Long Play Festival at Pioneer Works

Long Play Festival at Pioneer Works is a four-day music festival in Red Hook that treats Brooklyn's venue ecosystem as a single instrument, programming across multiple independent spaces simultaneously without genre boundaries.

Bang on a Can's Long Play Festival started as a name with a pun baked in. LP, 33 rpm, the album format as metaphor for depth and duration. Conceived by composers Michael Gordon, David Lang, and Julia Wolfe, it launched in 2022 after a pandemic delay, growing out of Bang on a Can's decades-long Marathon Concerts into a four-day sprawl across downtown Brooklyn and Red Hook. The festival uses Pioneer Works, Roulette, BAM, BRIC, and a dozen other venues simultaneously, treating Brooklyn's venue ecosystem as a single instrument. The programming refuses genre: a single pass might route you from the Philip Glass Ensemble to Oneohtrix Point Never to a 90th birthday tribute for Terry Riley. The question Long Play keeps asking is whether all of this music (new classical, free jazz, electronic, drone, art rock) actually belongs in the same room. The answer, year after year, is yes.