When Senryu took the stage at the Standard last Friday as part of the Big Ears Festival, the Knoxville band’s founder, frontman and creative force Wil Wright welcomed the world to his group’s music.

Senryu founder Wil Wright said that for four days every year, Knoxville is at the center of the musical universe.

“We’ve been playing these streets for about 25 years; we knew you’d come to us eventually,” Wil Wright told the crowd.

Wright and his bandmates launched into an hour-long set of their signature hard-driving rock with meditative, almost ethereal interludes that long-time listeners expect from a group that thrives on curiosity-driven experimentation.

“We are a curious band,” he said. “We want to give the songs the room to lead us somewhere we haven't been. We are turned on by experimentation, we are turned on by unplanned possibilities.”

Wright, who was making his third appearance at Big Ears (though the first with Senryu) said the band is a comfortable fit for the festival.

“The nature of this band is adventure and experimentation and curiosity and some sonic possibilities,” he said in a recent interview prior to the Big Ears performance. “If nothing else, that is what Big Ears is.”

Wright almost downplays the band’s sound. “Every band wants to feel like a special snowflake, but I tend to tell people that if you come to this show, it's going to be loud music with drums and guitars,” he said. “There is a psychedelic element, there is an aggression element to it.”

The band has been a fixture in the Knoxville music scene for a quarter century. While live shows have been more sporadic in recent years, Senryu has continued to record. The band released the single “Yes, I Have Been Paralyzed” last week and will release two albums this year — Nothing Bad Ever Happens and Long Dumb Ride, the band's first albums since 2017's The Jaws of Life.

“It's not a wildly successful band, but it’s a huge creative success, in that it's never compromised,” Wright said.

Wright teamed up with drummer Steven Rodgers to form Senryu in 2000. Brothers Dan and Andres McCormack, and Zac Fallon round out the lineup. He chose the name Senryu because it’s a form of Japanese poetry similar to haiku but with satire and irony.

Wright attended the University of Tennessee but dropped out to put his energy into Senryu and other musical endeavors. Eventually, though, he earned a degree from the Berklee College of Music.

His boundless curiosity and eagerness to experiment have led him in other musical directions over the years. Almost on a lark, he took on the persona of LiL iFFy, rapping puns based on the Harry Potter books. As improbable as it sounds, the project gained a nationwide following, but Wright pulled the plug after five years.

He also began composing soundtracks for movies, television and other media (Disclosure: he provides the music for the Compass Points podcast). He’s best known for creating the discord for Jordan Noel’s award-winning drama This World Alone,  and he has won numerous awards, including Best Composer for the Screen in the 2021 Screen Music Program in Milan, Italy.

Wright grew up in Rockwood and said guitar and movie magazines provided his access to the world beyond East Tennessee. 

He started writing songs when he was about 11 years old. His early influences were Sonic Youth, Talking Heads and Sun Ra — bands that refused stereotypical approaches to music. (Thurston Moore, founding member of Sonic Youth, performed at Big Ears on Sunday with Led Zeppelin legend John Paul Jones.)

Wright resists clichés. Every time Senryu goes into the studio, he said, the group starts from scratch. But the goal is always to create a coherent record.

“I’ve always tried to write albums instead of collections of songs, so there is kind of a grand statement,” he said. “I'm an album guy. I want to hear overarching through-lines and things like that. I'm very turned on by concept records.”

The Jaws of Life, for example, explores what it means to die — an excursion that has its origins in one branch of his family’s involvement in the funeral business. 

“For me, it's just always there,” Wright said. “You look at people, and even if you have nothing else in common, you do have one thing in common, whether they focus on it or not.” 

Though Senryu has been performing in Knoxville for decades, Wright said the show Friday at the Standard was more than just a regular gig.

“I think Big Ears is different in every way,” he said. “That's the reason they get the acts that they get, the legacy acts you didn't know you can still see, all of these once in a lifetime collaborations … For four days, Knoxville is the center of the musical universe.”