February 2009 Archives

Wino, Punctuated Equilibrium (Southern Lord): No doubt that two afternoon beers really help my impression of this solo debut (!) from ex-Saint Vitus/Obsessed/Hidden Hand/etc. frontman Scott "Wino" Weinrich. My first impression last month was "meh." Now it's totally kicking my ass--Wino's found this real sweet spot between outright doom (The Obsessed/Saint Vitus) and Southern rock (The Hidden Hand). It's a power trio, emphasis on power, with Wino on guitars and vocals and Jean Paul Gaster on drums and Jon Blank on bass; there's drawn-out epic groove jams ("Release Me," "The Woman in the Orange Pants"), proggy '70s workouts ("Smilin' Road"), and barn-burning hard rock (the title track).

I love Wino-era Saint Vitus--some real stand-outs on the SST roster, and that's saying something--but that group was sort of one-note. A good, deep one, but still. Here he matches the stone-deep heavy balls of SV with the texture of HH, and it might be his most mature work. It's badass, for sure. 

The Zydepunks, Finisterre (Nine Mile Records): Like if the Pogues were from Louisiana, except not really. Zydeco, really fast, with big and obvious melodies. "Dear Molly" is okay. They're playing Barley's on Saturday.

Young Dubliners, Saints and Sinners (429 Records): Big arena-ready hard pub rock with, unfortunately, fiddle and mandolin. Title track's not so much Celtic rock 'n' roll, as they describe themselves, as Catholic rock 'n' roll. Songs about booze, childhood friends, and love gone bad. hat do you want me to say? Go buy some Thin Lizzy instead.

Bloodkin, Baby, They Told Us We Would Rise Again: Opening track "The Viper" is good, lumbering contemporary Southern rock, but is a seven-and-a-half minute power ballad really the way to start an album? (Still two minutes left, and the guitars are already going all "Freebird.") Drive-By Truckers are an obvious influence, maybe a little too much (Bloodkin's from Athens and Patterson Hood wrote the liner notes), but they've absorbed Skynyrd, too, and there's a little (lot) late-model 38 Special on "Wait Forever." Very good performances all around, in fact--I should have gone to see them when they opened for DBT last month--but the songs are maybe a little too self-consciously epic and magesterial.

A.A. Bondy, American Hearts: Gloomy alt-folk ex-alt-rock guy with a passing vocal resemblance to Steve Earle. Well done--simple minor-key strums, gruff but polished singing, atmospheric embellishments (organ, reverb guitar)--but a little silly with the Southern Gothic thing. So serious and poetic. 

While the iPod's recharging, I'm going through the stack of unlistened-to promos.

First up: Alabama Blues Machine, Must Be Love. White blues from Birmingham. Totally and utterly competent. Decent singer, better-than-decent guitarist, also horns and organ, the whole Chicago thing. "Must Be Love" is a nice moody blues-rock song. Nice boogie guitar on the intro to "Double R Shuffle." I'll never listen to this again.

The Biscuit Burners, Take Me Home: Slick nuevo bluegrass with breathy sub-Robinella vocals. They play around here a lot. Tone it down, sister. The second female vocalist is better. Songs about whiskey, wine, and Seldom Scene. If you miss Nickel Creek (I don't) this is for you.

The Black Ghosts, s/t. US release of bombastic UK electro duo's 2008 debut. Standard disco-fried indie rock. Nice laidback organ sound on "It's Your Touch." Damon Albarn's on "Repetition Kills You." Slick but mostly dull, best when it tries to get funky ("It's Your Touch," "Until It Comes Again"). Oh, is this still on?

 

Nothing at the Big Mama's website, but a press release says ex-GNR drummer/celebrity junkie Steven Adler will perform there next month:

Adler, known recently for his roles on VH-1's Celebrity Rehab and Sober House, will bring his potent hard rock outfit to a limited-access show that will feature new releases from the band as well as a plethora of covers from Guns N' Roses' Appetite for Destruction era.
"This will be one of the most, if not the most intimate show that Adler's Appetite will perform on their current tour," said Karaoke Café Marketing Director Derek Ashe. "Admission will be limited to the first 300 ticket purchasers, and those lucky few who gain admission are going to have a very in-your-face experience."
In addition, fifty fortunate fans with special VIP tickets will be allowed to whet their own appetite for Adler and attend a meet-and-greet with the drummer before the start of the concert.
With their own EP currently available through major record outlets as well as online, Adler's Appetite is currently on tour on dates throughout the United States. The lineup includes bassist Chip Z'Nuff, founder of Enuff Z'Nuff, and lead guitarist Michael Thomas formerly of Faster Pussycat, as well as guitarist Alex Grossi of Quiet Riot fame.
Tickets go on sale soon for the signature event, which promises to rock the small town of Seymour like never before.

