The Big Ears festival, in addition to being a terrific fan experience and just plain fun, was also an education in new music and art. There were many new discoveries and it's going to take us a while to unpack and process everything we heard and saw.
It was the 10-year anniversary of the festival and the biggest yet. It was only our second year, but it seemed like the lines were longer than last year, the venues more crowded, and more events were full and operating on a "one in, one out" basis. Success is a good thing, but it's also a little disturbing to see our little secret get so busy.
We're not going to recap the festival on a set-by-set basis, but there's no place to start like at the beginning, so our first post in this unpacking will begin with our first set of the festival, Avey Tare's 7:00 p.m. set at The Mill & Mine on Thursday night.
Actually, our original plan was to see Roomful of Teeth during that time slot and catch Avey Tare later, but for some I'm sure very necessary and appropriate reason, the festival rescheduled Avey to an earlier hour and in direct conflict with Roomful of Teeth. The good news was (and this is one of the many nice features of Big Ears), Roomful of Teeth were scheduled to play other sets later in the weekend, giving us other chances to experience them so we opted for Avey's show as our opening set instead.
Not that we haven't seen Avey Tare before. A founding and constant member of the band Animal Collective, we saw Avey just last summer with his band-mate Panda Bear when they performed their 2004 album Sung Tongs in its entirety at Symphony Hall, in addition to numerous Animal Collective shows over the years. But the restless members of the Collective are always doing new and interesting things, and Avey has a new solo record that came out just last weekend during the Big Ears festival, so we were looking forward to seeing and hearing what he was up to lately.
Avey will be touring in support of the new album, titled Cows on Hourglass Pond, starting with a set tomorrow night at The Mothlight in Asheville, Tennessee. Avey's band for the tour will include fellow Animal Collectivist Deakin as well as drummer Jeremy Hyman, who was once in Ponytail with Dustin Wong and in Avey Tare's Slasher Flicks, and was the touring drummer for Animal Collective for a while.
But last Thursday night in Knoxville, Avey took the stage alone, solo, just an electric guitar and his voice. No light show, no projections, no visual or electronic effects, no stage banter, just Avey singing quietly, barely audible at times over his amplified guitar. He covered songs from Cows as well as 2017's Eucalyptus, but didn't cover any Animal Collective songs. The total effect was a little dreamy and intimate, sort of like having a friend singing some songs to you around a campfire (in fact, the songwriting was not dissimilar in many regards to Animal Collective's 2003 Campfire Songs). While one of the hallmarks of Animal Collective shows are their creative stage sets, lighting, and electronics, without any of that Avey was still able to sustain the audience's interests. These weren't folk songs - the guitar was electric, not acoustic - but it would not have been out of line to call it a singer-songwriter set. Imagine the song HORS_, below, without the percussion and electronic effects and just guitar and voice.
Big Ears by its nature is experimental and daring, a place where artists can extend themselves and try new things, and Avey Tare, ever the iconoclast, stood apart by stripping away stagecraft and electronic effects and innovation for the sake of innovation, and just played some pretty, crooning songs about horses and cows and koalas and eucalyptus. Or maybe the tour bus broke down somewhere and the rest of the band and the lighting equipment and the special effects couldn't make it to Knoxville. Whattya you think?
No comments:
Post a Comment