Okay, I'm not going to do a separate post on each individual artist I saw at Big Ears this year. Let's wrap up the opening Thursday night with a recap of the two remaining acts we saw that evening.
On the opening Thursday night, after catching 75 Dollar Bill at The Standard and then Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble at the Tennessee Amphitheater on the old World's Fairgrounds, I hoofed it over to St. John's Cathedral to see Austrian electronic musician Fennesz.
The walk from the Amphitheater to the Cathedral was long and confusing, and I'm sure I didn't take the shortest, most logical route between the two points. I also had to walk up a lot of staircases, and I mean a LOT of staircases. But no worries - not only did I get to St. John's in time to hear Fennesz, I was the first one in the VIP line to get in.
Fennesz is known for his intricate musical worlds and for his electric guitar compositions. Since the late '90s, he has been creating melodies and atmospheres that fuse classical and orchestral concepts with conceptual music and complex digital structures, resulting in dense multilayered sheets of sound somewhere between concrete, classical, and ambient music.
At Saint John's, the first half of his set consisted on ambient soundscapes generated from his laptop computer and a keyboard. As the set progressed, he routed a guitar through effects pedals and into his laptop, where the sound was further altered with samplers and other effects. He played solo, all alone, seated behind a small table set up in front of the church's big pedal organ.
Originally, I was planning to leave his set early in order to get to my next set, but as I started to lose myself in his sonic structures, I decided that I wasn't going to spend my festival rushing from one set to another. Instead, I'll just relax and take each minute as it comes. So I stayed - and enjoyed - Fennesz' entire set.
After the set was over, and after I had time to chat with a few of my fellow festival-goers, I made the long walk from St. John's Cathedral over to The Mill & Mine. Those two venues are probably the furthest apart of any two places hosting the festival and represent the longest walk between shows. I walked at a brisk pace and by the time I got to The Mill & Mine, the band playing there, Minnesota's Low, was already on stage. But as I walked into the club, they began playing the first notes of the first song of their set, White Horses, also the first song of their most recent album. Turns out, I had managed to stay and enjoy all of Fennesz's set and then to take the long walk between the two venues, and still didn't miss a single note of Low's set.
Low are a much-beloved indie-folk band whose songs feature haunting melodies and intricate harmonies between husband-and-wife members Alan Sparhawk (guitar) and Mimi Parker (drums). Although they've been around since the mid-90s, to nearly everyone's surprised they radically changed their sound in 2018, adding big slabs of noise and static over their songs, although somehow it was still all clearly recognizable as Low. Their new album, Hey What, the one that starts with White Horses, continues the experimentation.
I've seen Low a couple of times already, but not since they changed their sound. I was curious to hear how it sounded live, and how much of the noise and static were studio effects and how much was live instrumentation.
As it turns out, it's almost all their own instrumentation, and if anything, they sound even more unruly and distorted live than they do on record. To be clear, I like the new sound and appreciate a band expanding their sonic palette, but part of me also missed the cuddly old Low of earlier, when the term "fuzzy" was used to describe fans' warm emotional response to the music, not the static enveloping the songs. Still, it was an interesting set, and it's rare for a band that's been around for over 25 years to suddenly have something new to say.
Low played through their new album in its entirety and in the order of the tracks, and then performed several of their older songs. When the show was finally over well past midnight, I took the long walk back to my hotel (although the distance was only about half the length between St. John's and The Mill & Mine). According to the odometer app on my phone, I walked a total of 4.1 miles that day, and climbed the equivalent of 9 floors. I unwound with a couple of IPA drafts at Clancy's, a bar next door to my hotel, before calling it a night.
So on the first day of Big Ears, I managed to catch four acts, ranging from free, world-music-inspired improvisation (75 Dollar Bill) to gospel-influenced jazz (Damon Locks' Black Monument Ensemble) to ambient electronica (Fennesz) to freaked-out indie folk-rock (Low), and I still had three more full days to go.
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