Will Oldham, aka Bonnie "Prince" Billy, aka Palace, aka Palace Music, etc., has just been announced at the Bijou Theatre on May 26.

Kelefeh Sanneh wrote a profile of Oldham in The New Yorker last month.

Square Room calendar says guitar hero/bandleader/John Zorn collaborator/session guy Bill Frisell is coming to town on March 19.

A handy starter's guide is here.

Wilco's playing the Tennessee Theatre on Saturday, April 18. Tickets are $33.50 and go on sale Friday. New album just might be out by then. 

Big event this weekend is Knoxville Opera Company's production of Rigoletto.

I'm also heading over to see Donald Brown at KMA.

The weekend was pretty loaded with B'more-related talent, so it's no surprise that the city's City Paper (edited by former MP music editor Lee Gardner) sent a reporter to report it. Here's that report.

Knoxville, Tenn.--which probably connotes Bonnaroo and Dollywood to many people--seems like a hell of a place to assemble a crew including names such as Philip Glass, Christian Fennesz, Antony Hegarty, and Matmos. Knoxville is a sleepy, small city surrounded by low mountains and defunct marble mines. Its downtown, home to the festival's half dozen or so venues, is about the size of Mount Vernon with a small "Old City" nightlife-centric adjunct a few blocks square in size. Festivalgoers, the younger of which all tend to look like record store clerks, are easy to spot in the city's central pedestrian plaza, and strolling local families frequently look perplexed.

As far as I'm concerned, this official statement from Brent Thompson at the Square Room, in reference to Ashley Capp's statement on KnoxBlab, is the last word on this:

"We appreciate AC Entertainment taking full responsibility for this issue and setting the record straight. The Square Room is truly a gem in the landscape of Knoxville's growing music scene and will continue to bring the community an eclectic and impressive variety of shows. We enjoyed being an integral part of such a visionary project and look forward to being involved in next years Big Ears Festival."

Pitchfork reviews Big Ears.

Such conviviality proved to be one of Big Ears' central assets last weekend. The first-year festival gathered two dozen fringe music performers in the surprisingly (to most festival attendees, at least) vibrant downtown of Knoxville, a city of nearly 200,000 situated near the Great Smoky Mountains. The international cast of performers--from Baltimore's Dan Deacon and Matmos to Australia's the Necks and Austria's Christian Fennesz-- shared hotels, restaurants, and coffee shops with one another and with the festival's several hundred ticketholders. For music scenes (noise, experimental, avant-classical) generally castigated for their aloof and esoteric natures, the sense of kinship and community at Big Ears came as an inspiration and relief. Artists shared advice. Fans shared gratitude. Collaborations abounded. Surprises happened.

New York Times jazz critic Ben Ratliff on Big Ears.

I can't say for sure that the comment attributed to me is original. I repeated it often during the festival.

An e-mail from Drew Daniel, which disputes the most common description of the footage in question:

