Futureproofing #12: The end of Longform Editions
An interview with the Australian record label that became a beloved exercise in releasing music outside industry norms.
Edited by Tom Gledhill.
“Listen to it however you want, or ignore it," goes the note appended to the debut on Longform Editions—Daybreak by Richard Youngs. It comprised 31 minutes of manipulated streetscape field recordings, layered with synth and bass, and was released alongside three others with similar artwork, each a single extended composition. Right from the beginning, the Australian label had its approach down pat, with the austere style and crack curation of a blue chip, white cube gallery. (Indeed, Longform editions calls itself "a gallery for listening.")
For the last seven years, every two months, like clockwork, Longform Editions has released four compositions at once. The prompt was simple: make a track that's at least 20 minutes in duration, but it can be longer. (And in some rare cases, shorter.) Artists were otherwise free to run with the idea as far as they wanted to. In its time, the label attracted all sorts of artists, rom Kim Gordon, Carlos Nino and Eiko Ishibashi to modern experimental music mainstays like Ulla, Grand River, Celer, and Valentina Magaletti. The label's final batch, released this month, also includes a piece from Fennesz (which I reviewed over at Pitchfork this week).
It was rarely so simple as "non-ambient artist makes ambient music," but sometimes that's how it was—and usually it was great. The creativity and community around it has made one of the most impressive catalogues of any label in the last 10 years, the kind where you can select a release from an artist you've never heard of and be pretty sure that it's going to be at least good, if not great. Think about how many mainstream artists have resorted to making sub two-minute songs, or hell, even how dance music labels like Hessle Audio now provide shorter, edited versions for Spotify and Apple Music, like a zombie version of the old radio edit come back to feast on our attention spans. Longform Editions' only rule is that you couldn't do that—in fact, you shouldn't edit at all.
That ethos, above all, is what made Longform Editions important. This was a radical sort of freedom, divorced from format or categorization in an industry where atomization and lifestyle branding is paramount. A Longform Editions release isn't exactly an album or an EP, but it can be. Some releases were definitive works, others could be minor detours in an artist's catalogue, and all were worthwhile. The lack of format is what made it interesting, because you were invited to sit down and listen, though it was up to you how deeply to engage, as Youngs' note on that first release makes clear. A friend of mine described the label as a "salve," and while I don't think the label would ever refer to this music in those emotional terms, there's something inviting about diving into a label whose entire catalogue invites deep focus, reflection and analysis—not just zoning out and relaxing, but something more active.
Started by Austrailans Andrew Khedoori and Mark Gowing, who ran the similarly stylish Preservation label, Longform Editions was a passion project through-and-through. There was no end goal other than to put out the music. Making money was a bonus, not a chief concern. As Khedoori says in the interview below, part of the joy of running Longform Editions was purely "the doing of it." It's a stance that brings into harsh light—and into question—the almost unbearable hustle of the modern music industry, where even independent artists are forced to fight over scraps of attention (and scanty cents) from corporations whose biggest priority is amassing subscriber and advertiser dollars.
Of course, that comfort comes with the stability of having a full-time job that you don't hate, and that doesn't drain your soul and mental capacity. (Khedoori works in public radio, Gowing is a designer.) But in our interview, Khedoori questions the need to make art your career—isn't it better for everyone involved if your idea of success is making the art, rather than selling it to an indifferent marketplace?
I'm not going to make a judgment here—it's easy to generalize when you have a successful career that allows you to indulge your art instead of suppressing it. But Khedoori makes a compelling case for an alternative model of success that prioritises fulfillment over finance. And that's exactly how Longform Editions feels after these past seven years: a successful experiment, not because of money, but because of its artistic breadth and influence. It's difficult to think of a musical outfit from Australia with as much crossover reach as Longform Editions, which is all the more remarkable given the leftfield nature of the music. It's also a testament to the strength of the curation and the community around it, and even though it's ending now, the archives are strong (and voluminous) enough to last many more years.
Below the interview, there are a few weekly listening entries, with a full roundup of new releases coming in next week's newsletter.
