass Etudes

Forbidden Love – all the things you aren’t supposed to do to string instruments. Julia Wolfe’s string quartet for four percussionists is a creative collaboration conceived by none other than Sō Percussion, the ultimate can-do collective. Together, Wolfe and Sō share their beautiful, ethereal, and crunchy discoveries from this iconic quartet of instruments.

Julia Wolfe Forbidden Love, performed by Sō Percussion + David Lang the little match girl passion, performed by Ekmeles

The intrepid electric guitar quartet Dither performs The Expanding Universe, the iconic 1979 album by the electronic composer and computer-music pioneer Laurie Spiegel. In 1977, one Spiegel composition, Kepler’s Harmony of the Worlds, was included on “The Sounds of Earth,” an LP compilation that accompanied the Voyager spacecraft as it traversed the solar system. Dither captains its concert voyage of The Expanding Universe with four electric guitars through a galaxy of live effects.

Dither performs Laurie Spiegel The Expanding Universe

Japanese pipe-organ builder and sound artist Yosuke Fujita returns to New York with new and recent works including music recorded in a cave at the foot of Mt. Fuji and featuring his custom-built pipe organ in duet with a colony of bats indigenous to the area.

Fuji|||||||||||ta

Matmos is Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt; they have been making forward thinking sample based electronic music out of unusual sound sources for the past 31 years. Based in Baltimore, their most recent album was commissioned by the Smithsonian to mark the 75th anniversary of the Smithsonian Folkways record label and builds dizzying collages and rhythmic structures out of the sounds of wasps, dolphins, office equipment, firearms, electronic storms, natural recordings and field recordings from the record label’s back catalog. Their performances are an unpredictable mixture of video collage, live sampling, and improvisation.

Matmos

Anna is a Scottish composer, performer and producer whose work straddles the worlds of contemporary classical, art pop, electronica and experimental rock.

Ligeti Quartet performs Anna Meredith Nuc

Anna Webber is a powerful and passionate flutist, saxophonist, and composer. Fiercely dedicated to avant-garde jazz and experimental classical music, her live and recording activities can be heard with an impossible-to-count number of ensembles she has formed, leads, and regularly contributes to. Shimmer Wince is her latest album and she is joined live by Adam O’Farrill on trumpet, Mariel Roberts on cello, Elias Stemeseder on synthesizers, and Lesley Mok on drums.

Anna Webber: Shimmer Wince

The Netherland’s Ensemble Klang (NL) perform Peter Adriaansz’s Environments.

Dutch composer Peter Adriaansz is renowned for creating a lush immersive sound world to consider profound existential questions. With Environments, featuring the New York debut of Ensemble Klang (The Netherlands), Adriaansz sets texts from Robert Pirsig’s classic Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance and beat philosopher Alan Watts to a spatially orchestrated and unusually tuned score for guitars, winds, vibraphones, Bayan, and synthesizers.

Peter Adriaansz Environments, performed by Ensemble Klang

Pianist-composer Sylvie Courvoisier, a native of Switzerland, has earned just renown for balancing two distinct worlds: the deep, richly detailed chamber music of her European roots and the grooving, hook-laden sounds of the downtown jazz scene in New York City, her home for more than two decades. Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has been described as “a singular talent” (Lloyd Sachs, JazzTimes), ”NYC’s least-predictable improviser” (Howard Mandel, City Arts), “one of the most exciting and original guitarists in jazz—or otherwise” (Steve Dollar, Wall Street Journal), and “one of today’s most formidable bandleaders” (Francis Davis, Village Voice). In recent Downbeat Critics Polls Halvorson has been celebrated as guitarist, rising star jazz artist, and rising star composer of the year, and in 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship.

Sylvie Courvoisier / Mary Halvorson Duo

Mivos Quartet will perform the complete Steve Reich string quartets including WTC 9/11; Triple Quartet; Different Trains! Mivos is invested in commissioning, premiering, and growing the repertoire of new music for string quartet, striving for rich collaborations with composers over extended periods of time.