This weekend we were set to perform at the Square Room in Knoxville,
TN as part of the Big Ears Festival. We were setting up in the venue
with the sound and video crew, who were really friendly and nice
people. All was going swimmingly, until we were asked by a video tech
person about the content of our video. We told him that it ran the
gamut from squiggly psychedelic abstraction to heavily tweeked and
digitally manipulated but non-pornographic footage sourced from
damaged VHS tapes of gay porn. The piece in question, the video for
our song "Public Sex for Boyd McDonald" is mostly a flurry of
snowy-looking format glitches and unintelligible signal, but it does
contain about three seconds of full frontal male nudity as a young man
named "Buster" takes off his clothes and gets in a hot tub. We
explained the piece and continued with our sound check in a
professional manner, under the impression that everything was fine.
The room looks and sounds great, and we were excited to play. A few
hours later we were told that there was "a problem"?but not from the
Square Room itself. Apparently (and here my information is second
hand, admittedly) the owner of the building that houses the Square
Room is a hard-line fundamentalist religious conservative, and when
the Square Room entered the space they were asked to pledge not to
present material that is any way "indecent" or "immoral", or words to
that effect. We were given to understand that we could perform in the
Square Room if we would agree not to play "Public Sex for Boyd
McDonald", and apparently someone (the owner?) had looked at YouTube
clips of us playing this concert in other cities (London, Paris, etc.-
cities which have so far managed to endure our queer porn onslaught
and emerge unscathed) and decided that that piece was artistically
and/or morally bankrupt and that we were beyond the pale. Martin and I
try not to take what we do too seriously, but we are serious about our
work when the chips are down, and there was no question for us of
altering our show to fit someone else's standards. Sadly, this kind of
resistance to a sexual minority on the part of the landlord for the
Square Room, if that is what it is, confirmed the worst stereotypes
about a bigoted, narrow, and, if I may be blunt, culturally retarded
and backwards mindset that snobby coastal types tend to think pervades
the Deep South; it was exactly the sort of thing that surely this
festival, with its inclusive programming of Antony and other queer
voices, so beautifully counteracted. But luckily, the owner of the
Square Room does not speak for Knoxville. The Big Ears people were
completely supportive and understanding and the show was moved to the
Catalyst, where a loud and large audience took in the show and voiced
their strong support of what we were doing. The Catalyst venue
welcomed us when we were in a tight spot, and the result was a really
hectic Round Robin with Dan Deacon afterwards, and a fun and positive
crowd. So we left Knoxville happy in the knowledge that, thanks to Big
Ears, we were able to play the show we wanted to play, to a roomful of
grownups and hipster kids who are not going to be psychologically
scalded by seeing a penis for three seconds on a video screen. The
people at the Square Room are not the villains here, but I worry that
they have painted themselves into a corner in which they have to
filter what they present on behalf of their landlord's dubious agenda.

Happily, the evidence of our concert amply demonstrates that
fundamentalists don't speak for Knoxville.

In this interview with Andrew Clayman that we ran to preview the festival, Daniel said one of his motivations for taking part in Big Ears was to resist big-city stereotypes about the South:

"I think the shear incongruity of that kind of music in that part of the country appealed to me," Daniel explains. "I grew up in Louisville, Ky., so to me, that part of the country is not a place I'm suspicious of or condescending towards in the way I think a lot of people are.

"I think a lot of people who are in New York or L.A. kind of pooh-pooh the rest of the country and don't really assume that people there have any curiosity about experimental work. But my experience, growing up in Louisville, is that I was totally famished for it, and really intrigued by the examples of it I saw around me."

Following up on Saturday's decision to move the Matmos performance from the Square Room to Catalyst: The unofficial word has been that the management of the Square Room--a for-profit company that's been capitalized by the Cornerstone Foundation, a Christian organization--became uncomfortable with the Baltimore electronic duo's work when they realized that a video image of a man masturbating in a hot tub would be shown on a screen behind the stage. There were rumors that the decision was motvated by homophobia (Matmos members Drew Daniel and M.C. Schmidt are gay).

Steve Green from AC Entertainment says, "They basically decided after sound check and seeing the image in the video that they weren't comfortable with the show being there. They told them they could not perform or not show the video, and that wasn't an option, so we moved it. But it worked out ultimately. Having the show with the Baltimore Round Robin made sense, and they were going to go down there after the show anyway. It was just unfortunate."

More details to come.

It's safe to say Knoxville's never seen anything like Big Ears. It felt like a rousing success--some moments of genuine musical transcendence, some surprises, a small but fairly bustling little community of festival-goers all over downtown. Some of the late-night sets were delayed, but that--and the Square Room vs. Matmos drama--was about it for glitches.

Not much of the music yesterday grabbed my attention--Pauline Oliveros' performance was curious and comforting, but not engaging, and Michael Gira's suicide folk didn't fit the generally celebratory mood of the night--but I greatly enjoyed being out. The brains and muscle behind the festival--Ashley Capps, Jason Boardman, and Chris Molinski--were beaming at the closing party at Pilot Light, and they should have been. It was a great weekend.