Longform Editions interview
Andrew Ryce: So… why is the label ending?
Andrew Khedoori: Quite simply, for us, it just feels like the right time to not do it. I think that Longform Editions has a very cyclical nature about it, and that has been really great for Mark and I over a long period of time. But we're looking to enter different phases of our life, and we need to change the cycle. We need to lock into other loops of life.
Mark is transitioning from his graphic design and publishing career into being a full-time artist and it requires that kind of concentration. My family's growing and evolving and changing, starting school. The reasons are kind of banal, but also exciting for us.
What that means is that we have to lose something that we love along the way. But it's not that dramatic. Mark and I have been releasing music for well over 20 years, and we're really happy that we've had such a great stretch of time together and we've worked together in a really harmonious way over a long period. It's not necessarily easy to do! Mark and I can be quite bloody minded together, but we've hardly had any tense moments at all.
Are you proud of what you've done?
Pride… look, I have a real personal difficulty with the idea of pride and legacy. I feel like when you start talking about pride, you feel like you've done the job. In any aspect of my life, there's always work to do. It may not be me doing the work, as far as experimental music is concerned, but I'll be still working in music.
I still have a desk job that works with music and I'll still want to be involved in some way. I'm plotting ideas to move forward in some way that will hopefully reflect the ideas of Longform Editions.
But I think legacy usually relates to The Beatles or Led Zeppelin, or culturally loaded musical objects. So I'm not really sure where Longform Editions fits into that. But I'm really happy with the project, and I'm also quite surprised and astounded at its trajectory and the artists that we were able to secure for the project, and the response and reception for the project has been well beyond expectations.
What's your current day job?
I work in community radio and have done for a long time–like a cross between NPR and college radio, in American terms. A 400-plus-strong network of radio stations dedicated to broadcasting to niche communities and providing an alternative media platform to the mainstream. I used to work at a community radio station as the music director, and some years ago I moved on to work for the Community Broadcasting Association of Australia. They're the representative body for most of the community stations around the country.
I work on a project that is dedicated to getting new Australian music to those stations. Because there's so many, it's hard for Australian artists to negotiate the whole terrain of those hundreds of stations. My project is the Australian Music Radio Airplay Project (AMRAP), and we engage in various initiatives to get music on community radio because it's usually the first place that you'll hear a new Australian artist.
A lot of Australian artists that you're probably familiar with have started out getting airplay and presence and audience on community radio.
So you have a lot of professional experience in wrangling artists and trying to get them to do stuff.
As far as AMRAP goes, that's a different kind of engagement. But prior to Longform Editions, Mark and I ran a label called Preservation, which had a similar curatorial direction—different exploratory sounds with a strong design element attached. I don't know if wrangling is the word. One of the great things about Longform Editions was that it was not an intense negotiation to get people to take part. It was just a matter of their time and their schedules. The interest was there—it wasn't like we had to sell a used car.
Was there a specific prompt that you gave artists?
Yeah, but it's pretty open-ended. We created a document explaining it. We wanted artists to use the time that a fully digital release would allow, so we suggested a minimum of 20 minutes to give the series the substance we felt that it needed. But as you're probably aware, some pieces went up to 72 minutes. We just wanted to give people space to explore, to step outside the typical release format, to explore something they haven't artistically, thematically or musically before. And it was great to be a sounding board for ideas or share ideas.
Often I approached artists with a particular idea—I would see something in their music and ask "Is that something you're interested in pursuing in this space?"
Some artists removed themselves from their chosen instrument or practice and tried something different for them. It was open-ended, but there was a purpose as well.
Why 20 minutes or more?
It was arbitrary, but we just felt that, for this project to have the weight we wanted it to have, these pieces needed to be long, for that exploration to really unravel. We've also had some that are closer to 15 minutes long. We weren't hard and fast about it. I don't think anyone was getting to 19 minutes and being like, "What do I do now?"
It just gave that understanding that we were looking for something that would unravel and shift or have a fluid sensibility that wasn't beholden to time or done-and-dusted too quickly.
Was extended composition something you've always been interested in? Why was it so important for it to be Longform?
