Big Ears Day Three Recap, Part One: Xylouris White, Horse Lords, Musica Elettronica Viva, Supersilent

In The Daily Dumpster Blog by Eric Dawsonleave a COMMENT

It’s often mentioned how you can’t see everything at a musical festival, especially one as sprawling as Big Ears, so you just make your choices, hope you like what you see and hear, and try not to think about what you’re missing. I’ve been pretty good at doing that in the past, but this year’s Big Ears is so packed with can’t-miss or once-in-a-lifetime events that I had serious FOMO throughout most of Saturday.

Part of this is because, by day three, I started to make choices based on venue and, for lack of a better explanation, volume and velocity. Basically I needed to hear some rock music, dance music, or hip-hop. Certainly multiple days of jazz, improv, and new music have been a dream come true, but the days are long and I kind of just needed a punch in the gut.

So I missed Xiu Xiu’s Twin Peaks music and Roedelius in favor of seeing my favorite drummer in the world, Jim White, get down with Cretan lute player George Xylouris. (Yes, it was very rocking.) I missed Colin Stetson’s by-all-accounts amazing take on Gorecki’s Third Symphony to see Horse Lords, and I have zero regrets. It was the kick I needed. My friend, who hadn’t heard them until then, commented that they reminded her of a lot of ’90s bands. That hadn’t occurred to me, but I realized they do kind of sound like Trans Am, Six Fingered Satellite, and their ilk, if they were influenced more by African music and minimalism than Krautrock and synth rock.

I knew I would regret missing Gavin Bryars Ensemble, and all reports back were ecstatic. (It was their North American debut! In a church!! And they premiered a piece he wrote for the festival!!!) But I really wanted to check out Steve Lehman and Selebeyone’s jazz/hip-hop band. (Plus I needed to eat. That always seems to be an inconvenience at this festival.) Unfortunately they were still sound-checking 45 minutes after their scheduled start time, and we had to get to Henry Grimes.

The only other problem I’ve run into so far this year was at the one chin-stroking type performance I had to see, Musica Elettronica Viva. Their appearance at Big Ears screamed can’t-miss, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. The Mill and Mine seemed like a good venue. Frederic Rzewski’s piano sat in the middle of the venue, like it did during his solo performance the day before, with Alvin Curran and Richard Teitelbaum’s tables full of electronics facing him on either side. A nontraditional, intimate set-up.

But they started out so quietly that the constant coming and going of people through the metal doors—every 30 seconds or so, at some points—was very distracting. And I couldn’t put myself in some Cage-ian headspace where everything is music, even the ambient and unintended sounds of the room. It was just flat-out annoying. Don’t know if the performers thought so as well, but it took me out of their subdued and subtle sound-making. This has been a problem at the Square Room in the past, until they got wise and started making people enter and exit through the back door after a performance began. Don’t really know that there’s a satisfying solution to this problem. It’s a festival, people come and go, every venue is different and that’s part of the deal.

So a couple of bummer experiences, but you roll with it. After all, you still got to see Jem Cohen project films in a parking lot with a live music score, Henry Grimes, Philip Jeck, and Supersilent after all that. Supersilent was one of my most anticipated shows, on my Big Ears wish list since the first one back in 2009. I think everyone, myself included, was expecting something a bit more ambient and down-tempo. There were definitely moments of that, including some sublime trumpet playing and singing by Arve Henriksen, but the Norwegian trio also let loose with prolonged bombastic percussive attacks. Have to admit the second go-round attacked my nervous system and I had the most visceral experience of the weekend, but it was still sublime. A friend commented afterwards, “Man, I guess I’m a few Supersilent albums behind,” surprised by the volume and intensity. He also said, “That was great.” It was.

I started the day moderating the Q&A with Jem Cohen and Guy Picciotto following a screening of Cohen and Fugazi’s film Instrument. I suspect I was asked to do this not so much because I work at a film and audio archive but because I appear in the film as a talking head for about 10 seconds. Footage from a Knoxville show in 1996 is in several minutes of the documentary, a weird show with a rowdy crowd and some contentious parking-lot interviews, and Cohen and Picciotto talked briefly about the band’s experience during it and why they wanted to include that footage. They were unsurprisingly sweet and thoughtful, and if you are or were a Fugazi fan, it was a treat to hear them talk for an hour or so about the band and film.

Eric Dawson is Audio-Visual Archivist with the Knox County Public Library's Tennessee Archive of Moving Image and Sound, and with Inside the Vault combs the archive for nuggets of lost Knoxville music and film history to share with us. He's also a longtime local music journalist, former A&E editor of the Knoxville Voice and a board member of the nonprofit performance venue Pilot Light.

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