Back in March, when the humid haze of summer still seemed like a utopian dream — as opposed to the post-apocalyptic dystopia it has become here in T.O. — Wavelength's Jonny Dovercourt and Kevin Parnell took a roadtrip to Knoxville, Tennessee to check out the second installment of the annual Big Ears Festival. With a stacked line-up including such big names as Joanna Newsom, Terry Riley, Dirty Projectors and The Ex, it was definitely worth investigating. We also discovered our new favourite band, Brooklyn duo Buke & Gass, who we quickly invited to make their Canadian debut at the ALL CAPS! Island Festival, coming up on Aug. 8 at Artscape Gibraltar Point. Jonny reviewed the three-day festival for Toronto's own MusicWorks magazine, and Kevin took photos. The piece is out in the summer issue of MW, available on enlightened newstands near you, but as a MusicWorks-approved Wavelength exclusive, you can read the unabridged version here:

SOMETHING FOR EVERYONE: BIG EARS FESTIVAL
March 26-28, 2010
Knoxville, TN

Review by Jonny Dovercourt, photos by Kevin Parnell

Clean, tidy, and eminently walkable, downtown Knoxville’s
historic main drag Gay Street feels more like Europe than America. And indeed,
it’s a fitting time to visit the U.S., just days after Congress passed the
health care reform bill, for a music festival that feels distinctly European.
Unlike the Next Big Thing-chasing club crawl of that other, better known
Southern U.S. fest, South by Southwest in Austin, the Big Ears Festival is an
carefully curated festival driven by an artistic mandate to showcase
cutting-edge artists from a wide variety of practices.

This more civilized approach makes for an effortlessly
enjoyable festival-going experience. Taking place in handful of venues located
within walking distance in the revitalized downtown of this small East
Tennessee city, Big Ears is organized so that the dedicated listener has the
chance to catch almost everything. The brainchild of home-town success story
Ashley Capps, a local entrepreneur whose company AC Entertainment started the
huge outdoor Bonnaroo festival and also manages the two gorgeous
turn-of-the-century theatres that hosted the bulk of the festival concerts, Big
Ears launched to great acclaim in 2009. But it went truly big in its second
year, offering a stacked line-up that more than justified the 14 hour drive
from Toronto.

One could argue that going big simply means going pop
— while Big Ears offered world-class experimentalists including American
minimalist pioneer Terry Riley, on the other hand its other “big name” was a group who recently had the Number One Record
in America: Afro-pop guitar strummers Vampire Weekend. This is where the
European flavour dissolves: in Stockholm or Berlin, such unapologetically commercial
programming might contaminate any high art aspirations. But this is America,
and “something for everyone” is democracy in action. And if a familiar name
pulls in “the kids” and turns them on to something new, doesn’t everyone one
win?

Things got started off quite right on Friday night at
the Big Ears Annex, a former bluegrass club now sitting vacant and set up as a
fantastic rock venue just for the festival. The very first act we witnessed was
Brooklyn duo Buke & Gass, and they turned out to be the find of the fest.
No need for gross-outs; their name has nothing to do with bodily fluids. Rather
it describes this like-named pair’s unique, home-modded string instruments.
Arone Dyer (female) plays the “buke” (baritone ukelele) while Aron Sanchez
(male) is on “gass” (guitar/bass). Taking the home-spun theme further, Buke
& Gass were their own rhythm section, stomping out time on kick drum and
tambourine. Offering astonishingly
creative riffage on their stringed beasts, the duo underpinned their stop-start
madness with playful folk-punk melodies. Even more affecting was Dyer’s voice,
which swooped from soaring soprano to punk staccato: the mischief in their
music evident as she chanted evil mantras (“out to get you / out to get you”)
with a smile.

Buke & Gass’ triumph is underscored by the fact they
were opening for The Ex, the legendary Dutch art-punk collective. Together
since 1979, the band marked their 30th anniversary with a major
change: long-time vocalist G.W. Sok left the band. Whereas most groups would
have taken that as a cue to call it a day, The Ex simply recruited a new singer
— and took this as an opportunity to write and play all new material. This
seemingly effortless self-reinvention is testament to The Ex’s boundless
creativity and unflinching commitment. Performing as a quartet, guitarists
Terrie Ex and Andy Moor and drummer Katherina Ex were joined by new vocalist
Arnold de Boer, who adds more melody and frontman moves. The noise and
intensity of this set may have shocked those expecting the ecstatic brass party
of their recent collaboration with Ethiopian sax player Getatchew Mekuria, but
their lockgroove, Congotronics-inspired rhythms still kept the crowd moving.

At the Bijou Theatre on Gay Street, The Ex were followed by
their near-namesake, The xx. This U.K. trio has been receiving massive amount
of Internet hype, and it is hard to understand why. Though at times likeably
reminiscent of minimalist post-punk pioneers Young Marble Giants, The xx’s
electronic pop has what psychologists term a “flat affect,” emotionally distant
despite its classic British dourness. The xx’s team clearly attempted to make
up for the performers’ removedness by investing in a dazzling light show, which
began theatrically with band members’ shadows projected onto a screen — to
ecstatic screams from the packed house. Back at the Annex, Australian-bred,
Icelandic-based sound artist Ben Frost created sustained screams of a different
kind, punishing the house with his black metal-inspired, “infrasonic” ambient
minimalism, created with only a guitar and a laptop, that lulled these tired
travelers towards dark dreams.