There's a few reasons for that. I've been interested in extended composition anddurational composition for a really long time. I actually discovered a triple-CD set, Trilogie De La Mort by Eliane Radigue, at the community radio station I used to work at. They were throwing it out, so I took it home, and the music was like nothing I'd ever heard before. It wasn't in line with Brian Eno's idea of dropping in and dropping out, that kind of ambient music. It was a real springboard for me, and the idea of exploration became really important.
My approach to music consumption had changed not only with the demands of the radio job, in having to listen to a lot of music, but just with the surge in music releasing and availability due to streaming platforms. I felt like I might not have been treating music with reverence. When you engage with durational music, there are a lot of possibilities, and you also have to pay respect and reverence to the music to feel its effects. Just as it is when you go into an art gallery and take some time with a painting or a sculpture.
It's not something that you can just walk past, unless you're just not necessarily interested. But if you find that point of interest, you can find your own way in. And that's why we went with the digital format. We wanted to be bulletproof from the trappings of format and third party issues—pressings and distributors and promotion—we just wanted to create good work in the purest of senses as possible.
We felt that durational composition was a way for us to make sure that the quality of the work was always going to be good and stand out in a digital world as well.
What do you mean when you say pure?
When Mark and I ran the Preservation label, we had a really great time of it, but we also just kept coming up against typical industry obstacles that any indie label will usually face, just being let down in so many ways, that it never became purely about the music.
So we just wanted a music-first project, and we knew that if we created a project that was about long, extended, durational compositions, we would have a better chance of achieving that.
Mostly, apart from the administration of the label—paying royalties and things like that,—our main business was dealing with artists and putting these editions together. And that's what made it a pure joy. We didn't have to deal with distributors or PR agents. That was a liberating feeling.
There's a tyranny of distance, too, when you're coming from Australia. It's a little bit harder to get noticed. So we wanted to upend things a little bit. Do things in a way where it was artist first,music first, and we didn't have to say, "Oh, we can only print 300 of these" or "we can't print any of these, because it's not going to sell."
Process-wise, was it difficult to maintain the pace of four releases every two months?
One piece took nine days to come in. That was probably the quickest. Some took four years after the first conversation. It was a juggle. Sometimes I'd contact Mark and say, "Oh, I'm in a bit of trouble. I really don't know what's going to be coming out in April."
Mark used to laugh that off and go, "You always seem to make it work."
And that's the only thing I can say—we just always seemed to make it work. I don't think we ever compromised on an edition, and we were always able to release four strong pieces of music each time. Sometimes we’d have to move stuff around, but that's fine.
One thing I like to talk about here is the financial realities of working in music. So, with almost no physical overhead, did the label make money—or how did funding it work?
We were able to keep costs extraordinarily low. We didn't hire a publicist—I did all the publicity. I've done publicity before and I felt with a project like this, a publicist wasn't necessarily going to do a better job. There are limitations on where you can go with pieces that are 72 minutes long.
Mark did all the artwork and there's no cost involved there. We had an accountant and they did a lot of work for us at a pretty low cost. We were able to split sales with the artists from day one, and during the pandemic period, we paid 75% to the artists to help them along a little bit more. At our peak, we had over 250 subscribers, so after a while we were able to guarantee a certain amount of money. We were able to pay artists. Not thousands and thousands of dollars, but we were able to profit, and we reached the point where we could pay for mastering the work without having to worry about recouping the costs through sales.
We did it all with no overhead. It was our energy and time that were the main costs. We were able to look after people as best we could.
What was the division of labor between you and Mark, and was there anyone else involved in getting the releases across the line?
No, it's just been me and Mark the whole time. I'd say that 95% of the curation was me, and the other 5% was me sending stuff to Mark. I really value Mark's opinion, but he's often the silent partner in Longform Editions.
