We got this little toy kaleidoscope from the Knoxville Museum of Arts’s Museum Shop a few months ago. As our 5-year-old Thomas played around with it, the wonderful shopkeeper Vicki Wyric told us about an artist who takes photos through a kaleidoscopic lens and then blows the images up really big. How cool. We bought one. Thomas was entertained by it for a while, then it got relegated to the bottom of the toy bin, as these things do.
Until Big Ears. I fished it out and started messing around with it at shows, taking photos through it with increasingly weird and beautiful effects. Sometimes it got passed through the crowd like a sparkly-gold communal joint, received with childlike delight by all.
I mean, of course. It’s Big Ears. Everyone here is open to a different perspective.
I’ve been to all but a couple Big Ears iterations since the festival began in 2009. Each year is a wholly different experience, shaped as much by the music as it is by happenstance and where I’m at in my life. It’s a personal festival to me, and I don’t know how to write about it without getting personal.
That’s my disclaimer. Here is my journal, or at least the first half. Alan will be along later today with his Thursday/Friday recap as well.
Thursday, March 27: The Fine Art of Coming In a Little Too Hot
There’s a heated debate taking place at the end of Barley’s bar between four like-minded strangers: Jill, Steve, Reba and myself. What show to hit next? Having to choose between two co-scheduled shows, Tortoise and Beth Gibbons, feels like a full-blown existential crisis. Jill, a scientist who is on psilocybin mushrooms, presents a compelling possibility: What if the Beth Gibbons show is a Portishead reunion?
At Big Ears, anything is possible. Despite the fact that we just met, I’m Team Jill. We high-five and head toward the door. “Give ‘em hell!” Reba shouts after us.
I like Jill. I like how fast she walks. SO fast. She has cool glasses and a cool coat. She’s funny and easily excitable. She is impressed by the contents of my bag, which in addition to the kaleidoscope include a bubble wand, a tiny cymbal, a single drumstick and an emergency hot dog. “Who are you?” she asks, in awe or horror, I can’t tell.
There are two types of people in the world: those who have their cake, and those who eat it, too. Plans have changed. We don’t have to decide. We are going to ALL the shows.
“We ARE the cake,” Jill exclaims breathlessly, maybe taking the figure of speech a little too far. Whatever. It’s a vibe. I scribble into my notebook, all-caps, our revelation:
College indie rock Leslie is very satisfied that we are at Tortoise. It is super rockin’. But after a few songs, it’s time to go. Now we just have to figure out how to teleport from the Mill and Mine to Beth Gibbons at the Civic Auditorium. I tell Jill about the trolley (this is her first Big Ears), but she shakes her head: not fast enough.
There’s a row of scooters in front of us. We figure out how to get two going and race down Gay Street, whooping and hollering. It is the most fun I’ve had in my entire adult life. On Monday morning I am going to sell my car and buy a scooter.
Beth Gibbons appears on the stage in gauzy sheets of indigo light that match her voice. There’s no Portishead reunion, but they do play one Portishead song. Jill declares her prophecy a success.
Beth sings:
I’m floating on a moment, don’t know how long
No one knows, no one can stay
All going to nowhere
All going, make no mistake
It just reminds us that all we have, all we have is here and now
Jill and I gaze into one another’s emotional, tear-filled eyes. No one can stay … it’s a sign from the universe that it is time to SCOOT.
And then once more, we’re screaming through the Knoxville night on these stupid-fun scooters, which also now seem dangerously fast. We probably should not be riding these scooters. Jill howls at the moon: “Everything that is happening is crazy!”
Our destination is the bottomless NYC electronica outfit Darkside at the Mill and Mine. But there’s a fat slice of cake in the middle we can’t pass up: Geologist at the Pilot Light’s own free three-day festival, What For? The artist, Brian Weitz, was a member of the experimental group Animal Collective, which played one of its earliest out-of-town shows at the Pilot Light. Tonight he’s shredding time and space with a hurdy gurdy, a sort of hand-cranked violin. The sound bounces off every surface of the room. He cranks it harder and faster as the packed room loses its mind.
Jill touches my arm.
“I love you,” she says.
“I love you,” I murmur back.
And then Jill disappears into the night.
Friday, March 27: Take Me to Church
I awake with Darkside still ringing in my ears. Literally. I maybe should have worn earplugs.
My game plan today is pragmatic. Tomorrow I’ll have my kiddo with me, so today’s my chance to binge on quiet, nuanced, avant-garde in the festival’s most intimate venues. I ease in with the Philip Glass Ensemble at the Tennessee Theatre. Big Ears just wouldn’t be Big Ears without someone performing Philip Glass.
It is actually quite an exciting, early-’70s composition but its meticulous exploration of repetition techniques would have had Thomas upside down in his seat. Alone, which is a rarity these days, I feel like I’m floating on my back, watching clouds slowly drift and change shape overhead, dividing and subdividing and reordering themselves as though through a kaleidoscope. It’s a nice way to get my ears big and open for the day ahead.
Four downtown churches are in service as Big Ears venues this year: Church Street United Methodist, First Presbyterian, St. John’s Cathedral and The Point. Each one is different in its acoustics and the scenes contained by their crayon-hued stained glass, but in each you can feel a sense of the sacred. I’m not a church-going person, but I can appreciate a shared space where people commune in the spirit and service of the metaphysical.
In a sense, that’s what Big Ears is about, too. Our five human senses are limited, but we can follow them as far as they’ll take us. When you reach the map’s edge and lean out a little further still, you can sometimes catch a glimpse of what’s beyond.
I spend the afternoon searching out that edge in various sanctuaries and cathedrals. Standouts include Modney at First Pres, a freaky-deaky solo violinist whose work is elegant and unsettling, sometimes unspooling in threads and other times shattering into fragments that waft through the air like shards of glass. He uses a loop pedal and sounds like he’s playing a violin inside out.
In the neighboring chapel I discover Jeremiah Chiu & Marta Sofia Honer, who blend modular synth, piano and viola with textured field recordings. The kind of thing where, if you close your eyes, it’s easy to forget where you are – is it a church pew, or a mossy creekside log in the forest?
I walk into and right back out of Sun Ra Arkestra with Yo La Tengo at the Civic Auditorium – it sounds great but is more of a party that I am in the mood for. I follow the spirit around before landing at another map-edge moment: Flore Laurentienne at Church Street Methodist. Come for the French-Canadian keyboardist, stay for an ensemble backing of lush, ethereal strings and a surprise light show. The sanctuary is “activated” throughout the week by projectors that make the walls crawl with neon glow worms or ripple as though we are underwater.
My mind goes somewhere else. It tends to happen when you listen to this sort of music. It’s easy to live your life within a hall of mirrors, a self-perpetuating echo chamber fueled by an IV drip of algorithms – this is what you enjoy, this is what is familiar, this is what you believe. Music like this can disrupt that cycle, opening our ears – ourselves – to the new and unexpected.
By now the sun is setting, and I feel ready to reenter polite society. Touch grass. Drink a beer. Compare notes with friends. Back at Jackson Terminal, Swamp Dogg’s psychedelic soul slaps me back into reality, good and hard. It sets me right for another long night highlighted by Antipop Consortium’s seminal electro-rap, a stop into the Pilot Light for the world premier of local supergroup UaD5, the heart-stabbing return of ANOHNI and the Johnsons, and Les Claypool’s Bastard Jazz, whose trademark voice and gut-punching bass lines just never get old.
I, however, do feel old. My bed beckons. Until tomorrow …