Saturday’s marathon began at the Tennessee Theatre with the
“disintegration loops” of California-based composer/performer, William
Basinski. A master minimalist, Basinski’s single piece consisted of a single
descending four note progression emanating from his reel-to-reel decks,
accompanied by digital clicks and a projection of a single cloud slowly sinking
through a deep blue sky. Familiar yet otherworldly, not unlike an afternoon
planetarium show. Next up was DJ /rupture, a.k.a. New York’s Jace Clayton, who
created a seamless pastiche of global beats, dropping in Latin, Jamaican and
Indian rhythms, plus some Diana Ross & the Supremes for good measure.
Though watching a DJ mix tracks in a soft-seater seems like a pointless
experience, the performative aspect was enhanced by a giant video projection of
Clayton’s hands on deck(s). The headliners of this matinee concert followed:
Brooklyn’s Dirty Projectors, who moved from the freak fringe to the indie
mainstream with their brilliant 2009 album, Bitte Orca. Now solidified both as
a co-ed sextet and as this generation’s Talking Heads, the DPs are the vision
of Dave Longstreth, an avant-garde composer and virtuosic guitarist who has
absorbed the influences of Malian pop, classic rock and commercial R&B.

Resolving binary oppositions — high vs. low, pop vs.
classical, contemporary vs. classical — seems to be the task of a lot of
the most exciting modern music. Witness the career of Big Ears guest curator
Bryce Dessner, who is a member of both the determinedly mainstream, anthemic
rock band The National (who closed the festival on Sunday night), as well as
the classical chamber-pop quartet, Clogs. Performing at the Bijou along with a
series of guest vocalists including Sufjan Stevens and Nadia Sirota, Clogs
played a number of operatic songs off their new album, The Creatures in the Garden of Lady Walton, to a packed house that
was significantly older than many of the other concert audiences, evidence of
the festival’s cross-generational appeal.

Any opposition between the worlds of guitar rock and DJ
culture were not in evidence back at the Annex, as DJ /rupture faced off with
Ex guitarist Andy Moor for a set of improvisations that packed a visceral
impact. Moor’s jagged string-slashing collided with /rupture’s equally
fractured beats and concrète,
occasionally settling into a groove which would be gleefully destroyed as soon
as anyone got too comfortable. Konk Pack, a trio of European free improvising
veterans — Thomas Lehn, analog synth; Roger Turner, drums; and Henry Cow
co-founder Tim Hodgkinson on table-top guitar — later played a wildly
churning set to a sadly small house. It may not have been a coincidence that
Vampire Weekend were playing at exactly the same time — proof that
populism has its downside?

Another of the Big Ears 2010 line-up’s more popular acts,
Joanna Newsom, soon took the stage at the Bijou. The harpist, pianist and
singer/songwriter, whose music draws on Appalachian and Celtic folk traditions
as well as ‘60s country-rock, was accompanied by two violins, drums, trombone
and a guitar, ukelele and flute player. Though Newsom performs effortlessly and
displays a folksy lack of pretension, her music seems to offer little besides
prettiness. As the night grew to a close, we headed to the Tennessee for a
midnight performance by festival Artist in Residence, Terry Riley. The new
piece by this living legend was truly bizarre — a long-form “jazz odyssey”
featuring spoken word by Riley seemingly based on dream sequences, and
concluding with a crooned tune that began with the line “Cannabis is a
wonderful drug.” The audience didn’t need to smoke up to feel dazed and
confused, which put one in the right frame of mind for a fantastic rendition of
his 1964 world-changer “In C” — with Riley joined by the Bang on a Can
All-Stars, the Clogs and boy-wonder composer Nico Muhly — which didn’t wrap up
until well after 2am.

Sunday, the last day of the festival, began with the only
Canadian act on the Big Ears bill, Vancouver-born, Montréal-based sound artist
Tim Hecker. Filling the Tennessee Theatre with his amorphous, ever-evolving
noisescapes, Hecker played in near-total darkness, encouraging the listener to close
their eyes and feel at home in his soundworld. Our Big Ears experience
concluded with The Books, the Massachusetts duo of singer/guitarist Nick
Zammuto and cellist Paul de Jong. With their mix of pastoral, John Fahey/Nick
Drake-inspired acoustic explorations and clicky electronic interloping, The
Books fit firmly in the pseudo-genre of “folktronica.” The potentially lulling
tranquility of their music, however, is happily offset by their hyperactively
integrated video pieces, plundering vintage VHS tapes for material ranging from
hypnotherapy to goose hunting to Mormon hat-tipping customs. The result was a
humourous yet thoughtful audio-visual feast, a perfect way to end a three-day
aural smorgasbord for those with voracious musical appetites.