Last weekend I made the trek down to Knoxville, Tennessee, to take in some of the abundant offerings presented at the Big Ears Festival, arguably the most eclectic and interesting large-scale music fest in the U.S. Few other events juggle such a wide range of approaches—folk, contemporary classical, international, experimental, noise, rock, jazz, electronic, and any number of hybrids. I’ve attended the event three years running, and the sprawl tends to be overwhelming, with concerts stacked up against one another. A listener either needs to bounce around, catching parts of a given set, or settle in to catch a full performance, which means missing others. My natural preference is for the latter, which means there were plenty of things I missed because I was busy elsewhere. And since I needed to get back to Chicago on Sunday, I also missed a bunch of stuff happening then, including Henry Threadgill’s Zooid, Rangda, Deathprod (aka Supersilent’s Helge Sten), and Gavin Bryars’s The Sinking of the Titanic, among others.
Today’s playlist:
