indie hearts still beat the same

1. "Heretics" - Andrew Bird
2. "Don't Die In Me" (Mt. Eerie Remix) - Mirah
3. "Breaker" - Low
4. "She's Fantastic" - Sondre Lerche
5. "A New Name" - !!!
6. "Long List of Girls" - The Blow
7. "Someone Great" - LCD Soundsystem

vinyl-only bonus track:
8. "My British Tour Diary [Restiform Bodies (anticon.) Remix] - of Montreal

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(the play button is backwards, but i bet you figured that out.)

i originally posted this podcast a few days ago (sneaking it in at the end of march so it can qualify for the monthly quota), but it disappeared when i started drafting the text of this post, to accompany it. basically what happened is that i got back from sxsw, and the next week there were a whole bunch of records released that i wanted to hear, most of them, as it turned out, within the indie umbrella, so i bought a bunch of them, and that made me think a bunch about indie and my relationship with it.

but mostly i just wanted to say a little bit about some things about those records, in ways that may or may not illuminate or complicate the things i blathered about above.

so, sans plus ado: about the songs in the mix (in the form of album or concert reviews/first-impressions, or just more blathering):

[armchair apocrypha] might be [andrew bird]'s least interesting record to date. his idiosyncrasies were still markedly present on his last (and first seriously indie-hyped) album, mysterious production of eggs - and they're not entirely gone here (his weirdo smarty-pantsy lyrical proclivities and jokey song titles - "yawny at the apocalypse" anybody?; that unmistakable whistling.) but basically it's another step away from his most truly unique (and rocking, and best) album, '01's rootsy, genre-flected swimming hour. this is his least bluesy album, and it's his first on a blues label, fat possum.

put another way: this is the first time he's sounded so much like straight-up indie [rock]. though it's also possible that indie is just coming to sound more like him. certainly we've had a spate of literate but sensitive but quirky but mellow composer/songwriter types lately (sufjan stevens, owen pallet, colin meloy), and bird seems to be setting himself up to join their ranks in the public consciousness. but his own distinctive personality is in danger of being lost in the process. he seems to be getting more indie and less rock; as the guitars pile on, everything just ends up feeling langorous and subdued. not that this is entirely new territory for bird - it certainly feels familiar - even overly so, as when "heretics," probably the most immediately catchy track here, unabashedly bites the main riff from eggs' bangin' "a nervous tic motion" (fortunately it also adds two or three more hooks of its own.) dude loves him some "eastern-tinged" pentatonics. (fwiw, he was billed as "pop" in the sxsw schedule, whatever that means.)

anyhow, i don't mean to suggest that this is a bad album - far from it. it's not just merely pleasant either - it borders on hypnotic at times, and lyrically there's plenty to dissect (i'm only just starting to) - but, the uncharacteristically muted (i.e. boring) album art isn't entirely misleading either.
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oh man, i love mirah. hadn't thought about her all that much recently (well, that's what happens when you don't put out an album for three years.) but it all came back when i saw her a couple weeks ago, at the church. if i try to say anything about her performance, it'll just sound like i'm gushing and crushing, so i won't. but it was interesting that she has long, straighter brown hair and no glasses now (and i would definitely not have recognized her.) possibly the most resonant part of the concert experience was just being in that crowd - looking around and feeling like i knew exactly who all those people were, even though i didn't know any of them. (y'know, all those cute little indie punk lesbian folkies, and variations permutations therefrom.) (also, being able to turn my head and eavesdrop on dozens of people chatting about indie music - as vaguely delimited above - including no less than three separate and simultaneous conversations about the arcade fire. now that's what i'm talking about indie community.)

anyway, mirah's a total sweetheart with gorgeous gorgeous voice who writes terrific songs - every time she did a number from c'mon miracle (which was most of them) i was like...oh yeah, i love this song! damn what a good album... well the lady at the merch table (who also did the spanish speaking on "the dogs of b.a.") talked me into buying this recent 2cd of remixes, and i was skeptical (indie-folk remixes?) but i'm glad i did. it may be the best indie remix album i've ever heard (not that that's saying too much - biggest contender would be a people's history of the dismemberment plan) - it basically boils down to the fact that 1) mirah's voice is absolutely lovely, plus 2) the songs are still great, and most of the time these two things remain reasonably intact; also even though 3) most of the mixes hew pretty closely to classy but still interesting down-tempo/ambient territory, 4) they all hold down a pretty distinct indie aesthetic (guy sigsworth of frou frou fame contributes the token "polished" potentially-commercial reworking, but that one's so pretty i bet even her hardcore fans don't mind) and therefore 5) it all hangs together very well sonically while avoiding sounding too samey. it might have been interesting to hear something really radical (for instance, something that could have half a chance of working on a dancefloor?), but it's probably just as well that nothing's that divergent. as it is, the mt. eerie rmx of "don't die in me" is one of the most idiosyncratic contributions - and also one of the coolest, with vocal cutting/splicing that manages to be "experimental" and just a little off-putting without being annoying. of course, being phil elvirum's work, it doesn't sound hugely different from mirah's original records in the first place - it just exaggerates the general microphoneyness. nice stuff. (also worth checking out: jonah bechtolt - of YACHT/the blow's "screwed and chopped" version of "jerusalem."
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i have a lot to say about low right now, but i'll save it for another post later on, either just before or just after i see them on monday (!) (which knowing me means it will be up in about a month.) for now: drums and guns is really really good; i've been listening to it more than anything else in a while. and "breaker" is fairly representative of what makes it so good. (this video is pretty silly though. but i guess it's fittingly minimalist and heavy-handed/inscrutable. doesn't quite get the breathtaking beauty part.)
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"sondre lerche sucks" - said matt merewitz, the jazz publicist of northern liberties, offhandedly, upon noticing three titles by the sometime-wunderkind, sometime-crooner in the "individual artists; rock/pop-ish; male" section of my cd shelf. eh, he's probably right. mr. lerche did after all put out a smooth jazz-pop vocal album last year, which i suspect is largely responsible for mr. merewitz's opinion of him. besides, does astralwerks put out anything that doesn't suck these days? (isn't astralwerks, like, the most confounding label?)