One thing that's important to note—and this is a story I've never really told before about our relationship—is that Mark and I met in the indie rock circles of Sydney, and we were discovering new kinds of music in the post-rock boom, listening to bands like Tortoise and Labradford. Eventually that led me towards stuff like Morton Feldman, Eliane Radigue. When we first started Preservation, we were working with Oren Ambarchi, who had a pop project with Chris Townend called Sun. We had no expectations around it, but it got a lot of airplay on the highly influential—at least then—national broadcaster here, and suddenly, Preservation was getting noticed from the industry,
We had this instance where a really great indie artist from America that I was a huge fan of approached us—on a strong, recognizable indie label from the states—to license this artist's next work in Australia. I thought it was really cool and asked Mark what we should do. Straight away, Mark said, "This is what it's going to look like: They're going to send us the artwork. We're going to put it into a jewel case. We're going to print the CDs, and then we're going to try and sell it. That is so dull. That is so uninteresting and so unadventurous. We need to be doing things all ourselves, creating our own things."
He didn't want any part of that. And he was very adamant about it. There's no opportunity for us to express ourselves in any way, shape, or form in that. That was such a defining moment for me and everything that we've done. So the division of labor is hard to speak about, but Mark's influence was huge. He also did a great deal of admin, and the creative direction is all him, which is crucial to Longform Editions' presence and recognizability. It's probably even-handed.
Was there a philosophy or idea behind the nature of the artwork for the releases?
When we were running Preservation, we had a sub-series called Circle, and we wanted to shine a light on more new and emerging artists creating unusual work, and we needed a way to bind those artists together. So Mark used his interest in typographical systems as an abstract form of art to tie all those together. We were looking for a kind of a low-cost way to do that, and also not try and reinvent the wheel by way of design every time we did it.
We took that philosophy into Longform Editions. We wanted something that was… arty. I can't think of a better word at this point. We didn't want it to be photography or something standard—we wanted it to be high-end and recognisable. It was a real joy. He'd already been working on typography and he'd use Longform Editions to experiment with that. Everything to do with Longform Editions is, to some extent, an experiment.
I remember someone wrote a review and said, "You can spot a Longform Editions space from 50 feet away." I liked the fact that people could see that. People were excited about seeing the art, and what was next after a particular cycle.
Was there anything you were surprised by, or lessons you learned, during the seven years of running this experimental label?
I always expected that any piece released on Longform Editions would not be part of somebody's main body of work, but artists took it on with such gravity and love, nobody phoned it in. It was great just to correspond with people who understood the project, even if something didn't pan out.
Longform Editions grew in a way that we didn't necessarily expect—if you told me that Wadada Leo Smith, who is a long-term exploratory jazz individual, would be doing something on Longform Editions when we first started, I wouldn't be able to imagine it. But suddenly it became possible.
Did running a label focused entirely on extended composition change the way you listen to or consume music, or even think about music in general?
Absolutely. I often start my day with an extended piece of music—not necessarily a Longform Editions piece. But it's tricky talking about this, because I never wanted Longform Editions to travel down the path of a wellness app, or a streaming playlist that is supposedly great to study to or work to. Those are practical applications, and I think, first and foremost, music is an art form. That's something we have forgotten. It's so tied to industry in a way that other art forms are not, so much more prominently and quickly and in a more cutthroat way, that we tend to be a lot more dismissive of music.
When you started the label, it was against the grain of the music industry. Has the landscape changed at all since then?
I don't think the status quo has really changed a great deal. The major labels are so deeply intertwined with streaming platforms. There was a big debate between Mark and I when we started. I didn't want the music to be available on streaming platforms. But now, the fact that it's available to anyone and we've moved beyond issues of cost, streaming actually makes Longform Editions more accessible than ever. That's the benefit.
And there's a lot of people, especially younger people, who are listening to way more kinds of music because of streaming platforms. But obviously the business model is extremely horrible, divisive, terrible, exploitative, and extractive. That's coming out more now, and it will be interesting to see what the response is. There's currently not a lot of response.
I actually thought post-COVID there'd be a little bit more response to the live music infrastructure, which, especially in Australia, is in crisis. But there's no new model being proposed or worked on at this point in time.
And while streaming platforms are copping a lot of criticism, the only idea of resistance is not listening to them. There's no solution. We're just not in an easy place with the music industry, and we need more ways to access art, which is difficult. It's always been an issue, and streaming platforms just made it bigger. I don't know how or when it's going to radically shift anytime soon.
