FEATURE: Big Ears Top Fives
TOP FIVE PERFORMANCES AT BIG EARS 2025
KWAI
Lia Kohl, Dougie Bowne & Matt Nelson, Barry Altschul’s 3DOM Factor, Ibelisse Guardia Ferragutti & Frank Rosaly, Steve Roach
RON
Joy Guidry, SML, Turntable Trio (Maria Chavez, Mariam Rezaei, Victoria Shen), Tindersticks, Beth Gibbons
JULIEN
Beth Gibbons, Tindersticks, Anohni & The Johnsons, Cass McCombs, SML
BILL
Tortoise, Tindersticks, Meshell Ndegeocello, SML, Nels Cline Singers
QUIXOTE
Turntable Trio (Maria Chavez, Mariam Rezaei, Victoria Shen), Joy Guidry, Lonnie Holley, Alabaster DePlume, Mestiszx (Ibellise Guardia Feragutti & Frank Rosaly)
KWAI’S REPORT
1. LIA KOHL
Saturday, March 29th, 3:30 pm, First Presbyterian Sanctuary
We are sitting in the light, beautifully austere main Sanctuary of the First Presbyterian Sanctuary. Lia Kohl comes out mild, sitting on a stool with electronics to her right and cello to her left. She picks up an older portable FM radio, holds it to a microphone.
She records and plays the static, combines bursts of music into a machine. An Ableton Push, possibly a Polyend, forms a musical structure. She proceeds to build up layers of processed sound, playing from her sequencer, the instrument rising, collapsing melodic structures, built from synthesis, real world, and radio waves; suggestions of beats and diaphanous textures materialize.
Her cello forms layers of sound. Played thoughtfully and delicately, real-time sampled memory and live. Melody, but also tone, texture, and percussion.
The audience was rapt throughout, with hardly any of the audience leaving midway for another performance. We were elevating.
My evaluation of the performance comes subconsciously. The crescendo swells, and tears come to my eyes. The applause at the end fills the stripped-down Sanctuary with echoing thunder.
Lia Kohl, stands up; bows. Her face, a void, lost in her sound during the performance – often her eyes staring beyond, into the eaves of the Sanctuary, channeling inspiration from above – shows emotion for the first time. She is knocked back, visibly staggered by the adoring audience’s reaction.
Many rush to the altar to congratulate the performer.
2. DOUGIE BOWNE & MATT NELSON
Saturday, March 29th, 10:00 pm, The Standard
Standing outside the venue for 10 minutes or so, it was late, dark, and damp. Only a handful of festival attendees were entering The Standard.
Walking inside, only 20 people are visible. They wait in a large, open square, surrounded by dark brick walls and worn wooden floors. Employees are talking in murmurs to each other, surprised by the light attendance.
Curtains were pulled across the two entrances to what seemed to be the performance space. It was past performance start time – very unusual for Big Ears, where things start promptly at their listed time. Sound check was still going on? Drums and bass were audible.
Finally, we were let inside. Attendance seemed even lighter inside the larger performance space. We waited.
Eventually, well after start time, Matt Nelson and Dougie Bowne entered. Nelson set up behind an upright bass, a box of random material to his right. Bowne sat behind a folding table with a laptop. To his right, a collection of electronic drum controllers. Later, we would learn that an electric guitar was behind him. Nelson would pull assorted objects from his box, stretching the sound of a prepared bass.
It started. Nelson attacked his bass; distorted; violent. Bowne was visibly upset, running his hands through his hair and wiping his brow, layering sound with live sampling and looping. He built patterns on his drum pads. He took samples, assigning them to the drum heads, the beating of his sticks triggering instant recalls of Nelson’s wild playing.
The two respond, bouncing ideas off each other.
Nelson abuses his bass. Bowne lobs it back at him, getting more and more anxious, adding drums and then textures of electric guitar, ringing with sustained tone from an E-Bow.
This is very much my shit and no one is here.
At the end of the improvised performance, Bowne’s body crumpled inward on itself, and he released a sigh of relief, having made it through a performance that felt dangerous, as if it could collapse into cacophony at any time. He bowed in gratitude and surprise as someone in the audience shouted, “Encore!”
Bowne and Nelson gave us a little more mayhem.
3. BARRY ALTSCHUL’S 3DOM FACTOR
Friday, March 28th, 4:30 pm, The Point
The walk to The Point was long. Indeed, it was the farthest point from the festival. We passed vagrants. One mumbled something about whether “they” still had plump sausage. What?
We entered the church’s sanctuary. There were materials, pamphlets on the church’s outreach to the poor, the addicted, and the lost. The congregation advertised a judgment-free, supportive community for those trying to get back on their feet. The building was made of stone.
This one was an older crowd. The lone couple on the younger side seemed to be visitors from Japan. One imagines they took the long trip to catch glimpses of Jazz legends, unreachable across the Pacific.
Barry Altschul emerges from behind the altar. He is limping, stiff. His 82-year-old body shows the wear of a life of travel and late nights. He greets us, looking a bit surprised by the size of the audience, The Point’s place of worship majority filled – he sits behind the drum kit, center to the altar.
