Big Ears (website/wikipedia) is an annual music festival that takes place in Knoxville in early spring every year lately. It's not a rock festival, more like a jazz / electronic / weird music festival. Here's how Atlanta music writer Chad Radford described it in 2015:
... The annual weekend of jazz, modern classical composition, minimalism, and improvised music rattles the street signs and storefronts of downtown Knoxville. Why these nebulous strains of experimental music are placed on the same lineup isn't spelled out in an easy explanation. Big Ears' website steers clear of pushing the festival as a forum for any particular musical genre. The festival's identity is as much of an enigma as the music and the audience that will descend upon Knoxville when Big Ears returns .... Big Ears' unifying aesthetics are steeped in musical abstraction and impressionism, and include a spectrum of sounds from droning ambiance and elegant string arrangements to squelching feedback.
Two years ago, some of my friends went to it and came back crowing about how great it was. ONE year ago, I really wanted to go but could not for some reason, and that weekend seemingly EVERYONE I knew was up in Knoxville having fun. So this year, dammit, I booked the weekend and was going no matter what. And Sharon was coming with me!
Here's a rundown of everything we were part of:
Thursday:
drove up from Atlanta (more on that below) and arrived in town at around 7pm
Knoxville Symphony Orchestra performing John Luther Adams
Sun Ra Arkestra with Marshall Allen
dinner at the nearby Public House while waiting for a line of storms that never came
Yo La Tengo, performing an hour of drone!
and THEN the storms finally came, and we had to run home through it. We were completely drenched!
Friday:
Tony Conrad short films: The Flicker, Landscape Is A Wish for Motion, Weak Bodies and Strong Wills, Beholden to Victory, In Line, Palace of Error, I've Never Been, Teddy Tells Jokes, Straight and Narrow. Mr. Conrad was supposed to be present but had taken ill, and in fact passed away just days later. R. I. P. Tony Conrad. This collection was fantastic!
nief-norf
lunch with Scott and Frank
Lou Reed "Drones" (six guitars in continuous feedback, with bean bags)
John Luther Adams piece in an old church
Eighth Blackbird with Bonnie Prince Billy and Bryce Dessner
dinner at Cru Bistro
Outside The Dream Syndicate with Faust -- was supposed to be with Tony Conrad, but in his absence it was just the Faust duo (Diermaier on drums and Péron on bass) with a few more backing musicians, including Laurie Anderson hiding behind the amp stacks!
Yo La Tengo and Lambchop, in a show that would not end, with a moronic audience member right behind me
Saturday:
We split up, and I took it easy for the morning.
Laurie Anderson and Philip Glass
The Necks
dinner someplace?
Sunn O)))
Kamasi Washington
drinks with Scott and Frank
Sunday:
John Luther Adams composition for countless percussionists in a park that used to be a quarry
Drove home!
And now the drive ... I really like to drive my own electric car whenever possible. However it does have range limitations -- it can go about 80 miles on a full charge, and then you need to stop and plug it in for "a while". How long depends on the type of stations. Increasingly, we are seeing "DC Fast Charging" stations appear around the region, and so last year I wagered that by now, March 2016, there would be enough DCFC stations along the route for me to make the run in an electric car. And indeed, just weeks before the Knoxville trip, a couple new stations went online on the I-75 corridor.
At right is the map that I sketched out when planning the trip, mostly to assuage Sharon's reasonable concerns but also as a quick reference during the trip. In that map, the orange markers are for DCFC stations, and the black numbers are miles between stops.
We drove up (north) along the western route via I-75, and then drove down (south) along the eastern route via the Great Smoky Mountains. On each route, two of our three stops were relatively quick DCFC stops (30 minutes each), and one stop was using a slow charging station (about 90 minutes).
There was some drama along the way, no doubt. On the way up, the car seemed to get confused and kept giving me ludicrously low range values -- sort of like your gas needle suddenly plunging to empty. I could see though that the range was good and we made it with no sweat (well, little sweat). On the way down, one of the charging stations in the mountains was non-functional, so I lost some time there.
In all, though, the trip was a success, and this is just the beginning. Every year the DCFC infrastructure grows by leaps and bounds. As I type this, the I-85 corridor up to the Carolinas and beyond is just about online. Electric vehicles are about to clear the last hurdle -- road trip capability.
See you in Knoxville next March!
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