Michael Gira and his band, Swans, sound check before their Big Ears set. From a video by Mika Chance

The fourth chapter of Big, Bent Ears, Sam Stephenson and Ivan Weiss’s “Serial in Documentary Uncertainty,” pulls back the curtain on the art of documentary, and on one facet of that art in particular: chaos. As Weiss tells it, their attempts to capture Knoxville’s Big Ears festival were impeded at nearly every turn: interview subjects went AWOL, keys failed to open doors, and a search for an errant projector cord culminated in a late blitz to Walmart. Fortunately, at the end of the week the Rock Fish Stew team had documented a lot of great musicians; that’s here, too, including footage of Swans, the Kronos Quartet, and Holly Herndon, among others.

Read the latest chapter here, and catch up on the rest of the series:

• Chapter One, There Are No Words
• Chapter Two, Borderline Religious
• Chapter Three, Nazoranai, a Documentary

Dan Piepenbring is the web editor of The Paris Review