The Rest Is Noise

You know that sound a steel saw makes when it cuts through rebar or other metal?  That's the sound most typically produced by Arto Lindsey on his electric guitar at Big Ears on Saturday "morning" (actually, 12:00 noon to 1:00 p.m., but it felt like morning after two days of festival late-night hours).  So this is more or less what we woke up to on Saturday.

Make no mistake - we're not complaining - it was a bracing, energetic set, and woke the audience up better than three shots of cappuccino.

The music programming at Big Ears was every bit as eclectic as our taste in music - in the four days of the festival, we heard ambient minimalism, the gentlest of solo piano and solo violin, jazz from piano standards to free-form avant-garde, folk songs, the post-rock of Godspeed, electronic dance music, a bit of pop rock and a bit of bluegrass, and even modern classical.  The rest, to play on Hamlet's words, is noise.

And what glorious noise it was!  We could go on and on, but we think we've unpacked as much of the Big Ears experience as we care to or need to, and this may well be the last post on the topic (time to move on to other things).

Speaking of noise, the festival closed out with the frighteningly intense Rhode Island scuzz-noise band Lightning Bolt.  If Algiers' music is "post-punk" and Godspeed's "post-rock," then Lightning Bolt is "post-music."  It's noise with little to no art to it, and that's what makes it so great and the most fitting way to end the high-concept festival.  Their single goal seems to be to whip the audience up into as much of a frenzy as possible.

Here's a little taste of Lightning Bolt as captured on our iPhone.  Honestly, this was one of the more melodic portions of their set - it got more anarchic from here.

   

We've got the usual music sets cued up for the next month or so (see the sidebar listings) and then in early May we have Atlanta's Shaky Knees music festival.  So between coverage of that and our ongoing, Friday-night Dreaming of the Masters series (RIP Cecil Taylor!), there should be no shortage of posts about music on this blog.