i thought about going to see him at the tla last night, but not only were tickets $20 ($5 less than i decided not to spend to see him in austin), it was a seated show. like, with reserved seats and everything. do you realize how lame that is!? i guess they figured the crowd would be mostly upwardly-aged easy-listeners suckered in by the dulcet tones of aforementioned jazz crooner record (which, by the way, i haven't heard and don't particularly intend to, though i'm sure it's interesting enough.) little did they know that young sondre has changed his tchune and is now a bonafied rock and roller. ha-ha! sucker punch, more like! (meanwhile, his backing outfit have transmogrified from the "faces down quartet" to the leaner-, meaner-sounding "faces down." named, of course, for the chorus hook of "dead passengers," the lead track on his similarly titled debut album - still possibly his best song.)

but hey - lerche was scandinavian pop before scandinavian pop was cool. (er, hence him not being cool?) he was not-really-that-indie before marginally-indie was indie. actually, the scando-pop/indie crossover merits some discussion in its own right - but we'll save that for the swee/tweedish installment in the genrephilia post series (remember that? yes, i still haven't finished writing about the february podcast...but just wait!)

anyway, phantom punch finds him putting the /rock that little bit further ahead of the pop/ - kinda like (i'm obliged to mention) squeeze or graham parker or xtc or recent tourmate/cover victim elvis costello - without sacrificing the sophisto-. i'd call it his most readily digestible record, and just maybe his best. really, it's no more and no less than i expected it to be, and that's fine by me. "she's fantastic" might be my favorite, so take that as you will - but it's pretty solid front to back. yup. nicely done.
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the new !!! album, myth takes, has been getting pretty good reviews. i'm not that excited about it.

i hoped it would be dancier. it sounds vaguely "dancy" without really feeling all that danceable; it's "fun" but not actually fun. maybe it's too busy and stuffed with stuff - there are moments where the layers of instrumentation are stripped back, and the remaining grooves are revealed to be decently funky.

so it's pretty much indie guitar-based music. and it's okay. i should probably write about it when i'm actually listening to it, because i do enjoy it when it's playing. but is that enough? what good is that? don't we really want shelves full of albums that we can enjoy without having to listen to them?

on that note - i do really like the cover art, and especially how the insert folds out into a 4x larger version of the same image.
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the blow opened for mirah at that show, which for mirah's sake should have been in the sanctuary as initially announced, but for the blow the basement was perfect. it was just khaela singing/rapping, with all the beats/music in a backing track (cuz the other guy was on tour), but she was a-maaaa-zing. really, i think she must have won over everyone in the crowd, instantly.

the set took the form of a lecture/demo, almost, with the songs strung together in a narrative about struggling with her own inability to write songs about anything other than not being able to get with the people she wants (and her corresponding inability to have a satisfactory relationship), involving various attempts to write about other things, failed at first, and eventually more or less triumphant (closing with the perfect popslice love-song "parentheses," and then the more bittersweet but still optimistic "true affection.")

she did "long list of girls" and talked about how she should sell it to j-lo or beyoncé for a million bucks: "it's awesome, right?" well...yeah, it's pretty awesome - i've had it in my head tons lately - though it would be good if there was a little more song to it (also, b has already done the marching drumline thing, a couple years back.) anyway, this was one of the "failures" because even though it's about how she's over the guy, her friend pointed out that if she was really over him she wouldn't be writing a song about him.

her persona was perfectly-pitched self-deprecating sarcastic confessional, performative enough to seem slightly put-on, but that slightly exaggerated edge almost gave it more honesty - even, maybe especially, when the story arc veered out of the realm of the plausible. a lesser performer might have come off as indulgent and wallowing, but the frankness and biting humor of her approach helped convey something vividly resonant about human loneliness and self-doubt. that resonance is still there, if less visceral and somehow more hopeful, on paper television, the album from which most of her set was drawn. (by the way, that's the european cover up there, which i think i like better.)
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one more. AOTYTD (does that mean it'll be forgotten in 9 months?) sound of silver is indeed a good good good good good record. whether all those goods add up to a fanfreakingtastic is another question, but it's an album to smile to, darn tooting. "effortless" is a good word - it's flirtatiously close to "tossed-off," which might be the trouble. not that this album is, but i get a sense that, if he really put his mind to it, jimmy murphy could make a total bleeding masterpiece for the ages, one groove under which we could all get - cuz he's got love on his side - but as it is he's just bubbly crusin', givin' a chuckle and out pops yr rhythmical underwebbing for the next six weeks. could be longer.

am i being not nice? i haven't even listened to 45:33 (technophobic!) and this album sounded familiar like an old crush on first listen, which mind you was the day it was released and not a whiff sooner. i wonder sometimes but the bands that everybody complains about being the oh-obvious product of influences (the strokes too, holdsteady like i mentioned) often actually have an extremely distinctive steez - and what a case in point! it's so so supa-soundsystematic.

actual quibble: i'm not quite sure i'm buying "north american scum" as the pop stand-alone - it's no "daft punk" or "beat connection" and certainly no (hands-down, hush-hush LCD greatest single moment) "tribulations." i'm not sure this album has one. "someone great," which you can in fact dance to, and easily (you just have to beatmatch into it first), is a total total winner, and probably the (correct) consensus favorite. "all my friends" is close and (i think) is the one with the straight-up junior boys vibe. (also half-cops the melody from "count souveniers" is it?) "get innocuous" may be the biggest dancefloor stormer - i burst into the steamy floor of making time last friday just as it was blooming out from... some soulwax track i think. heck.

i am going to love this album for a long time.

(i wanna get) MAA-riit!

come closer, love...

