November 2009 Archives

It's been a rumor for months, and now it's official: Terry Riley, the high priest of musical minimalism, will be the featured performer at Big Ears 2010, the second installment of AC Entertainment's festival of avant-garde and experimental music.

The 74-year-old Riley will be the official artist in residence at the festival, scheduled for Friday, March 26-Sunday, March 28. The weekend is a celebration of Riley's 75th birthday, which is in June. Riley will perform several concerts over the weekend with other musicians, including a performance of his 1964 masterpiece In C. The Calder String Quartet, a Los Angeles group that has worked with Riley since 2006, will also present a program of his work.

In C is generally regarded as one of the foundational pieces of minimalism, the mid-20th-century style of composition based on repetition and drone that's associated with Riley, La Monte Young, Steve Reich, and Phillip Glass.
 
The first Big Ears last February featured Glass and his partner, the cellist Wendy Sutter, as well as a range of artists from around the world, with notable appearances by experimental composer Pauline Oliveros, Australian jazz trio the Necks, saxophonist Ned Rothenburg, Baltimore dance-rock guru Dan Deacon, and New York cabaret-pop singer Antony Hagerty. The festival, held at the Bijou and Tennessee theaters, the Knoxville Museum of Art, Pilot Light, and the Woodruff Building on Gay Street, drew press coverage from The New York Times, Pitchfork, Atlanta's Creative Loafing, and the Baltimore City Paper.
 
"It's a tremendous honor to have Terry Riley participate in our festival this year," says AC Entertainment's Ashley Capps in a press release. "It's a dream come true."

The full lineup will be announced in early December. Tickets will also be available then.

The first official announcement about Big Ears 2010 should be coming later today or early tomorrow. Some news worth noting is that the festival website has the date for next year's event listed as March 26-28.

That's a few weeks later than the first Big Ears, which was held in early February. But it seems very likely that the festival is indeed happening again. 

I expected Peaches to be pretty trashy. I didn't quite expect just how spectacularly and gloriously trashy she would be during her performance at the Valarium last night. It was a hour-long celebration of appetite--a marked improvement over the warmed-over synth-rock of opening act M.E.N., and, I think, a more fully formed political statement than the Le Tigre spin-off's sloganeering. Maybe "Shake Yer Dix" and "Lovertits" aren't part of the standard vocabulary of political discourse, but as a statement of dancefloor hedonism and pop indulgence, they beat cardboard signs reading "Silence=Death." (I agree with the sentiment, and it's an important message, but you're preaching to the choir here. And who wants to dance to that, anyway?)

The rock dynamics--the guitars and the encore, especially, and closing the set with the crowd-pleasing "F--k the Pain Away"--were a little disappointing, but Peaches and her band worked them well. She ruled the stage from the moment she appeared, wearing a rubber or maybe latex cartoon porcupine suit and a wrestling mask. By the end of the set she was down to a flesh-colored nylon bodystocking. She crowd-surfed, spewed a bottle of champagne over the audience, and played something that looked like either a fluorescent light bulb or a lightsaber. 

When I was a kid, my mom was terrified of rock concerts, I think mostly in response to KISS and the stampede at the Who's 1979 concert in Cincinnati. I had vague ideas about the debauchery that happened at concerts; last night was about as close as I've ever gotten to actually seeing what I thought a rock concert was like when I was 10.    

The second installment of the Square Room's Sound Off competition on Wednesday night ended in triumph for Vinyl Thief, who broke out all their high-school band instruments for a rousing set.

Most of the bands--Vinyl Thief, Seeing Skies, Madre, Kamuy, and Enigmatic Foe--were only vaguely familiar to me, but each one had significant charm and/or promise. (As someone who thinks Jimmy Eat World's "The Middle" is one of the great singles of the decade, I especially appreciated Seeing Skies' tight and polished radio emo.)

More details soon.

Conventional wisdom around town the last couple of years has been that two Knoxville bands seemed to have the potential for Superdrag-style breakout success--the Royal Bangs and Tenderhooks. Royal Bangs just released their very good new album, Let It Beep, on Black Keys' drummer Dan Auerbach's Audio Eagle label, to some enthusiastic--if not exactly widespread--reviews. The Tenderhooks, on the other hand, have been supporting their second album, New Ways to Butcher English, for a year now, frequently performing in New York but apparently unable to land the kind of label deal they want.

So, about a week and a half ago, just after their performance at the CMJ Music Marathon, the band called it quits. Singer/guitarist Jake Winstrom and drummer Matt Honkonen are heading into the studio soon with Tim Lee; guitarist Ben Oyler and bassist Emily Robinson haven't announced any plans. It's disappointing news from one of the city's best bands.

Mic: "You can edit this, caintcha?" Todd: "Nope." Mic: "No? Aw shit." Local singer/songwriters Mic Harrison, R.B. Morris, and Todd Steed discuss their upcoming show at the Square Room on Dec. 11.