His comrades emerge.
Joe Fonda approaches the upright bass; Jon Irabagon picks up a saxophone.
Altschul begins to tap at his drums. A cymbal here, a tom there, the rhythmic time indiscernible, known only to the percussionist. Eventually, though, a structure emerges and a journey begins.
Fonda’s playing joins the drummer first. Irabagon trails, allowing Fonda to build up the push/pull of the drum and bass partnership.
The first solo came. Fonda is deep into it, his face manic, a fever building, his hands flying up and down his muse’s neck. Time stretches.
After a few minutes, Altschul stands gingerly and leans against the low railing fronting the altar’s dais. Irabagon moves to stand next to him. They look at Fonda. Show us what you can do.
Satisfied after five minutes or so of improvised, frantically wild bass solo, Altschul carefully sits back down behind the drum kit. The trio continues together.
This was free jazz, and it was hot as hell. In time, they came to burn. The audience was deep into it. The solos came, freewheeling but still grounded. Irabagon, more than the others, held to a core melodic foundation, even if at times it abstracted into only the barest suggestion of his original pattern.
One finds oneself thinking, “This old guy has still got it.”
The applause was wild. A common reaction to the best performances of the festival, Altschul and his combo appeared to not believe their audience’s reaction and its appreciation.
4. IBELISSE GUARDIA FERRAGUTTI & FRANK ROSALY
Friday, March 28th, 2:15 pm, Regas Square
Thankfully, we got to this one early enough. Most seats filled, we still find some good ones only 15-20 feet away from the low stage, set up to one side of a low-ceilinged community space.
The band comes out. Although the act goes by the name of only two of its members, Ferragutti and Rosaly, six musicians emerge from behind the curtain strung as a makeshift green room to the side of the small performance space.
Ferragutti looks the ethereal in a flowing white poncho over dark clothes. She is positioned behind a stand of electronics. A synthesist sits behind a Hydrasynth to her left, with more electronics to his left. And to the left of that, Rosaly behind an elaborate drum kit. A massive cluster of tiny bells adorns his hi-hat. A bass player, a wind instrumentalist, and a percussionist doubling as a brass player fill the rest of the stage.
Ferragutti engages the crowd regularly, light-hearted singing of freedoms and overcoming oppression in her native Spanish. Multiple times, she says that she wishes the crowd could understand the lyrics. I miss many of the words, but overall, “Intiendo,” I want to respond.
Ferragutti and Rosaly’s band is having fun. They are joyous. They play with smiles and collaborate, building complex poly rhythms upon solos. The synthesist manipulates the other band members’ instruments on the fly. There are Latin beats. One hears Bossa Nova, but with Rock, with Cumbia, and New Wave electro. There are African elements. This is World Beat, but a generation beyond.
Around the third time Ferragutti thanks the crowd, I look behind me. The room is completely full. There is no room to move. Obviously, word is spreading.
There is a thing happening here.
5. STEVE ROACH
Thursday, March 27th, 8:00 pm, Church Street United Methodist Church
I was not expecting much.
I had seen Steve Roach perform before. Granted, it was a live stream during the heart of the COVID-19 pandemic. His improvisations behind stacks of pre-prepared synthesizers were aurally pleasing but missing that certain thing.
Years later, in 2025, in real life, in the Church Street United Methodist Church’s sanctuary, Roach emerged a little late. His entrance came behind an unexpected introduction from a guy talking about lighting and “an experience.”
The guy said something like, “I come from Brooklyn, like many of you,” continuing on with something about being impressed with Knoxville (how could a small Southern city stand up to the glories of Brooklyn?). Even in this backwater (albeit a backwater that does host a cool festival that he has heard of, one called “Big Ears”), he thinks the coming interplay of light, architecture, and sound is a great demonstration of his technology.
Whatever. This Church does have impressive architecture, though, laid out in the ancient cross style, built from dark stone, exposed wooden beams, stained glass, and a metallic altar, backed with a wall of weirdly shimmering quilted texture and more stone.
It goes dark. Roach stands behind and between three tables of electronics, only a shadow with two tiny, dim work lights letting him see his instruments, the tools from which he will coax waves to sound.
The waves sound... so too does the light flow; a stream.
It starts with a barely visible glow on the wall. Do I see something?
It blossoms.
In time, the light, the visual textures, a visible manifestation of the worlds Roach is beckoning from his machines envelop us.
The sights are laser-precise, highlighting and transforming every detail of the space.
Words fail to describe the land of image and shifting perspective that is forming in response to Roach’s ambient electronics and lightly structured rhythms. Birds chirping, brooks babbling, wind rustling, and tone, electronic, synthesized – immaculate sculptures formed from raw oscillators, banks of filters, envelopes, and bucket brigade delays.
The things that were there a moment before, melt, projections altering fundamental reality.
In a dark, medieval environment, a wormhole has opened, sucking the audience between a dimension that we can see and touch and a dimension that we can only imagine.
The many cell phones trying to capture this as a memory in pixels fail to capture this fantasy.
— Kwai Attude