Marit Larsen Day, apart from being most of the days around here, is so magnificent that it spanned both yesterday (when my copy of under the surface arrived in the mail, and when i finally got the photos i'd taken of her in austin - the best of the rest of which have been added to the original sxsw post.) and the day before (when this interview ran in stylus, and when she became mymymyspace friend.) i guess today too, since i'm finally posting this now, and hopefully nan will manage to send me the videos too.

i can't really explain why it took me this long to fall completely in love with her (music, and her), considering dave and frank have been harping on about her since at least this time last year. i've been open to it, but i think not having a physical cd really does slow things down, and of course seeing her in person (these photos are still no comparison, sorry) was the absolute clincher. it sounds like she's looking for stateside distribution and is hoping to come back and tour here (that's what she told us), so hopefully so...

seeing and meeting her, of course, has given a new dimension to my relationship with under the surface. without getting into a deep analysis of the album's lyrics, i want to reflect on them a little bit. i'm sitting here trying to read through some of them in the booklet, which is a strange experience because they are printed with no line breaks or punctuation, and to begin with they're often composed of short phrases which are sometimes ambiguously related.

lillie says that the songs "lack a certain maturity" - which i can hear, though in the case of a song like the vaguely platitudinous "solid ground," it can be tough (or subjective) to separate the prosaic from the profound. that one i hear as earnest and genuinely moving - similarly to some of the recent "inspirational" amy diamond songs, though perhaps with a more probably basis in life experience. "come closer" - easily my favorite song on the record - is gorgeous and heartbreaking and very true (it hits close to home for me - maybe for a lot of people, as lillie suggests) and certainly seems to come from the heart for marit (and is especially touching knowing how shy she can be/seem.)

this is despite it having, like a number of her songs, some curious lyrical turns of phrase ("it's a nice escape"? - though that's not the best example), which could be poetic license, "immature" craftsmanship, semi-deliberate ambiguity, or an imperfect command of english coming through (though her spoken english certainly seems masterful.) it's funny to have to sift through these possibilities to try to get a sense of what she's after.

as i see it, where the songs do often falter is where they don't seem to be coming from her lived experience - most notably "this time tomorrow," a tale of suspicion and domestic infidelity (which calls to mind "the long honeymoon" and a few other elvis costello songs) that is very oddly distanced from the song's narrator by being told in second person, addressed to the (presumably?) cheating husband/boyfriend, as if from the psychological perspective of the wife/girlfriend but related by a third party. it's hard to see where marit fits into this equation, since i doubt that she's experienced a situation specifically like this (though her jealous tendencies - and her internal conflict about them - on are clearly on display in more straightforward, confessional title track.) obviously, a song doesn't need to come from personal experience to be good or to ring true, but in this case the story feels more like a series of strung-together clichés than a resonant psychological portrait.

on the other hand, the 'lack of maturity' is part of what gives the album its vibrancy - in some ways this album represents marit "growing up" and distancing herself from her teenybopper days in m2m, but (as is absolutely fitting for a 22-23 year old), it still retains a lot of youthfulness, hand in hand with a more reflective perspective on it. she's hardly a teen-pop artist anymore (i'd describe the album musically as a fairly equal balance between country, rootsy folk, and polished, m2m-style pop), but i love the teen-pop-like flashes on it, especially the multi-tracked spoken-sung moments in the bridge of "don't save me" ("don't you dare! leave me here!") and the chorus of "the sinking game" ("we dive!") those two songs are the album's most exuberant and just plain fun, and in a way their most youthful, but they're hardly innocent - they have their eyes wide open about the messiness of love. and so that makes them probably the most complex and truthful, and revealing.

spring broke

some signs point to i should make a mix for spring, about now. which would have to be called:

spring mix (what else.)

here's one: three seasons ago it was summer ['06 ] and i made popsical. three seasons before that it was autumn ['05] and i made october is eternal. three seasons before that it was winter ['04-'05] and i made wintry mix. and now it's spring ['07] and a seasonal mix might be due.

this was basically the first mix i ever made for mass distribution. i devised a way to fold paper sleeves for it, and passed them around a few days before spring break at college. it still sounds pretty great to me:

title: we will fight them on the beaches

format: cd-r
date: just pre- spring break, 2003
packaging: just a folded piece of colored paper, cut to make a little tab.

1 free • cat power
2 mbgate • max tundra
3 all bad ends all • the books
4 buttoned down disco (fila brazilia disco frisco mix) • clinton
5 springtime in new york • jonathan richman
6 a touch of spring • daedelus
7 the teacher • super furry animals
8 twenty long years • joel x. blecher
9 fear farms • com.a
10 get in or get out • hot hot heat
11 promofunk • soft pink truth
12 socs hip • the lilys
13 come out to play • ub40
14 sold! • enon
15 majestwest party • majesticons
16 makeleke • damon albarn et al.
17 burning with optimism's flames • xtc
18 groovy girls make love at the beach • gary wilson
19 losing your affection (client on demand mix) • future bible heroes
20 such great heights • the postal service
21 temptation/star guitar (live from brixton academy) • the chemical brothers

SxSW finis (putting the austin in exhausting)

PART FOUR

[PART THREE] [PART TWO] [PART ONE]

the good, the great, and the awesome, more like, heh heh (l-r?)

day four! well, i didn't really expect this day to top the incredible day three, particularly since there weren't all that many shows i was especially keen on. but somehow it managed to be about equally perfect, except that where friday had been carefully plotted out, saturday was for the most part a serendipitous string of spontaneous happenings.

breakfast was the first meal i'd had at home (in a home) all week, and possibly the nicest - toad in the roads (toads in roads? eggs in holes? one-eyed egyptians) with avocado and fruit and matt and nico and david and those wacky ledowski sisters. but after that lovely bit of company i headed out on my own for the first show of the day, the almost unfathomably exciting the good the bad and the queen.

man, getting on that rsvip list and getting my wristband ensuring access to the fort was maybe the best decision i made all week. sure, it would have been swell to see gbq at their official showcase the night before at stubb's, last on the bill in a venue more befitting their stature... but this way i was able to save $40 and still watch them play a full hour-plus set (including two encores), in the open air at 3:00 on a balmy afternoon, from the second row, dead center. (also, i couldn't have gotten in the night before.) the fort itself was pretty rad - not sure what the building's used for usually, but they had it set up as an indoor maze of nooks and crannies, a jeans showroom, a guitar repair shop, blogger rooms, and an adult swim "gallery," eventually leading out to an expansive courtyard with various kiosks, dj tent, bar dishing out free beers and peach-colored soco punch. and a sizable stage, of course.

