Okay, the hard work's just about done - I've finally made my selection for the fourth and final day of Big Ears. 

12:30-1:30 - Martin Subotnik: As I Live and Breathe

2:30-3:30 - John Zorn: Bagatelles

5:15-6:15 - caroline

7:00-8:00 - John Zorn: Painkiller

8:45-10:00 - Marc Ribot y Los Cubanos Postizos

10:00-11:00 - John Zorn: Cobra

Yes, there are tradeoffs and missed opportunities, but I won't go into them here.  Instead, let's focus on the positive, what I will actually see and hear.

As I Live and Breathe is an interactive light-and-sound work created by the 89-year-old electronic music pioneer Martin Subotnik with the Berlin-based video artist Lillevan. Subotnik said, “As I Live and Breathe features live and sampled vocalizing along with some of my most advanced electronic performance techniques. . . It starts with my breath, moves through a vocalizing cadenza of vocal gestures, and ends with a tender and simple use of gentle rhythms and melodic fragments."

Sunday's set of Zorn's Bagatelles will be performed by the Brian Marsella Trio and the John Medeski Trio. Pianist Marsella will be performing with the bassist Trevor Dunn (Mr. Bungle) and drummer Kenny Wollesen. Organist Medeski (of Medeski, Martin & Wood) will be performing with guitarist David Fiuczynski and drummer G. Calvin Weston.  Should be great.

I've only recently discovered the British post-rock band caroline, and I'm intrigued to hear them live.  On their self-titled, debut album, they sound so ethereal and dissolute that at times it seems like they forget they're in mid-song, allowing "uncomfortably" long stretches of near silence, or odd passages that sound like someone tapping uncooked macaroni on a metal table.  Or something.  I'm intrigued to see how they translate that ambient energy to a stage setting.

Painkiller is John Zorn at his most punk rock and confrontational - an ear-splitting assault of noise and free-jazz energy in a no-wave setting.  He doesn't seem to perform his Naked City songs much there days, but this is as close to that as he gets, except perhaps even a bit more intense.

For this year's Big Ears, guitarist Marc Ribot is reviving his Los Cubanos Postizos (the Prosthetic Cubans) project from a nearly 20-year hiatus. He first formed the band to salute (and mutate) the compositions of the Cuban bandleader Arsenio Rodríguez, whose recordings from the 1940s modernized the classic Cuban sound. 

It will be tricky to get from Ribot's set at the Mill & Mine, which ends at 10:00 pm, over to John Zorn's Cobra set at the Tennessee Theater, which begins at 10:00.  I'm going to have to assume that after four days of drone and free-jazz with little sleep and even less food, I'll have mastered the mysteries of quantum entanglement and the time-space continuum and be able to instantly teleport myself from one venue to the next, or perhaps be able to be at two separate locations at the same time.  Either solution will work, or I will have to reconcile myself to leaving Ribot just a little bit early or arriving at Cobra just a little bit late.  

And then I'm done. Then I can spend one last night at my hotel to sleep, perchance to dream, and then drive back home the next day until Big Ears 2024.