It's hard to make a living. It would be nice if people could create without wondering how it's going to add up at the end of the day. And the value of music today is judged on its past successes and past glories. We're just looking to repeat that towards success. So people at major labels aren't even looking for the next big thing, and that's a dangerous scenario. What are the masses going to be listening to if things keep going that way?
On the flipside, does running this kind of label for so long and appearing successful—whatever that means— give you hope for the future of music?
I just think it needs to be done. When you're talking about "hope," I wonder if that's loaded with the baggage of industry. Maybe we need a conversation around expectations and why we create. What is it that we create for? Some people want to live off their art, and over time they've had chances to. Even the experimental scene had a window there, after Radiohead's Kid A, and them citing Boards of Canada and Autechre. Suddenly there was interest in, and more money around, that music. Records like Fennesz's Endless Summer actually sold a lot, and a bunch of records on Thrill Jockey sold well.
The bottom dropped out of that really quickly, but I think there's still this lingering scenario of, "Well, what am I going to do this for? Why am I doing this if it doesn't get me cash?"
In America there's a lot of feelings about work and labor, like, someone who works on a community radio station over there, they start up a Patreon and say "this is work." I'm like, "Hang on, I thought you were a volunteer." It feels like a very American thing to say "Everything I do for somebody else is work," and I struggle with that a lot. But it it might be easy for me to say because I've been steadily employed for a really long time,
I wonder whether we need to recalibrate what forms of expression are supposed to lead to, and how they change us as people—what it means for a society to have a healthy space, generally speaking, for expression that is not tied to success.
Longform Editions in some ways divided the larger Australian music industry, because it didn't follow the industry's typical trajectory towards success. In Pitchfork, for example, Longform Editions was the only Australian venture to be featured as a full-page article for a really long time.
There's an irony there. There's also not a lot of attention paid to Longform Editions in Australia as a result. Moments for music to "break out" have really shrunk and bottlenecked in the industry. We're not there anymore.
If Longform Editions was not working in this paradigm of looking for traditional success or money, or the industry, then... What was the purpose?
Exactly for the doing of it.
I've always worked in radio, and one of the great things I love about radio is hearing something on knowing that other people are hearing it on the radio at the same time, knowing that it's growing. It's a rare privilege to be able to access music as much as I can and share it with people. It's just one little corner of my life, but it's the activity that makes it all worth it.
It's the doing that does it. You asked about pride before. It's not that. It's about the doing—I love doing it. I might not be solving climate change or fixing the other problems of the world that need addressing, but we do need art to be out there, and I'd like to contribute because music's given me a lot. So that's really what it's about.
Weekly Listening
St. Agnis - The Seek [5 Gate Temple, 2025]
In some ways the spiritual inverse of the Darkness Darkness album highlighted in last week's newsletter, this release on John T Gast's 5 Gate Temple label turns dubby techno into something ugly and sandpapery. The drums are harsh, overdriven and often palpitating, and on tracks like "Emergence," starry-eyed melodies spiral into shrill bitcrushed screeches. This is techno that eschews the grid feel of most of the genre in favor of volatility and speed, like it's trying to run away from your ears every time you try to count the beats—which also makes it feel so much fresher than your average pop-gabber-techno of the '20s. The Seek is not for the faint of heart, but it’s more hippy than hardstyle.
Time Cow - "Million Leg Millipede" [Self-released, 2025]
This one-off single precedes an upcoming solo album from Equiknoxx member Jordan Chung, and from the title on down, it's a typically silly, exaggerated affair—heavy dub effects, squirmy synths, a horizontal sprawl that indeed feels a little like the pitter-patter of a many-legged insect scurrying across the ground. Chung exudes trickster vibes, but "Million Leg Millipede" also has an eerie shroud, with a melodic lead that feels like a cutoff SOS morse code message. Moving further away from the leftfield dancehall he's best associated with, Chung is touching on something that feels genuinely new and exciting—just wait for that LP next month.