Big Ears - Day One

It's Friday, but please excuse us for not posting our usual Dreaming of the Masters or New Masters, New Dreams videos, as it doesn't seem necessary nor appropriate to post any samples of the Masters, either Old or New, as we're sharing physical space with them right now, eyeball to eyeball, nostril to nostril, in the city of Knoxville, Tennessee.

To put it another way, yesterday was the first day of Big Ears 2019.

There's lots to unpack and a lot more to hear, see and do today, so let us first just state that yesterday we were delighted to run into several of the friends that we made here last year and picked up our conversations and show-going right up as if a year hadn't passed in the interim.  That, and we've already met several new fellow music fans and soon-to-be new friends - the audience at Big Ears is as diverse and singular as the music.

Here's who we did see yesterday:

AVEY TARE

Animal Collective's Avey Tare, solo, playing songs from last year's Eucalyptus and his forthcoming Cows on Hourglass Pond.

KUKANGENDAI

Crazy (fun crazy, not weird crazy) math rock from Kyoto.

YUNOHANA VARIATIONS

Collaborative project among drummers YoshimiO (The Boredoms) and Susie Ibarra with Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe (Lichens) doing electronic stuff.  Improvisational jazz-rock outer-space music.

MERCURY REV

For about three months in 1998, we were totally obsessed and in love with the album Deserter's Songs by the upstate New York band Mercury Rev.  To be quite honest, we hadn't heard much from them since that time, although they did recently release a tribute album re-recording songs of the great Bobbie Gentry (Ode to Billy Joe, you know, "and then Billy Joe MacAllister jumped off the Tallahatchie Bridge").  They didn't play any of that and stuck mostly to Deserter's Songs and other older material, which is pretty much what we wanted.  Can't believe it took us 20 years to finally see them.

Bl_ANK

We closed out the night with the end of a set by the Nashville percussionist Bl_ank at the tiny Pilot Light club.  We got there late and couldn't quite figure out what was going on, although it seemed to involve him playing a solo drum set on stage and periodically running to the back of the tiny club to do something that elicited strange electronic sounds from what appeared to be a fluorescent light fixture, and then running back up on stage to drum some more.  Like we said, we got there late and didn't get the chance for any more context to the set.

Anyway, that was all Thursday evening, the first day of Big Ears 2019.  We have three full days ahead of us, and will try to post updates as we can.