About the Film

This sound art documentary film follows artist Jem Finer’s Slowplayer, filmed during the opening weekend of AV Festival 2012 in Newcastle. Slowplayer is a modified record player running at roughly 3rpm, slowing whatever record is loaded onto it down to fill an entire day of gallery opening hours, so a beat that would normally last a second stretches out into something closer to a minute.

Jem Finer

Jem Finer is a UK-based artist, musician and composer, and a founding member of The Pogues. Since studying computer science in the 1970s he has moved between photography, film, music and installation, and his work often returns to long-durational processes and extremes of scale in both time and space. His best known piece, Longplayer, is a musical composition designed to run continuously for one thousand years without repeating, currently housed in a former lighthouse at Trinity Buoy Wharf in London. Between 2003 and 2005 he was artist in residence in the Astrophysics Department at the University of Oxford, producing sculptural observatories including Landscope and The Centre of the Universe, and his other work includes Score for a Hole in the Ground, a permanent installation in a Kent forest powered only by gravity and the elements.

Slowplayer

For each day of AV Festival 2012, Slowplayer played a different record slowed down to fit the gallery’s opening hours, from Ravel to The Sex Pistols to Ornette Coleman to The Sound of Music. Jem asked me to choose a record from his collection to be played that day, and I picked “Bird Sound in Close-up”. At that speed, the music mostly disappears. What is left is closer to a seismic rumble, with long stretches of near silence between each impossibly slow beat.

As Slow As Possible

AV Festival 2012 took its title, As Slow As Possible, from John Cage’s ASLSP, and ran across Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Sunderland throughout March, exploring how artists stretch and mark the passage of time. Slowplayer was shown at The NewBridge Project in Newcastle, one of several works across the festival that asked visitors to slow down rather than move quickly between pieces. Other works that year included Leif Inge’s similarly stretched-out reworking of Beethoven’s ninth symphony, part of a wider programme built entirely around duration and patience rather than spectacle.

Filming Slowplayer

There is not much conventional action to film in a record spinning at three revolutions per minute, so most of the challenge was simply staying with the piece long enough for its scale to actually register. Being handed a record to choose myself, rather than just observing from a distance, is the kind of small detail that stays with you longer than the technical side of a shoot. It is a reminder that documenting an artist’s process is rarely just watching. Sometimes you end up briefly part of the work itself.

Slowing down as a filmmaker to match a piece like this is harder than it sounds. The instinct on most shoots is to keep things moving, look for the next shot, the next angle. Here, the more useful discipline was almost the opposite: resisting the urge to cut away, and letting the piece’s own patience set the pace of the filming rather than imposing my own.

About AV Festival

AV Festival was a biennial festival of art, film and music held across Newcastle, Gateshead, Middlesbrough and Sunderland, running from the early 2000s until its final edition in 2016. Over the years it built a reputation for taking on genuinely difficult, slow or demanding work rather than easy crowd-pleasers, which is part of why a piece like Slowplayer found a natural home there. You can find out more about the festival’s history at its Wikipedia entry.