In the last clear year, 2019, a year with beginnings and endings, past and future, I played a four hour performance at the Oscillation Festival in Brussels with Akio Suzuki, Aki Onda and Rie Nakajima. “Dara dara”, we called it, which in Japanese means being lazy or slow.

We began discussing this event two years earlier, as a culmination of the experience of working on longform events in various combinations together since before 2015. The actual duration of the event was not so extreme then, by comparison with that preparatory groundwork, and besides, time scatters, goes incognito or plays tricks when invited to open its borders in this way. To present slowness and laziness as virtues was in some sense a reaction against the mania for productivity, professionalism and high density content that prevailed in that now distant and barely credible time. In four hours you can go to the kitchen, use the toilet, move from the margins to the centre or just sit and listen.

This was not the first occasion I had participated in longform soundings of this nature. In December 1976, Paul Burwell and I played for four hours and 30 minutes in the freezing cold vastness of 2B Butlers Wharf in East London, activating metal strings suspended across the space and consciously exploring resonance and emptiness as significant elements of our musical assemblage. Evan Parker was present at that performance and two years later, when I was organising the Music/Context Festival of Environmental Music at the London Musicians Collective, he suggested a 24 hour concert for eight performers, to be called Circadian Rhythm.

Implicit within that title was the question of endurance – can it be done? – but also a curiosity about sun and moon, light and dark, ascendency and decline, the rhythms that ebb and flow within larger cycles and how they might influence improvisation. As it transpired, we were too depleted to continue after 13 hours. Many factors were at work to disperse our stamina, but with its blocked off windows the room was perpetually dark, so the optimism of a summer dawn was withheld from us behind barriers designed to constrain sound, to keep it hidden from the neighbours.

This spectre of the social, what it enabled and what it suppressed, was another (unspoken) question lurking within the fascination for long duration music events. It was no coincidence that these three events took place in buildings that had lost their purpose to industrial obsolescence or drastically changed work practices. It was as if long duration music events could only be accommodated in ruins emptied out by progress (otherwise known, in cliche, as the march of time).

By the 1970s, music making was firmly embedded within the regulatory embrace of capitalism and its domination of time. Yes, there were regions of the globe where sounding rituals, perhaps cosmologically functional, still survived, free for a few more years from the formalities of staging, audiences, start times and ticketing. Yes, an underground economy existed for night people, the jazz clubs, discos and rock events that only came alive after dark, setting a pattern for the future of club culture.

In April 1967 I was there for the 14 Hour Technicolour Dream at London’s Alexandra Palace; then, in December of the same year, Christmas On Earth Continued at Olympia. To an impressionable teenager the dusk to dawn formlessness of such totemic happenings was a taste of life without limits and yet they invariably took place on a Friday or Saturday. Not so detached from the worlds of work or school then. Similarly, events such as Terry Riley's all night concerts or complete performances of Erik Satie’s Vexations (of variable durations but over 36 hours is possible) played important roles in restoring or relaxing the temporal possibilities of music events, yet their place in a congealed infrastructure could be fragile at best.

Compare this with the omizutori, or water drawing ceremony, held at the Nigatsu-dō hall of Tōdai-ji temple, Nara, Japan. Held in early March with a duration of two weeks, the ceremony has been observed annually without a break, allegedly for over 1200 years.

In his study of Asian incense clocks, The Trail Of Time, Silvio A Bedini describes the omizutori in some detail, the many different phases of the rite and the way time is divided into segments of six hours in order to keep track of its complex procedures. “On 1 March,” he writes, “the participants move into Nigatsudō Hall, where they walk about ceaselessly chanting sutra, striking bells, blowing horns of conch shell, rattling their rosaries and clanking iron staves in an ever increasing crescendo of rhythmic sound as an accompaniment to the fire and water ceremonies taking place outside the Hall until 14 March.” I have recordings of the ceremony: thrilling, chaotic, cacophonous, then sometimes near silent, just the sound of crackling, oil rich pine root, sacred fire.

Zora Neale Hurston encountered similar complexities and extended temporalities during her fieldwork in Haiti in 1937. For the setting up of a new hounfort (or hounfour, a Vodou temple), the first stage of the process was to walk for hours at night until the destination was reached. At that point a houngan, or priest, made the signature of a loa (spirit) on the ground and threw water down three times, for the dead. What followed included the stripping of palm fronds, sleep, drinking channelle tea, cooking large quantities of food, the remaking of an ascon (a gourd entwined with beads and snake bones), the dedication of the drums and hounfort, the chanting of names of gods, lighting of gunpowder, the waking up of drums, sacrificing chickens, and so on, continued the next day by a Petro (Iwa spirits) ceremony, and then the third day, spent in dances to Petro Quita, when a bull was sacrificed.

“During the procession with the bull,” Hurston wrote in Tell My Horse: Voodoo And Life In Haiti And Jamaica, “I heard the most beautiful song that I had heard in all Haiti. The air was exquisite and I promised myself to keep it in mind. The sound of the words stayed with me long enough to write them down, but to my great regret the tune that I intended to bring home in my mouth to Harry T Burleigh [African-American composer, baritone singer and arranger of spirituals] escaped me like the angels out of the Devil's mouth.”

As religious observance, both these examples mix devotional actions, activities necessary to sustain the body through an ordeal, and what might be called, in different circumstances and understandings, a music of instruments and voices. Durations of days, weeks, or thousands of years, are necessary to construct and maintain the assemblage that constitutes the ceremony and its purpose in holding up the world. A part of the music may change or be forgotten, yet in a healthy vibrancy of cultural life that part will heal itself and become new.

The durational marathons that have no attachment to an observance, other than music itself, could be thought of, at the very least, as a resistance to drudgery, a pushing back against the arbitrary temporal limits set by technologies, a questioning of spurious theories about human attention span, yet also a feeling of grief that so many of these intricate, deeply established rites have been disassembled in a matter of moments. The shards lie on the ground around us all, dispersed and abject as all the other entities of the world, things underfoot.