they had by far the best djs i heard all week too - a-trak and the rub were scheduled to spin that day, and just between sets as the most exciting "background music" you can think of. not sure who was playing at that point in the afternoon, but they kept me smiling, with "california soul," "lip gloss" (!), some new-ish house song that i really like and haven't been able to place yet, "fu-gee-la" played over a clipse instrumental, and pb+j's "amsterdam," all seamlessly sequenced together. melissa in sundress asked if i was going to be dancing during the show too - "well, i don't think it's exactly dance music" i said, but she said just to wait - after all, with a rhythm section like that...

in case you don't know (and wonder why i'm so excited about this band who are, after all, brand spanking new), the good the bad and the queen are damon albarn (mastermind of blur, my favorite band, or darn close to it, among many other excellent musics), paul simonon (bassist of clash, everyone else's favorite band), tony allen (the the afrobeat drummer, veteran of fela kuti's bands and his own as well), and also in addition the guitarist from the verve as well (and gorillaz, etc.) right. well, hopefully you can understand why it was a little intense, to be standing five or ten feet away from at least two or three bona-fide legends. i'm not sure i'd fully prepared myself for that aspect of it.

even before they took the stage, just looking at paul's bass (old and yellow, with his name scratched into the side - indeed, it's the same one he played with clash) was an unexpectedly holy experience. it was clear this was to be no winehouse-esque taster set - they were doing their thing full-on, no messing around, with an evocative painted backdrop and a lengthy overture by the bowler-hatted all-female string quartet. there had been a band scheduled to go on before them, at 2:00, but they were forced to cancel, allegedly so that gbq could finish their soundcheck. (yup.)

and then they strode out...oh man. i'm not sure i can do justice to how bad-ass paul simonon is, in particular (just check out his outfit in the above photo!), sauntering around the stage with his bass, or aiming it like a weapon at somebody in the audience, his every move (even plucking a single bass note) seeming deliberate and deadly serious but somehow also tauntingly tossed-off. tony was cracking me up - most of the time he'd sit basically expressionless behind his kit, the most casually dressed of the bunch with just blue jeans and polka-dot button-down on his diminutive frame, but every so often, especially as the set went on, he'd break into a big goofy grin. damon, meanwhile, who was standing almost directly above me for the majority of the set, was effortlessly dapper as hell with his top-hat and navy suit, looking absolutely distinguished despite the remnants of a boyish sparkle in those dreamy blue eyes. melissa had called him "delicious," and it wasn't long before i was swooning right along with her - at one point, in an instrumental break, he and paul went to the side of the stage and lit up, then strode back and just stood there casually dragging, basically just oozing sex in an almost ridiculously calculated but still woozily potent manner.

with that much coolness pervading the air, the music was almost secondary - but then, the music was an integral part of the coolness too; they fed off one another. honestly, paul and tony's playing was nearly as solid or in-pocket as you might think - there were definitely moments where the time was a little fuzzy, and individual licks that didn't quite hit their mark. as has been noted, the rhythmic elements are not especially prominent in gbq's music - tony spent one song just shaking a rhythm egg (see above), and another barely playing at all - and that sparsity makes the bass and drum parts so much more exposed and vulnerable, and therefore harder to play, mistakes that much easier to detect. but it didn't really matter - especially as they warmed up, they found a way to make the grooves work in spite of, or almost because of these rhythmic inconsistencies. on the other hand, maybe we were just all ready to forgive them, or accept whatever they offered as gospel, because of the magnanimous force of their mere presence. i was really curious how tony was going to render the chorus fills on "herculean," which, on the album - as looped by danger mouse - feel a little off-kilter, almost too subtly to be deliberate. it turned out he didn't even play them, just stuck to the simple groove.

of course, this really was damon's show, even as he made his contributions as understated as everything else. the songs, which were just perfect for that warm, slightly overcast afternoon, are centered around the vocals, and his performance of them was as achingly beautiful as you could hope. he didn't do much else besides sing, in fact - he moved to the piano for a few songs, played a few recorder notes at the end of one, and a bit of melodica on another - and that was more than enough. just like last time i saw him - when "sweet song" was at the peak of its personal poignancy for me - there was a moment that he nearly brought me to tears. that was in "green fields" (i could have predicted - i'd nearly wept before just listening to in headphones in the sun), certainly the emotional centerpiece of the album, collapsing the personal and political, how the world has changed and especially "above all things, i've learned/it's the honesty that secures the bond in the heart" - i just put my hand on mind, chest almost overflooded with that warm sad love, reached out to melissa and she nodded back.

they played the entire album, a lot of it in order, and then they came out for an encore - the two groovier b-sides, one they recorded in lagos and the other for which they brought out a syrian rapper, who was pretty amusing. then damon (who hadn't said very much the whole time) urged us not to forget new orleans, and that was it. whoosh.

now. if i'd really had it together, i would have gone earlier to the norwegian showcase at the "northby tent" in a park a few blocks away, to see when marit my dreamgirl was performing. i hadn't because i'd wanted to make sure to get to the fort in time (which wasn't really a problem but better safe) and also because i'd sort of thought i wouldn't be able to get in without a badge. as it happened, marit played a three-song set at 4:10, which would have been perfectly me timed for me to go catch it after the good bad finished. but i didn't know that, so i called ben back and chatted with him as i strolled leisurely over, arriving just after she had finished. ohhh welllll. it was only three songs. i also missed her playing with thom hell's band earlier (though i did get thom's cd, which i look forward to checking out.) and i didn't get to jump around some more with matt and sarah. but at least i got to see her again, in the lovely dress she's wearing this picture, and flutter flutter some more. (would have tried to get another, non-blurry picture with her, but my batteries had died again while taking gbq videos - i've decided that my new camera kind of sucks, which is a real shame. or maybe i just need to use lithium batteries rather than aa rechargeables.)