UPDATE: Oh, and Christian Fennesz is still in town. Just saw him having breakfast at Cafe 4.

Two key minutes of Negativland's "It''s All In Your Head FM" earlier today, brought to you after an arduous journey involving codecs, phone-cam video format converters, and YouTube.

well, it started more than an hour late, but the crowd was patient and there's an energy obscuring any fatigue in here. Larkin Grimm was a little Lilith Fair for my tastes, but the ensemble still impressed. will leave the last two acts and wrapups for Matthew & David, but suffice to say the inaugural Big Ears was a great success, and everyone involved should be beaming with pride for some time.

let's do this again next year, folks

another big highlight; Negativland has brought their edgiest bag of tricks. funny, aurally captivating, and possesed of deep ideas.

brunch at the Bijou was lovely; we had to sit upstairs but got to watch a family of fellow diners puzzle over Sxip Shirley's Sonic New York clamoring around downstairs. and Oliveros was a treat.

Accordion music is being processed at KMA right now.

It's a beautiful Sunday afternoon.

For the record, Dan Deacon's been wearing the same sweatshirt for three days.

My biggest scheduling challenge is coming up this afternoon--trying to fit at least some viewing of the Daytona 500 in amid Negativland, the finale set at the Bijou, and Ned Rothenberg and the guys from The Necks at KMA.

40 feet up, it's a little thundery.  Chattanooga's Shaking Ray Levi Society is leading workshop-goers through their paces, teaching them a few of the ins and outs of their trade.

The workshop started (as they all seem to do around here) with a couple of brief lectures detailing the history and mission statements of today's hosts.  Don't worry - those drums aren't just there for show.

Soon audience and instrument both were pressed into service.  It's loud enough at times to be heard four floors below through the jazzy din of the Brewery's soundtrack.

...and the Baltimore Round Robin is still bumping like nuts. (trying not to feel old here...staying out til 3 is a solid start.) let it be remembered, if anything is, that Matmos' migration to the Catalyst did nothing but improve the festival, as their set (controversial video clip and all) was followed shortly afterward by impromptu participation in Dan Deacon's party-rocking Baltimore showcase. (hated to miss The Necks, but it's best not to dwell on that stuff at festivals.) it's more dance oriented than the incarnation that hit the Pilot Light a year or two back, but during a festival celebrating the avant-garde, isn't a wild dance party (no matter how conceptually-loaded or Matmos-featuring) kind of the weirdest thing that could go down?

god, tomorrow's gonna be here way too soon for my tastes.

Wow. The first 40 minutes of The Necks' show--one I'd been anticipating greatly--was nice. A little bass, then a little piano, then some shimmering light percussion. And so on. And on. And on some more. Nice; really nice. Then, all of a sudden, drummer Tony Buck goes mad on the high hat and stays at it way longer than any reasonable expectation. And then the bass drum, and then BAM! drums explode. Become the lead instrument, in fact. And it keeps going and going and going. For real--Bonham/Buddy Rich-quality drumming there. A remarkable way to close the night. (For me, anyway. Have fun at Dan Deacon, the rest of you. I'm going to Taco Bell and resting up for tomorrow.)

the word seems to be this: the Square Room objected to a sequence of Matmos' accompanying visuals depicting a well-endowed young man pleasuring himself in a hot tub. explicit? fairly, I guess. but sexual-orientation neutral. (early reports had attributed the switch to qualms over the electronic duo's homosexuality.) it's collossally silly and more than a little embarrasing, especially during Knoxville's big moment in the culture spotlight, but the rumor mill persists in casting the L7 Room as bigots and that's a heavy sort of thing to throw around. a lot of folks have been waiting for them to let their less-than-secular colors really fly, but the issue here is more about obscenity than prejudice, and no matter your thoughts on either, there is obviously a legitimate distinction.

Todd Steed and a semi-rotating panel of associates (sorry, potential musicians of note, but he's the only one I recognize offhand) are giving a Big Ears home to Experimentalus Localus at Java this weekend.

I like to think that I coined the whole "my counterparts already covered X, Y, and Z, so I won't belabor the point" thing and that anyone else who does it is just poorly aping me.  With that in mind, here are some dubious-quality pictures from the Glass Q&A.

