Big Ears 2015: On the Ground at America’s Biggest Avant-Garde Party
“Festivals like to say that they’re diverse,” said particularly eclectic folk imagineer Rhiannon Giddens onstage at the fourth edition of Knoxville’s Big Ears Festival, “but this is a diverse festival.”
In one evening at Big Ears 2015, you could see a full-bodied, often eerily precise Knoxville Symphony Orchestra interpreting Max Richter‘s “recomposed” version of Vivaldi’s Four Seasons — interrupted by an applauding crowd too enamored with violinist Yuki Numata Resnick’s blazing solo. Then walk two blocks and see art-rock bludgeoneers Swans play at deafening volumes, vibrating the floor and chairs of the Bijou with “Frankie M,” an opening number that sounded like firing a shotgun at a running motorcycle, their set looking like they were literally shaking dustballs from the rafters. An ambitious avant-garde festival with toe-dipping stations for 20th-century composition, contemporary indie-rock, abstract electronics, jazz, folk, ambient and Syrian pop, the mayor herself talked about not knowing where to start. She detailed her own Big Ears strategy of just wandering in to shows, quoting Tune-Yards’ “Look Around”: “You wouldn’t believe what I saw in the city tonight.”
Though the sounds came from different arenas, there were through-lines — repetition, dissonance, interlocking melodies — and this year the festival seemed intent on expanding more than just ears, with a large number of acts exploring visual elements, soundtracking movies and bringing multi-media presentations.
Demdike Stare used the digital sounds of their decidedly modern horrortronica — rumbling drones, booming bass and dubby crackles — to add ominous atmosphere to 1922 folklore-sploitation film Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages. Director Jim Jarmusch and his band Sqürl gave dreamy, blurry Man Ray films some bleary shimmer, watching his monitor intently while gently pushing his guitar into an amp, coaxing out soft feedback. For further extra-sensory adventures, you could take a trolley to the Big Ears Brunch, where a cooking station in the corner turned the Public House bar into an ad hoc restaurant complete with a DJ spinning Talking Heads on vinyl and decadent pastrami hash contrasted by black olives.
Tyondai Braxton turned a pocket of rock club the Standard into a stand-alone art exhibit with Hive, five trypophobia-welcoming podiums for five performers to play a squishy clatter somewhere between Steve Reich, Black Dice and Willy Wonka. Lights flickered and splayed, smoke poured and three percussionists clacked woodblocks: the sound seemingly connected to house music but the feeling more like being inside a pachinko machine. Guitarist Bill Frisell and his tight four-piece played their original score to William Morrison’s The Great Flood, a lyrical documentary of the Mississippi Flood of 1927 edited from old news reels. Slow-rolling aerial footage of flooded neighborhoods, people on roofs, dynamited levees and cattle barely able to keep their head above water were given full songs that treated these meditative, poignant images to a wide array of emotion. Somewhere between country blues and New Orleans jazz, the flowing water was matched with mournful music, the politicians coming in to survey the damage with a jaunty, ironic swing.
Though Frisell’s performance — subtle but stunning — was probably the best intersection between music and visual, Stained Radiance, a collaboration between guitarist Nels Cline and painter Norton Wisdom, was easily the most engaging. Cline and Wisdom felt like a live action Brothers Quay movie, the guitarist’s dark ambient drones buzzing as the painter smeared and squeegied paint along a lighted screen. Unlike, say, Joseph Arthur or Janelle Monáe, where an onstage painting yields a finished result, Wisdom’s slick surface meant erasing, soaking with water, drips, re-painting, overlapping — a painting whose constantly evolving shapes and ephemeral nature actually matched how music works. In primitive, Rauschenbergian lines, he painted a sex act that turned into a guitar solo, to which Cline responded with an avant-Zepplin riff.