i did stick around for the next band, davey jones' locker, who were truly impressively loud (earplugs!!!) and had a transparent orange drum set. and rocked pretty good, not that it's my kind of thing. also got definitely the best free beer i saw all week, "fat tire" from local brewery. and that's where i finally met up with caitlin (remember, from pb+j night one) again, along with her friend (dave, i'm pretty sure), who's on the verge of dropping out of music business school to pursue his music business fulltime (seems like a pretty sensible decision, actually.) he definitely had some fast-talking, hard-living industry cat in him, and he's a charmer, as you gotta be, so i liked him. he just finished booking a tour for scanners, he said, and they were playing in fifteen minutes over at the beauty bar, so would i like to come?

actually, i really like scanners, though i hadn't put too much into trying to see them, so that was an excellent proposition. even better that tagging behind dave made it much easier to get into the venue than it would have been otherwise - less an issue of credentials than confidence and assertiveness. funny six-degrees connection - my high school buddy scott got to be good buddies with scanners (especially the lead singer, sarah), while he was living in london last year. so i had something to talk to them about when i met them briefly before and after their set. which was flipping sweet, by the way. i think i rocked out harder to their set than any other show all week. especially crucial hits "lowlife" (their new order cover), "in my dreams" (p.j. harvey cover), and "look what you started" (travis cover), though for some reason they didn't play my favorite and their album opener, "joy" (their, um, gay dad cover?) guy and girlfriend in st. pat's green next to me were totally rocking out too. yeah, that was awesome.

went in search of the annuals ("who are annuals?" txted nan - "indie rock cuties" i txted back) but the venue seemed to have disappeared. just as well, because we got in line early for earl greyhound at chuggin' monkey, which filled up fast (even though the bar actually wasn't that full when they stopped letting people in.) we watched from the balcony upstairs, just above the stage, and took a lot of good photos, which are all on nan's camera:

hopefully i'll get those soon and put them up here. in the meantime, this gives you something of an idea. dig: massive drumkit, almost-as-massive drummer, the feather in the bassist's afro (i couldn't decide if i thought that was her real hair or not), the guitarists gawjess locks (you can't really see the embroidery on his shirt there), the fact that the dudes outside at the window definitely have the best spot of anybody. earl greyhound played and sounded almost exactly like they looked, which is to say it was pretty righteous. a power trio, no questions asked. as alyssa promised, no hint of camp or irony, just hard-hitting funky rock and psychedelic riffage. i suppose i could say something theoreticalish about that. but i won't.

at that point i was more than ready to take a break and head back to the outskirts for a st. paddy's party at the house of matt's friends the brosnans (who had lent us the bikes.) and that's exactly what i was planning to do, but just to see i started back via 6th and red river, more or less the nexus of the sxsw scene, to see what things looked like outside the daptone showcase which was starting in five minutes. to my surprise, they looked pretty sparse. very short line for ticket-buyers, no line for anybody else. i'd have been fine with not seeing sharon jones for a fourth time just then, but if they were going to make it that easy... and only $12 too, which is hard to beat. so i waited in line and grooved to budos band who had just started up their set (and were easily visible just around the low wall of the emo's annex tent. it took slightly longer than expected, chatting with jeanine the bouncer who seemed almost more eager to get us in than we were ourselves, but after a small parade of badgies and wristies
she came through for us.

so i was right up front for the last four or five tunes of the budos set, including the dynamite "aynotchesh yererfu" and a sort of odd, loose version of "my girl," which they emphatically insisted was a smokey robinson cover (well, yeah.) and for sharon i was in the very front row. actually i wasn't as excited as all that. fourth time around the novelty had kind of worn off, and this was an abbreviated version of the set - though they still did the full dap-kings intro and a number with just binky (which was a really excellent "memphis-style" piece - can't wait for his album to drop, as he keeps promising), which meant a smaller percentage of it was sharon. but actually it was refreshing not to be the most excited person in the audience, for once. that title would have to go to kent, local kid standing (er, dancing) next to me in the front, who had never seen sharon before but seemed to know a lot about her, or possibly the bear couple just behind us, in yellow and orange. (they both got to go up and dance on stage with sharon, and their giddiness was beautiful to watch.)

well, anyway. she did a couple of new-ish numbers, and no-longer-new-to-me like "be easy" (which is still great) - her next album is gonna rip too - and also "genuine" (to close the set, with both of the amy winehouse back-up singers - amy was watching from backstage.) still no "n.b.l." or "all over again," sigh. too bad she couldn't have done a longer set, but it seemed like the crowd was loving it, so hopefully that portends good things to come.

now it was 10pm. no clear plan for what to do - hadn't been able to meet up with any of the usual suspects, who were scattered around (none of them, i think, made it into the crazy crowded spoon/stooges stubb's bill, and i was fine with not being there either.) i went to exodus, where i knew i wanted to end up later on, and saw the end of todosantos (venezuelan techno/dance/rock group) fun ravey set. was not impressed by what i saw of lesbians on ecstasy (too bad), so i wandered out again...thought about catching gary wilson at the church, but didn't feel like paying another $15 for it; could have seen keith kilgo but that would have been money too...eventually just got a free myspace hotdog and watched the pipettes from behind the beauty bar for a while. ("this is our last show of the week, so we want to make it extra special!")

