My #BigEars 2026 recap: I walked 24 miles over four days, and saw sets (or pieces thereof) by:

• Masada (Quartet)
• Ches Smith’s Clone Row
• Mary Lattimore and Julianna Barwick
• SML
• Pan American + Kramer
• Uhlmann / Johnson / Wilkes
• Dave Harrington & Mary Lattimore
• Janel & Anthony
• Eliana Glass
• Jeff Parker Expansion Trio
• SUSS
• Ken Pomeroy
• Hayden Pedigo
• Gwenifer Raymond
• Laraaji
• Walt McClements
• Annie & the Caldwells
• The Saami Brothers
• Cecile McLorin Salvant
• Winged Wheel
• Blunt Mansion
• Chicago Underground Duo
• So Percussion (Steve Reich’s “Drumming”)
• Simon Hanes’s Gargantua
• Shane Parish (playing Autechre songs)
• Laurie Anderson + Sexmob

Plus a great movie about the Newport Folk Festival.

I can say without reservation that my favorite sets — Masada, Cecile McLorin Salvant, The Saami Brothers, Eliana Glass, Hayden Pedigo & Gwenifer Raymond duetting, So Percussion, Shane Parish — were the ones with the least amount of electronic sound manipulation.

To be clear: I spent a lot of my downtime in my hotel room coming up with patches for a new standalone monosynth I have been working on. I am no stranger to electronics.

But the things that connected with me this year were the most directly & essentially human things I heard.

And honestly, running anything through a loop pedal just sounds like running something through a loop pedal at this point, to me. I dunno if it’s just that the user interfaces of the most popular loopers are such that they sort of suggest or lead their users to use them in certain ways, or if I have just gotten overly attuned to the specific combination of sample rates and ADC/DACs they all use.

I love repetition — I sat on the floor and was fully completely engaged by a 78-minute rendition of “Drumming” even as my ass went fully numb — but I definitely feel at this point like I just wanna hear people PLAY rather than flat repeating copies of them playing.