Explore the Big Ears Festival 2025 with founder Ashley Capps in Echoes Podcast

In the Echoes Podcast we preview the Big Ears Festival 2025 taking place in Knoxville at the end of March. This is an enormous event with over a hundred artists all on the leading edge of whatever music genre they are in and at Big Ears, there are a lot of music genres, all in abundance. This year features more artists from the Echoesphere than ever including Steve Roach, Michael Rother, Marissa Nadler and more. Every year I talk to Big Ears founder Ashley Capps to preview the event.  Although Big Ears is thought of as a bleeding edge festival sometimes, this year it embraces artists from the new Age including Laraaji, who has been there before, and Steve Roach who is the first true representative here of the ambient new age explosion that began around 1980.

Ashley Capps: And really, new age music isn’t an outlier. We’ve had elements of what many people would consider to be new age for many, many years, I think. So, you know, I feel like it’s an important part of these exploratory music traditions.

Ashley Capps. With artists like Roach, Explosions in the Sky, Rich Ruth, SUSS, Immersion and Anoushka Shankar, it’s almost an Echoes Festival.

We will hear the complete interview with Ashley Capps.  The Big Ears Festival takes place March 27-30 in Knoxville, TN bigearsfestival.org