...when i got back to exodus as lezzies on x were finishing, the club had filled up a bit more, and it continued to throughout prototypes' excellent electro-punk ("we are prototypes, and we come from paris!") fun to catch some of the french lyrics, though even when i understood them they didn't necessarily make sense. by the end of that, when headliners jr. sr. were
next up, it was difficult to move through the room, and almost as hard to see the stage (this was the same venue where it'd been impossible to see nellie the night before.) still, i managed to get all the way back and upstairs to say hi to caitlin and dave (txting had finally failed us), and back down front to my same spot, with some hip kids on a little side staircase.

when junior senior finally took the stage, the crowdedness didn't matter. or rather, it became part of the point. the whole front section (twenty feet back? thirty?) turned into a chaotic frenzy of dancing, jumping, shouting, singing, smiling, clapping hands ("we are the handclaps" [clap clap]) and saying yeah ("do the kids dig what we do?" "yeah! yeah! yeah! yeah!") it was a little violent, but violent like love is sometimes. basically it was a huge dance party free-for-all, a teensy bit out of control, but fueled by giddiness and glee and ridiculous danish dayglo-pop-dance-rap-disco. "who cares about junior senior anymore?" a funny little woman asked me before the show - well, evidently a lot of people, or else they were just ready for a release. the second jr. sr. album is finally coming out in the states this summer, and judging from the new (to me) tunes they played, it's just as bright and fun and hooky as the first, with maybe a stronger disco influence.

hey, looks like some people managed to get some decent pictures at the show, cool. i almost can't imagine getting some of these shots in the middle of that insanity. look at those funky back-up singers! look at that (japanese?) m.c. they did a silly duet with! look at that crowd! hey, that's me, pumping my diagonal fist (in upper right, with green and er tan shirt):

the best way to put it is that we just did what the song said: "move your feet and feel united!" and indeed we did. even in the middle of the set, there was spontaneous hugging and laughing and dancing with strangers, all swept up in the euphoric moment. it was kind of incredible.

they closed with "d-d-dont stop the beat" and then one more song (new one), and then they closed the club down and we spilled out onto the street. the captain fellow from the hyphy show the night before was there, saying "it's rare that the last show is also the best."

indeed. but just possibly, the last best show was simply being there on sixth street, watching as all the clubs were closing and emptying out and the streets were crowded with sxsw folks, st. patrick's day revellers in their scanty greenness, garden-variety weekend partiers, and all other random sorts of people. a floodstream of humanity. yes...that was nice.

ok.

SxoxoxSW

PART THREE

[PART TWO] [PART ONE]

oh man, that's how i feel about my life sometimes...

day three was, like, perfect. as far as concert-going goes, non-stop thrillz - bam bam bam from show to show. so i'm going to dispense with the narrative flow.

Rjd2 [at p4k party, emo's]
in case you haven't heard, Rjd2 is no longer a dj or an electronic-producer dude. Rjd2 is now a prog-funk hard rock band. at least, that's what it seemed from this set, which included full-on band renditions of "since we last spoke," "exotic talk" and maybe a few others from swls, along with new material with a similar energy (but more singing.) some deadringer selections too ("horror" and "ghostwriter") but these required rj to get back behind the sampler to trigger the vocals. it makes some sense - rather than make sample-based music that sounds like a rock band, why not just have a rock band? the answer is that rock bands are often boring. this band wasn't - they're funky and hard-rocking and pretty technically great (at least the drummer) - but i wonder if i might have felt differently if i wasn't familiar with the more unusually-flavored original versions of their jams. either way, fun to rock out with them that afternoon

menomena [ditto]
they're not much more than a normal-ish indie rock band, but they are a very nice indie rock band, and i'm very happy to have seen them in action. hard to say what exactly it is about them, but their music stands out as being enjoyable without being identifiably all that different from any number of other (fine, but unexceptional) indie bands. another very cool drummer, with a pretty unique steez (more part-oriented than groove-oriented, but still groovy enough.)

girl talk [ditto]
i felt kinda bad - this crowd was not going to be whipped into a hedonistic dance frenzy like last time i saw him (or probably any other night-time club show he plays.) i did my best, but to be honest the set wasn't quite as inspiring as it could have been either. still, it's like impossible not to have a great time watching/listening to greg do his thing, and this was no exception. he played "c'mon 'n ride it" but didn't come down into the crowd to start an actual train until later on in the set. towards the end, he dropped his (underwhelming) "let's call it off" remix, and announced "peter bjorn and john are in the building!" - but how much cooler would it have been if they came out to do the vocals live?

i didn't take this picture, or the next one, but they were taken by somebody very close to me (the entire front two rows seemed to be photographers)
sorry, my camera died!

amy winehouse at the fort (fader/levi's party)
she was apologetic - she hadn't realized the venue would be so big, or she would have brought her full band (which somebody told me later was actually the dap-kings. pretty crazy, i wonder when/where they rehearsed. oh wait - whoa - apparently they were her band on the album too. why didn't i know that?) instead it was just her and a very suave-looking guitarist (duh, it was binky, in a silky purple shirt), doing laidback acoustic readings of her songs. which still fail to make much of an impression, except for "rehab" of course (but even that i don't think is that great. i'm kind of confused about why the album is getting such glowing press, even though it's cool that we may have a bona-fide [relatively-straight] soul hit on our hands in 2007.) still, the lady can sing. and hey how about that hair, and that makeup! and those tattoos! (look here for a better shot of amy's left arm tattoos, which was actually taken from closer to my vantage point, just at a different show.) her style's pretty intense, but it's also pretty damn wtf, no?

they told sigrid that their sweatsuits are now extremely smelly

datarock [ditto]
hell yeah. actually, not too much to say, but they put on a great show. all the faves from the album, and even the ridiculous ones (like "night flight to uranus") came off very sharp. some silly guys. after their set, "(i've had) the time of my life" came on the speakers, and they made us all sing it into the microphones.

nellie mckay [at exodus]
there are some good pictures from this set here. no way i would have been able to take anything like that - i barely even got to see what she was wearing (hey, nice shirt.) it's no great mystery why there was a lot of talking going on during this set: nobody could see her! the stage is very low at this venue, and she was sitting down, at an upright piano. before the set started, matthew and i were standing in the middle of the crowd, chatting with a chatty floridian ex-new yorker about the xpn world cafe, the three-penny opera, why pretty little head is nellie's coming-out album, and the all-important question of which is your favorite pipette ["if she were a man," she said, it would definitely be the "classic ice blonde" (that's gwenno i think) and she was mystified about why her husband and their drooling male friends all preferred rose (as do i)].