San Augustin is a little meh. could it have been the sound? seems like more controlled sonics would bring the drone life. guitarist David Daniell's collaboration with Christian Fennesz and The Necks' Tony Buck drove the point home, sounding fabulous...and formless. nice to see (and hear) the first of the weekend's several collaborative sets, but nothing compels me to see it through.

after dinner (nice to see that The Tomato Head's reputation has once again preceded it among out-of-towners), Powaqqatsi at the Tennessee Theatre. part of me laments the relative lack of cinema events at Big Ears, but I have to admit that the for-donations double feature of Godfrey Reggio's wordless, impressionistic ethnographies is a pretty inspired choice, and an excellent excuse to show off our city's pride and joy. it's also an easy introduction to the work of Philip Glass, even if the too-synthetic arrangments of his score date the film terribly.

now to bounce back and forth downtown for a few hours.

Still haven't crossed paths with any of the out-of-town reporters who came to cover Big Ears.

'Course, it's a wonder that I'm getting anything done--my cell phone's dead, GF's cell phone is out of juice, and my idea of "live blogging" is running up to the office in between sets.

I was really looking forward to dipping into the Philip Glass Q&A and coming back to report the Stupidest Question. Turns out I'm the sucker: The questions were uniformly intelligent, considered, familiar with Glass and his work, and Glass himself answered each one at length in a conversational, familiar tone.

Ran over to see San Agustin, and while it as a welcome relief to actually see and hear a drum kit, overall I was less than impressed. Nice set, great tone, but a little short on dynamics. Glass was out having dinner at Cafe 4--woulda stuck around myself, but the wait was an hour.

Next: Antony and the Johnsons, local metal/noise (and probably metal noise), Matmos, The Necks, Dan Deacon. Subsequent reports may suffer from the influence of alcohol.

my colleagues already covered today's exploits this far, but random thoughts:

Oliveros' workshop was enlightening, as much in her lecture as the slow-singing exercise. though elements of her thought processes veered toward the New Age-y, it's too easy to forget that phenomenon is rooted in some extremely useful, valid concepts,very much including Oliveros' mindfulness-minded "Deep Listening" technique. a good reminder that this festival (though at this point it feels more like a conference) is about big ears, not big brains.

glad to say that I disagree with Matt about Neil Hamburger; his walking tour lived up to its can't-miss hype, largely due to the understandably puzzled reactions from innocent bystanders...several of whom ended up following (and enjoying) it to its conclusion. the routine was what you might expect: coarse, elaborate falsehoods about our downtown. I learned quite a bit.

on a tragic note, my quest to find the proper supplies for the Collins workshop failed utterly, so I drank a few pints of White Mule instead. (this blog really has turned into a DTG&B commercial, hasn't it?)

rumors abound about the Matmos venue shuffle, but from what i've gathered so far it'd be unfair to judge until we see what they've got in store.

Tonight's Matmos show, set for the Square Room at 10 p.m., has been moved to the Catalyst in the Old City. It's the former Blue Cats location.

Jesus, I hope I have time to get a beer before the Philip Glass Q&A.

Philip Glass showed why he's the centerpiece of the weekend with a program of striking musical intelligence. After a short solo intro, Wendy Sutter performed Songs and Poems for Cello, a dark, sonorous, rich, dolorous piece with surprising warmth and emotion. Sutter's a disciplined player with a streak of passion underneath the surface, perfect for the piece. (Glass wrote it specifically for her.)

Then Glass played six etudes from an unfinished collection. The setting was positively cinematic--the dark back curtain lit deep purple and blue, Glass alone at the piano in profile. The pieces were filled with big melodies, memorable enough to be pop songs, punctuated by sharp splinters of glistening high-end notes. The final piece was heavy and rhythmic--it could have been the soundtrack to the climax of a particularly dark psychological thriller. The beat was so strong I tapped my foot through most of it. The highlight so far, and it's hard to imagine it being eclipsed.

Saturday afternoon update, live from the Downtown Grill and Brewery

I have a feeling I'm pretty alone in this--judging from the crowd he got for his faux historical tour of downtown, and the fact that the schedule's been reshuffled to allow him another set at Pilot Light alter tonight, I'm confident in asserting so--but I just don't really care for Neil Hamburger. Not much patience for his brand of anti-comedy.

