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Last Call for Festival Passes!

Big Ears 2026 is eight days away and tickets are almost gone. If you've been on the fence, now is the time. Less than a couple dozen 4-Day Weekend passes are available and remaining day passes passes won't last long. We have an incredible weekend planned and you don’t want to miss it!

The Greyhound Comes Alive!

One of the most distinctive venues in the Big Ears landscape this year is The Greyhound — a long-dormant Knoxville bus station in the midst of transformation, reimagined for the festival weekend as an intimate in-the-round space unlike anything else on the map. Over four days, the venue will host some of the most adventurous and singular performances of the festival. Read on for a closer look at a few of the highlights.

SML (XL) Residency
Thu 8:15p & 9:45p / Fri 8:00p & 9:30p / Sat 10:30p & 12:00a

Anna Butterss, Jeremiah Chiu, Josh Johnson, Booker Stardrum, and Gregory Uhlmann make up SML — five of the most restlessly creative figures working at the intersection of jazz, ambient music, and experimental pop. Each brings a distinct and singular sensibility, yet together they arrive at something entirely their own: spacious, searching, and quietly radical. Their Big Ears residency finds them performing across multiple sets throughout the weekend, making The Greyhound a home base for some of the festival's most rewarding musical conversations. For a sneak peek, check out their recent performance at Zebulon — a taste of what's in store.

SUSS Premieres

Americana Apocalypse
Thu 11:45p

New York ambient collective SUSS have spent the better part of a decade mapping the mythological landscape of the American West — wide-open spaces rendered in pedal steel, synthesizer, and patient, unhurried rhythm. For Big Ears, they bring something new: the world premiere of Americana Apocalypse, a full-length work that pushes deeper into the tension between the country's pastoral mythology and its fractured present. A rare chance to hear a major new work take its first breath.

Hania Rani Presents

Chilling Bambino
Sat 8:15p

Polish composer and pianist Hania Rani has established herself as one of the most captivating voices in contemporary music — her work dissolving the boundaries between classical composition, ambient texture, and intimate song. Chilling Bambino is her most adventurous project yet: a live audiovisual performance built around her acclaimed album, in which her crystalline piano and vocals are set against a world of moving image and immersive sound design. Tender and cinematic in equal measure, it's a full sensory experience from an artist operating at the height of her powers.

Wild Up:

Arthur Russell’s 24 to 24 Music
Fri 11:30p

Los Angeles ensemble Wild Up — known for their fearless and deeply felt interpretations of contemporary and experimental repertoire — turn their attention to Arthur Russell's 24 to 24 Music, the beloved disco and dance-floor project that revealed another dimension of the late cellist and composer's boundless imagination. A night of movement, warmth, and joy in the in-the-round space of The Greyhound — exactly as Russell might have wanted it.

Film Scores for No One
a Patrick Watson project
Sat 5:45p

Patrick Watson has spent nearly two decades composing for film — but Film Scores for No One is something else entirely. After a chance encounter with Amon Tobin's early Buchla synthesizer in 2019, Watson spent years building a modular rig of his own, using it to explore the sci-fi and horror-adjacent sounds he rarely gets to make for actual movies. Part live performance, part multimedia experience, it's deliberately unpredictable. "I really don't know what's going to happen," he said before its MUTEK premiere. "I'm usually semi-lying when I say that, but this time, I really don't know." Join us and find out.

Saul Williams Meets Carlos Niño & Friends
Sat 3:00p

Despite a longtime friendship, poet, writer, rapper, actor Saul Williams and percussionist and visionary producer and catalyst Carlos Niño had never properly collaborated until they convened in a Los Angeles glade in 2024. Niño built an intuitive, trans-generational ensemble as a setting for Williams’ meditations on colonialism, power, and justice.  The event, captured live on last year’s International Anthem release, was well-described as urgent, deeply moving, spiritual and political, as searching and alive as anything either artists has ever created. They’ll re-convene in Knoxville at Big Ears, in the Greyhound, on Saturday afternoon.