Mivos Quartet performs the Complete String Quartets of Steve Reich

Marc Ribot is impossibly fluent and world renowned as a composer and performer in rock, jazz, punk, americana, new wave, no wave, dance, theater, and film spanning a 40+ year career. Ribot’s delicate and at times haunting solo guitar score contemporizes this classic Chaplin film to a story relevant to the economic and social conditions following the housing market crash of 2008.

Marc Ribot performs Charlie Chaplin's The Kid

Digital meets analogue on Refract – the remarkable new trio album by electronic musician and tape loop specialist BlankFor.ms, powerhouse pianist Jason Moran and ever-inventive drummer Marcus Gilmore. Refractis an uninhibited sonic marvel that combines electronics, piano and drums in real time. By spontaneously recording loops grabbed on the fly and re-infusing the sonic planes with various effects, the results borne on Refract are sounds and energies rarely heard before.

BlankFor.ms, Jason Moran, Marcus Gilmore Refract

Pakistani-American drummer and composer Qasim Naqvi is perhaps best known as a founding member of acoustic trio Dawn of Midi. Outside of his work in DOM, Naqvi is an accomplished solo artist with a passion for analogue and modular synthesizer systems. For Long Play he’ll present Works for Modular Synthesizer!

Qasim Naqvi

New York experimental vocal sextet Ekmeles performs works by legendary composer and scholar George Lewis and increasingly acclaimed composer and storyteller Hannah Kendall that explore different aspects of the Afro diaspora. Lewis’s piece Lone Coast Anacrusis, for voices and accordion, gives voice to the peoples displaced and the communities shattered in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, based on Nathaniel Mackey’s poem of the same name. Hannah Kendall’s This Is But an Oration of Loss memorializes – hauntingly, delicately, passionately – a massacre of slaves on a ship in 1781. Ekmeles will also perform works by the highly sensitive and imaginative researcher into the inner world of sound, Georg Friedrich Haas.

Ekmeles performs George Lewis, Hannah Kendall, and Georg Friedrich Haas

Tomorrow Comes the Harvest is a mind-expanding, trance-inducing music journey of afrobeat and live electronics. Launched in 2018 in collaboration with the late Afrobeat creator and Nigerian drummer Tony Allen, the ever-evolving Tomorrow Comes the Harvest features Mills alongside flutist Rasheeda Ali, pianist Kathleen Supové and percussionist Sundiata in its latest iteration. Harnessing the rippling, relentless power of techno to elevate the soul, these artists transport, transmit, and tessellate to a higher consciousness.

Jeff Mills Tomorrow Comes the Harvest

The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language tells the tragi-comic story of Yiddish linguist Yudel Mark’s unfinished effort to create a comprehensive Yiddish dictionary. With a haunting score by Pulitzer Prize finalist Alex Weiser (C&V cycle 9) and a probing libretto by Ben Kaplan, The Great Dictionary invites audiences to contemplate the surprisingly grand ambition of Yiddish culture after its decimation during the Holocaust and to consider the power of language to transform and shape us.

The Great Dictionary of the Yiddish Language by Alex Weiser and Ben Kaplan

American Opera Projects

Dewa Ketut Alit is widely acknowledged as the leading Balinese composer of his generation and for his incredible creative and collaborative approach to Balinese gamelan music worldwide. New York’s Gamelan Yowana Sari and Talujon (percussion sextet) have traveled to Bali and back to bring Dewa Alit and a brand new commission to Brooklyn for Long Play.

Queens College Gamelan Yowana Sari with Dewa Alit and Talujon

Rebekah Heller is one of our most productive musical citizens – ultra-bassoonist, collaborative artist, educator, and advocate for new music. On Long Play she will premiere Steve Reich’s Grand Street Counterpoint (the street both she and Steve live on!), for solo bassoon and 10 pre-recorded bassoons, based on Reich’s Cello Counterpoint from the early aughts. Rebekah will also premiere her own arrangement (painstakingly transcribed from a live cello performance by Clarice Jensen) of Julius Eastman’s driving The Holy Presence of Joan D’Arc.

