KNOXVILLE
Big Ears Festival
A three-day residency of transcendent sound, light, and space at the legendary music fest
Church Street United Methodist Church
Knoxville, Tennessee
Thursday, March 27, 2025
— with Steve Roach
Friday, March 28, 2025
— with Arushi Jain and Flore Laurentienne
Saturday, March 29, 2025
— with Steve Roach and William Basinski
︎︎︎GET PASSES
Join Reflections for our upcoming residency at Big Ears Festival. We'll take over Church Street United Methodist Church in downtown Knoxville, Tennessee for 3 days of transcendent sound, light, and space.
We'll create site-specific lighting at the church that grows in intensity each day. At sunset, we’ll shift deeper into the sublime with ambient headliners Steve Roach, Arushi Jain, Flore Laurentienne, and William Basinski.
Big Ears Festival
Founded in 2009, BIG EARS is a groundbreaking annual event in Knoxville, Tennessee, known for its bold exploration of music, art, and culture. With over 40,000 attendees each year, the event features nearly 200 concerts, talks, workshops, film screenings, and residencies across downtown Knoxville. Past artists include Jon Hassell, Laurie Anderson, Kronos Quartet, Carla Bley, Meredith Monk, Terry Riley, and Steve Reich.
As a nonprofit, Big Ears works year-round to expand access to the arts through community engagement and cultural programming, lowering barriers for underserved groups and ensuring its transformative experiences resonate throughout Knoxville and beyond.
Steve Roach
Visionary synthesist Steve Roach draws on the beauty and power of the Earth's landscapes to create lush, meditative soundscapes. Inspired by Klaus Schulze, Popul Vuh, and Tangerine Dream, Roach’s sound design has captivated listeners for decades.
First emerging with the Berlin School-styled album Now in 1982, he came into his own with the 1984 minimalist epic Structures from Silence. Efforts such as 1988's equally heralded Dreamtime Return were directly inspired by desert life, incorporating field recordings and rhythms inspired by indigenous music traditions. Roach has maintained an impossibly prolific work rate throughout his career without sacrificing quality or craftsmanship, resulting in countless hours of truly sublime, otherworldly music.
William Basinski
William Basinski is a classically trained composer who has been working in experimental media for over 30 years in NYC and most recently, California.
Employing obsolete technology and analogue tape loops, his haunting and melancholy soundscapes explore the temporal nature of life and resound with the reverberations of memory and the mystery of time. His epic 4-disc masterwork, The Disintegration Loops, received international critical acclaim and was chosen as one of the top 50 albums of 2004 by Pitchfork.
Basinski was chosen by music director Antony Hegarty to score the Robert Wilson opera, The Life and Death of Marina Abramovic. Orchestral transcriptions of The Disintegration Loops by Maxim Moston have been performed at The Metropolitan Museum of Art,and La Batie Festival in Geneva, Switzerland.
Arushi Jain
Arushi Jain is a modular synthesist, singer, producer, radio host and engineer with an unorthodox vision of a centuries-old tradition – one that’s electronic and resolutely DIY.
Her compositions are inspired by Hindustani classical ragas, explored in an aesthetic that is contemporary and current. Arushi grew up in Delhi, then moved to California to study Computer Science at Stanford University. Her most recent album Delight was released on Leaving Records in March 2024. Her work has been featured on Pitchfork, Bandcamp, Boiler Room, Ableton, Resident Advisor, FACT, Crack, DJMag, and more. Arushi is the founder of GHUNGHRU, a radio series and record label, and is a resident at NTS Radio.
Flore Laurentienne
Flore Laurentienne is an open window to the technicolor soundscapes of Mathieu David Gagnon – the Canadian composer, producer and multi-instrumentalist who shapes vast orchestral sound to interpret the rugged wilderness and waters of his native Québec. The namesake of an inventory documenting St. Lawrence Valley flora, Flore Laurentienne illumes the science and spirit of his surrounds through expansive string orchestrations melded with the textures and experimentation of early analogue synths.
In his approach to composition hued by leitmotif and constraint, Gagnon challenges himself to extract beauty from simplicity in homage to the changing faces of natural landscapes. The presence of familiarity and flux in Volume I is heightened through the vivid instrumentation of a fifteen-piece string orchestra, which Gagnon brings together with an array of 1960s and 70s synthesizers, including the Minimoog Model D, the EMS Synthi and combo organs – an innately ambitious project which forges the composer’s distinctive path in the expansion of classical music archetypes.
© Reflections 2024. In time, out of time ☀︎