Most big-deal music festivals suck. Yes, that's just one writer's opinion, but crowds, lines, abbreviated/overlapping/distant performances, predatory locals/vendors/law enforcement—you can have it. Then there are the fringe festivals, the music-nerd gatherings, events such as
,
,
, Whartscape, and, now,
, festivals that attract people who are there for the music and want to remember something more than hearing "D.A.N.C.E." through a distant PA and a fog of Coors/overpriced garbage weed. At things such as Big Ears, people actually sit down to watch music, shut up during shows, and open themselves up to being awed.
Knoxville, Tenn.—which probably connotes
and
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.
It takes about 10 jerky-filled hours to get to Knoxville from Baltimore, which means that we got to town Friday night too late to see much more than some local jammy postrock and a stoner-rock outfit that played in a tent, names unknown. So we kicked off the weekend proper the next day with Philip Glass. The two-hour show was half stunning (older material) and half very good (newer). The stunning half mainly came from cellist Wendy Sutter, performing a trio of Glass pieces that sound like they're composed for a six-armed cellist. Watching such powerful, layered sounds come from such minute movements is boggling. Glass also did a post-show Q&A, notable for the question: "I play piano, how can I get your sheet music?" with the answer, "Wait until I die."
There's something immensely satisfying about seeing a middle-aged Southern crowd geeking out on a chamber-arranged, cabaret-style set from an androgynously voiced, transgendered musician. Antony and the Johnsons played a set heavy on hits—a deliriously off-the-rails "Shake That Devil," an odd, droning arrangement of "Another World," "For Today I Am A Boy." Antony's mock condescension toward the city—wiping off imaginary dust from his grand piano, "So, what is Knoxville known for, why does it exist?—fortunately didn't seem to be taken in earnest by anyone in the crowd.
Sometime in the early evening, Matmos learned it was
from its originally scheduled venue, a mid-sized performance space called, fittingly, the Square Room, which shares a glass wall with a neighboring restaurant. The offense was a projection that accompanies the chameleon-like electronic duo's track "Public Sex for Boyd McDonald." Specifically, the video has some grainy, cut-up footage of some '80s porn, and that was enough to get someone freaked out about freaking someone else out, and the show was moved to a brand new, club-style venue called the Catalyst with dirt-cheap beer and a two-story screen on which we watched said projection and made our own fucking judgments, thank you very much. The move also meant missing the Necks, who wound up booked against the rescheduled Matmos. If the Square Room can't book a show outside Christian rock because of this, so be it.
In any case, the eventual Matmos set ruled, well over an hour of material spanning its past couple of records, including the 20-odd-minute title jam from last year's synth face-melt
Supreme Balloon
, the above mentioned track from the project's hyperconceptualized
The Rose Has Teeth In the Mouth Of the Beast
, and a very cool piece that sounded like cyborg Americana on trucker speed. Also guesting with the band were Leprechaun Caterer/True Vine guru Jason Willett and Teeth Mountain's Max Euilbacher on saxophone and violin. Topping even Whartscape, this was the best we've ever seen Matmos.
The Baltimore Round Robin raged until well after three in the morning, also at the Catalyst. This version was sort of a hybrid/ad hoc of prior Round Robins, a uniformly energetic swath including Height, occasional
City Paper
contributor Cex, DJ Dog Dick, Smart Growth, Matmos, Dan Deacon, and Adventure. The Pitchfork dictatorship seemed to enjoy categorically
up in about three unnecessarily rude sentences that manage not to convey any concrete information, specific criticisms, or really anything else to make us think the writer didn't just look at the lineup, not recognize the names, and start typing.
Which is a bummer, because there actually were good performances that night and, hey, even great ones--like, say, a four-piece Matmos covering Soft Pink Truth's cover of Nervous Gender's "Confession," or Ed Schrader (another erstwhile
CP
Latest Baltimore City Paper
contributor) demonically channeling Swans-era Michael Gira, or Deacon, yet again, successfully emptying a room with his "gauntlet" performance-game. At the very least, the Round Robin provided a dose of whimsy most of the festival lacked.