but shortly after nellie started playing, we moved upstairs to the way back so at least we could actually see her. everybody else was still out of luck though - "we can't see you!" somebody shouted after the first few songs. "oh, well...i can't see you either," she responded. "maybe it's better that way, for both of us!" i'm not sure why i never realized before that she sounds (her speaking voice anyway) exactly like judy garland. though what she says is a lot brattier. anyway. so, she did "cupcake" and "lazy river" and a couple others from the new one (but not "columbia is bleeding," which i'd say is probably the highlight, nor "beecharmer" of course.) also "suitcase song" (yaay!) and "david." (i did shout out "i want to get married!", but if she heard me she probably didn't take me seriously.)

best part was the closing medley of "doggies and kitties": jumping back and forth among "yodel" (is that right?), "the dog song," "pounce," and "ding dong," in a way that really showed off her piano expertise and smart little theory-head, as she modulated around with little impromptu interludes and laughed at herself for messing up the words (i forget what the typically self-deprecating line was that she fumbled and then added "apparently" as an aside.)

still a goof; still a lovable goof. (was she really using sheet music?)

________

marit larsen


marit larsen


MARIT LARSEN!

[at, um, uncle flirty's]

whooosh!

okay, well, i'm still waiting on nan to send me the photos of marit that i took with her camera, but i guess i'll go ahead and write about the experience. this is the only halfway decent photo from that show that i can find online - but i have better ones, just be patient. thanks nan! (videos coming soon too.)

well i got to the venue when foxy finn irina bjorklund was still playing - was very glad to catch her last four or so songs. she and her band played rootsy cosmopolitan folk, mostly in english, and a couple of chanson-style numbers in french. she has a very appealing sort of casual sophistication - wearing an antique-looking lightweight yellow dress, sitting down to perform (she pulled out her saw for the last number) like she was playing on a back porch somewhere, with one shoe on and one bare foot (hmm, looks like that's a trademark/habit of hers) - and of course the french numbers only added to her sultriness.

and then it was time for marit's set. actually it took a while for her to go on, as there were some technical problems - the doorlady later told me that a fuse had blown in the [electric] piano, which was a recurring problem at that venue because of the demands of converting the voltage for the european equipment. meanwhile marit was in the corner by the stage, pacing and occasionally stretching...

now, my excitement for seeing her had been mounting throughout the week (since tuesday night when i found out she would be appearing), and especially after the previous night with the other marit, i was hoping for a similar experience (friendly post-set interaction, free cd? - wasn't really expecting on another dance contest and t-shirt), except better because i actually know and love miss larsen's music and would therefore have more to say to her.

but it wasn't until the moment i saw her in person that i fell in love with marit larsen. in <3. is gorgeous - not necessarily in a dramatic, striking way (like striking you over the head), but like a perfectly sweet, fresh-faced twenty-two-year old girl you might meet where you can't quite believe how delicate and soft and exquisite her features are. and tiny too, so delicate she would almost seem fragile if there wasn't so much sparkle in her smile and life in her rosy cheeks. (you'd never call her a porcelain doll - she'd just roll her eyes and laugh - but it would be a warm, easy laugh, wrinkling her little freckled nose.) it's cliche but the photos just don't do her justice, certainly not the wavy-haired, styled-up press photos, which tend to subdue her brightness (and her smile) in trying to present a more mature, moodier marit. maybe her soft, glowing vibrancy can't be captured in a moment's stillness, but i'm hoping my attempts will fare somewhat better, being from that shining night - with her simple, girlish dusky-purple dress; gold barrettes holding back her lengthy, straighter hair and looking somehow fairy-like - and taken through my smitten eyes.

well. i just bounced around quietly, enjoying my giddiness, while i waited for nan to arrive and the set to start (which happened in that order.) finally the band took the stage - seven pieces including cello, banjo, several guitars and keys - there was a fair amount of swapping around throughout the set - and launched into "only a fool." at this point it's harder to recall to mind than the impression she made visually and physically, but her musical performance (and the band's) was simply outstanding as well. truly - i was of course expecting to be excited by it, but i think that even anyone unfamiliar with her music would have been impressed. it's no surprise that she's a very professional performer (she's a ten-year veteran after all), but it was especially touching to see how much fun she was clearly having on stage. she displayed ample chops on guitar, mandolin, piano, and harmonica, and sang beautifully, reinvesting familiar lyrics with heartfelt meaning. there was one fabulous new song (apparently called "steal my heart" - the line that sticks in my memory is "if you're going to break my heart, break it like you mean it.") otherwise she hit most of the highlights from the album, including of course "come closer" and the moving "solid ground" (on piano.) no airing of "under the surface," and no "don't say you love me" as i was hoping - it was a short set - but, after a spirited run through "don't save me," she closed with possibly the most exciting cover she could have chosen; "my boyfriend's back." with a spot-on, energetic folk-rock rearrangement - retaining the hand-clap rhythm but fleshing out the stop-starts with a rootsy gusto.

meanwhile i was dancing my fluttery little heart out, at least to any song for which it was the slightest bit appropriate, and mouthing/singing along with many of the words. there was a good eight or ten feet between the edge of the stage and the bulk of the crowd, and while it would have been completely awkward to stay very close to the front with all of that distance, i hovered in the forward portion of that gap, sometimes hugging the speakers along the right side of the space. so, well, it would have been practically impossible for marit not to notice me, since she more or less had to look at and past me to see the rest of the crowd, but i definitely felt us making eye contact for much of the set - especially on "come closer" (it was all i could do not to take the titular instruction literally), which is sort of a perfect song for shy eye-contact flirting, shaking our heads at each other knowingly on the "will it keep you warm at night?...(i don't think so)" clincher-line. i mean, who knows - it was mostly beautiful self-delusion, of course - but i was having fun with myself, anyway, and marit certainly seemed to be having fun as well, and i imagine some piece of that came from seeing how gleeful her music was making me.