But the start of the tour turned sour. Hamburger noted that Krutch Park was an unpleasant place to start the ramble, as it had been the site of a series of child murders by a group of "hobos" in the 1970s, and the "hobos" themselves had been killed in a rash of vigilante retribution. Considering that there were several homeless or near-homeless people in the park at the time, I found it to be in bad taste. Then again, i can be pretty priggish.

Solo jazz clarinetist/saxophonist Ned Rothenberg provided, for me, the first really blissed-out ecstatic moment of Big Ears so far during his short set at the Square Room this afternoon. The third of the three compositions he played, this one on alto sax, started with a lyrical theme, kind of romantic and conventional, but over the next 10 minutes or so he alternated among that motif, heavy riffing, and fiery, flamboyant, virtuosic soloing. Badass. Small but appreciative crowd, nice room. An unexpected highlight for me.

Before the show, standing in line for coffee at the adjacent Cafe 4: my first celebrity sighting of the weekend. Christian Fennesz came in. Tall and brooding guy, imposing enough that I didn't introduce myself.

Right now, at this very moment, about 75 people are standing in the middle of the big open room on the top floor of the Woodruff Building downtown, each singing a different song of his or her own choosing very, very, very slowly. It's an impressive effect--a huge, layered tone that sounds more like an organ or synthesizer than a chorus.

It's part of composer/theorist Pauline Oliveros' Deep Listening workshop.

If you need yet another illustration of the eclectic nature of Big Ears, I'm leaving that to go follow Neil Hamburger's architectural tour of downtown Knoxville.

Hamburger was "funny" as ever, his comedy-routine-as-comedy routine and unpredictably terrible (often in two senses) punchlines sharpened for the Big Ears occasion ("okay, we're going to tell a few jpkes, and then someone is going to come out and shit in a bowl to high pitched noises") (which i probably just butchered), but perhaps the funniest thing was the high-spirited, high-volume young lady at the bar, guffawing and squealing in delight (even cutting down the setup to an extended series of Heath Ledger gags with "i love him!") to such great effect that the never-shy Hamburger had no response to it, instead saving his ire for punchline-steppers and earnest requests of "classic" material.

Neil started late, but luckily Hello City started even later; perhaps the most impressive crowd of the evening (taking into account the late hour and all-local bill) stood by as a round robin of Knoxville's most accomplished concept-rock bands made as strong a case as any for the question "why knoxville?" as great as it all was (Will Fist really, really sold Psychic Baos tonight) it was Double Muslims that walked away with the show, captivating both out-of-town newbies and seasoned Knox indies with an all-too-brief set that drew a wider variety than ever of musical ideas into one furiously tight sequence. genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, the best fifteen minutes of music i've so far heard at Big Ears.

no matter how this all turns out, Knoxville's got quite a lot to be proud of.

(Neil Hamburger will be giving a walking tour of downtown Saturday afternoon starting at 1:30pm in Krutch Park, and will return to the Pilot Light late Saturday evening.)

Blue Ranger, reporting in!

Jason indicated this wasn't to be missed, and was right on; teen-aged Madeline's sing-songy ukelele cuts recall Kimya Dawson (sue me if that's too on-the-nose), and Fence Kitchen's surprisingly poignant set of delicate one-man organ and trumpet duets was positively cinematic, soundtracking the bric-a-brac silhouettes in his corner of the nearly-empty art space. I expected performance art, and got something much different, and much better.

(Fence Kitchen plays again Saturday night at Pilot Light; Madeline Ava is a local, and we'll doubtlessly hear from her again.)

pretty transcendant, as you might imagine. not much going on onstage (picking up a tossed guitar pick was the thrilling climax of what I saw) and completely wordless, but Christian Fennesz' hazy, glitchy guitar/laptop soundscapes, simultaneously challenging and accessible, exemplify what's worthwhile about "noise" music, no matter what the lady in the lobby (using the one-two punch of "guess I'm not smart enough" and "my fourteen year old could do that") says.

a criticism, though: the obvious opportunities for Big Ears as a communal experience are underminded WAY HARD by assigned seating for the Bijou. i can understand it as a customer service precaution were the festival better-attended (which is not to say that it's not well-attended, or that we've even seen the extent of attendance yet) but the social inconvenience is really too high a price to pay. what could be lost in general admission? hopefully something to be chewed on for next year, if not the rest of the weekend.