Rebekah Heller plays Steve Reich (world premiere) and Julius Eastman

Claire Chase, described by The New York Times recently as “the North Star of her instrument’s ever-expanding universe,” is a musician, interdisciplinary artist, and educator. For Long Play, she will perform selections from her ongoing Density 2036 commissioning project, including works by the New York-based composers Du Yun, Marcos Balter, Suzanne Farrin, and Mario Diaz de Leon. She will also perform excerpts from the latest Density installation by the legendary Terry Riley. We can’t wait for this performance!

Claire Chase

Be the first to hear Alex Paxton live in America!  Virtuosic trombonist, improvisor and UK composer Alex Paxton makes his US debut on Long Play joined by the acclaimed Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, directed by Tim Weiss. Hear the American premiere of “ilolli-pop” – an astonishing non-stop blend of euro-noise, high-energy minimalism, improv, brass band enthusiasm, and general unrestrained cheekiness.

Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble plays Alex Paxton

Darius Jones has created a recognizable voice as a critically acclaimed saxophonist and composer by embracing individuality and innovation in the tradition of Black music across all musical classifications –  traditional jazz, electro-acoustic, chamber music, contemporary and avant-garde jazz, and more. fLuXkit Sextet, a new project developed by Darius Jones at Western Front, an artist-run center in Vancouver, Canada, is a set of rigorous and expansive compositions for saxophone, violins, cello, bass, and drums.

Darius Jones fLuXkit Sextet

Collaborators on albums and tours, this program offers a look at the intersecting artistry of Jason Moran and Immanuel Wilkins, filled with empathy and conviction, bonding arcs of melody and lamentation to pluming gestures of space and breath.

Immanuel Wilkins + Jason Moran

CORRESPONDENCES is an ever-evolving project between Soundwalk Collective and New York’s legendary Patti Smith. Spanning over 10 years, it traverses a wealth of geographies and their natural environments, where the artists have uncovered sonic steps left by poets, filmmakers, revolutionaries and impact of climate change. Featuring live films and director’s cuts, CORRESPONDENCES is performed by Patti Smith with Soundwalk Collective’s Stephan Crasneanscki and Simone Merli, Lucy Railton and Diego Espinosa Cruz Gonzalez. Visuals by Pedro Maia.

Soundwalk Collective with Patti Smith Correspondences

Ryuichi Sakamoto “was arguably the best-known and most successful Japanese musician in the world.” (Peter Tasker, Nikkei Asia)  He won an Oscar for his soundtrack to Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor and several Golden Globes and Grammy awards and nominations for other films. In 1992, he scored the opening ceremony of the Barcelona Olympics, conducting the orchestra while a billion people watched. Sakamoto’s film scores are renowned for their diversity and sensitivity, it is rare for a band to play this music live. and now the Bang on a Can All-Stars realize their own new live arrangements of the album 1996 (arranged by the All-Stars’ multi-talented clarinetist-composer Ken Thomson) — which includes an incredible selection of many of Sakamoto’s greatest hits – music from films including The Last Emperor, Wuthering Heights, The Sheltering Sky, Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, and more. The Bang on a Can All-Stars play Ryuichi Sakamoto is an exploration, a tribute, a celebration.

Bang on a Can All-Stars play Ryuichi Sakamoto, 1996

Ana Roxanne is a New York based musician working at the interzone of electric meditation, dream pop, and ambient songcraft. Her self-titled EP was later reissued by Leaving Records before signing with Kranky for her official full-length debut, 2020’s Because Of A Flower. Her inspirations span the secular (R&B divas of 1980’s and 90’s) and the spiritual (Catholic choral traditions in which she was raised), synthesized into a uniquely intuitive sonic language, equal parts atmospheric and ancient, healing and hermetic.

Long Play Festival

May 5, 2024

Kuniko Kato plays Steve Reich Drumming

May 5, 2024

NOMON

Long Play Festival