Looking back at the list of artists I wrote about in advance of the 2023 Big Ears Festival, I’m reminded of what an amazing yet indeterminate musical adventure the whole experience is. Not everyone I wrote about ended up playing; I wasn’t able to get to the performances of all of the artists I mentioned; and not all of the shows I made it to lived up to my hopes. Still, there were plenty of shows that exceeded my expectations.
Of the artists I wrote about last year, two whose shows I saw and that I would strongly recommend seeing (or listening to) are Kali Malone and Tarta Relena. With the audience seated and surrounded by speakers, Kali Malone performed an extended drone work at the Knoxville Museum of Art, while Catalan folk duo Tarta Relena held a full crowd entranced with their ancient-meets-modern, vocals-and-laptop performance at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral.
But enough of Big Ears 2023. The lineup for 2024 has been announced, and while there will no doubt be adds and drops between now and March, I’m going to give occasional shoutouts to artists I’m hoping to see perform.
First up is Bitchin’ Bajas, a Chicago-based trio that combines overlapping, repetitive motifs with polyrhythmic complexity, hazy psychedelic grooves and more ambient-like explorations of tone and texture. Their Bandcamp page notes that parts of the piece below, “Amorpha,” were created with Laurie Spiegel’s Music Mouse software.