(Christian Fennesz will be playing twice more this weekend, both times in collaboration with other musicians.)

So: Sxip Shirey's Sonic New York=human beat box+klezmer. Matmos infinitely better, best (?) Alive After Five ever.

Fennesz at Bijou: Wow, lots of gear set up, then dude with guitar playing along with samples from that gear. Fuzzy.

Bijou about 2/3 full--can't account for the balcony, b/c i'm underneath it. but damn, that's a sizable crowd. come on.

interesting, to weave back and forth between musique concrete and human-beatbox-tuba-and-miscellany dance music, sounding like the peak of an all-night carny throwdown. things got kicked off a little late, but it was an enlightening introduction to a weird weekend. would have loved to catch Matmos' first set, but it's off to the Brewery and then Fennesz.

(Shirley will be playing (with and without his Luminescent Orchestrii) at the noon Bistro brunch on Saturday and Sunday, and 10:45pm Saturday night at Pilot Light.)

first things first: I'm standing outside the KMA thinking about how lucky we are to have this going down in our usually culture-resistant town. I'd been looking forward to this for months but the excitement is just now really hitting me. (maybe it's the fancy laminate pass.)

but more importantly, if anyone knows where to get:

1. a little battery-powered AM/FM radio
2. a working, unenclosed speaker, the bigger the better
3. a couple of pieces of corroded scrap metal

let a brother know. these three things (along with 2 9V batteries, which are considerably easier to come by) are prerequisites for the Nicolas Collins workshop tomorrow, and I'm terrified that I will miss out on all the fun.

off to the opening ceremonies.

My colleague Travis Gray will be twittering Big Ears. 

You can check out some ambient music from local performers that will be performed in some form as Ampient Cafe at Old City Java at AmpientMusic.com. The lineup includes John T. Baker (sometimes of the French Broads and Econopop), DBLF Studios, Silent States, Carl Snow, Stolen Sheep, and Todd Steed and the Suns of Phere Morechestra.

Ampient Cafe runs from 11 a.m.-2 p.m. and 8-10 p.m. on Saturday, Feb. 7, and 3-6 p.m. on Sunday, Feb. 8.

The Big Ears Festival kicks off in just a few hours. We're going to be covering it as close to live as possible with a team of staffers and contributors--Matthew Everett (that's me), Travis Gray, Charles Maldonado, Dave Prince, and Nick Huinker--throughout the weekend, with notes on the music, commentary on what a mass gathering of experimental musicians and their fans have on downtown Knoxville, celebrity sightings, hopefully some perspective from out-of-towners, and some longer essays on the events.

The big events tonight include Matmos in a special version of Knoxville Museum of Art's Alive After Five series at 5 p.m.--the official start of the festival--Fennesz in a rare U.S. apperance at the Bijou Theatre at 8 p.m. (one of three shows he'll do this weekend, though it's his only solo gig), experimental trumpeter John Hassell with his group Maarifa Street at the Bijou at 10:30 p.m., anti-comedian Neil Hamburger at Pilot Light at 11 p.m. and Hello City, a collaborative set by local bands Bright Shuttle, Double Muslims, Fecal Japan, Mountains of Moss, New Madrid, and Psychic Baos.

Some tests will probably appear soon as we try to collectively catch up to 21st-century journalism, and regular updates after that. Stay tuned, tell your friends, get out to some of the shows, and give us some feedback. Politely, if possible.

The Bonnaroo lineup has been announced, and it's a big one: Bruce Springsteen, the reunited Phish, the Beastie Boys, Nine Inch Nails, David Byrne, Wilco, Al Green, Snoop Dogg, Elvis Costello, and Erykah Badu are among the biggest names, and you also get TV on the Radio, Merle Haggard, MGMT, Girl Talk, Bon Iver, Animal Collective, Of Montreal, Santogold, Grizzly Bear, Crystal Castles, and the Knux. As indie/pop rosters go, it's probably the best Bonnaroo schedule yet.

Among my own personal can't-waits: Snoop, Crystal Castles, Animal Collective, Alejandro Escovedo, King Sunny Ade, and Vieux Farka Toure.

Some national news on the announcement from The New York Times, and local commentary at Knox Blab.