anyway, she played eight or so songs and that was it - the sizable audience applauded appreciatively and we few giddy fans in the front clapped and cheered, but it was hardly a crowd capable of demanding an encore. still, i think her set found a very welcome reception. i was sort of too busy being smitten to pay much attention to anybody else, but i did say hello to the two other people up front who had been singing along and being excited (and joining me for a bit of dancing, though not much.) they turned out to be true marit superfans - they'd met through the fan forum on her website, and they clearly knew all sorts of things about her and her band. they'd come extremely prepared - they had posters for her to sign, presents and letters to give her, and had in fact made contact with her before, so she'd known to expect them. thanks to them, i was able to go to her dressing room (well, it was just the pool room in the back of the bar, reserved for the bands), just by sort of tagging along as they were trying to get in to give her the presents.

it was more than a little bit awkward - i'd been feeling particularly awkward since i'd initially tried to give marit a hug after she got off stage and was going around shaking hands - ordinarily i would have asked first, but i was still caught up in the rapport we'd been developing in my head while she was presumably too busy focusing on her performance to notice. she accepted the hug, of course, but it was still a bit uncomfortable - what i hadn't accounted for is that she is a good deal shyer than she seemed on stage. she's friendly and certainly polite, and she smiles a lot, but she's definitely reserved. but i have to say it was exacerbated by the two superfans, who seemed like they'd be pretty socially awkward even in a completely comfortable situation - which this certainly was not - and i'm sure me popping and tagging along didn't help much either. (after all, they are internet message-board denizens, who aren't known for their social ease - at least one of them self-identified as obsessive, and they both made comments to the effect that it was very surreal experience since meeting marit had been a long-time dream of theirs.)

by the way, you can read their accounts of the evening's events on the maritlarsen.com forum: scroll all the way to the bottom here for matt's ("Fanboy") indepth retelling; and here, scroll down past his blurry photos - that's him in the first five - for the same with sarah's ("SSrb1098") additional comments. for some reason they think my name is frank - look earlier in the thread for some of their initial gushing and first mention of me as "that guy jumping around in circles with things falling out of his pockets" (hey, it was only one thing - my camera.) i've registered on the board (as "Maritricious!") but i've not been able to bring myself to post yet.

so, anyway, we went back to the band room, and i mostly just stood there while matt and sarah alternately gushed and apologized for gushing too much. marit was certainly touched but also amused by the whole thing, saying that of course she didn't mind, that it just meant they liked her music a lot, which is the important thing to her. they gave her the presents - a lovely necklace, a stuffed texas longhorn (that makes noise), and wha twas apparently a scented candle (i only saw her smelling it, didn't see what it was) - and had her sign the posters. i didn't have anything to give her or take as a souvenir (i'd meant to snatch the setlist - which i usually don't care about - but i was distracted and sarah got it) but i did get a bit of (slightly more modulated) gushing in, and i also got to tell marit that "my boyfriend's back" is my karaoke song - and she said it's hers too! and that's why she insisted on having it in her set. so that was nice. it was all very nice.

i'll have more to say about marit later on (her name's pronounced something like MAH-reet, by the way - though i didn't really realize that at the time and may or may not have said it incorrectly when i was talking to her.) i've been listening to her album a bunch in the past week (and i finally ordered an actual cd copy of it), and i have some new opinions to spout about it. but i'll hold off for now, because this has gone on plenty long enough.

________


what happened next? well, i went by stubb's BBQ to try to get in for BDB and GBQ, but they had stopped selling tickets (even though there was plenty of space inside.) i went by antone's to try to get in for antibalas and the dap-sharons - no luck there but i had a lovely time waiting for an hour or so on the cash line ("optimists line," as i'd taken to calling it) in the warm night air, soaking in the loveliness of what had just happened, and chatting with my linemates lucinda, a former philadelphian who insisted that i wasn't in texas, i was in austin, and [never told us her name], a piano grad student at nyu, about struggling-artist life. if i had had my wits together i would have realized i could make the most of the $20 i'd spent on the nellie ticket and go back there to catch peaches (probably could have gotten in too.) but i didn't, so i just wandered back to scandinavia (er, uncle flirty's) and watched some of who i thought were grand island but now think might have been reykjavik.

whatever it was didn't really pique my interest, so i continued to wander along sixth street (a continual enveloping performance in itself - closed to traffic for the duration of the festival and mobbed every night with all sorts of interesting characters), taking it all in. i turned down an unlikely street and caught the strains of what i thought was maybe just a small, informal hip-hop show, not an official part of the conference, until the mcs started chanting "it's the pack!" indeed it was - just kicking off their set at the beauty bar patio. it's a small venue, but there was still room for me if i wanted to pay $15.

i decided to just stand outside the tent and watch for a while from near the entrance, where i had a clear view of the stage. after a few numbers i wandered on, not really engaged, past a series of venues on 7th and then back to stubb's to sit for a few minutes and listen to a couple of the good bad and queen's lovely mellow numbers ("kingdom of doom" and i'm not sure what else.) then i headed back to the beauty bar, still in a bit of a daze, thinking i might be able to catch the pack closing their set with "vans" (the stuff that i'd heard had been disappointingly conventional-sounding compared to that whispered, bizarro mini-masterpiece of skeletal hyphy.) (hmm, this is kind of interesting - article about "vans" and product-placement censorship.)

no such luck - the pack had evidently just finished their set, but the federation were starting theirs (sort of surprising that these names weren't already taken, eh?), and this time i actually stood and watched, along with a san franciscan fellow with a captain's hat who showed up soon after. they were fun - hyphy's supposed to be about being hyper and getting stupid, and though their outfits and general performance style was more or less standard hip-hop, they did do some goofy dancing and arm gestures and so on. they finished up with three songs in a row that i knew from my hyphy-downloading binge a while back - the so-so "18 dummy" and "i wear my stunna glasses at night" (or whatever it's called), and the genre-defining (i assume) "hyphy," which is really pretty great. mostly it was just nice to see a performance in a different style from pretty much everything else i'd seen at the conference - although to really appreciate the show i should have been inside the tent where it seemed like there was some serious dancing going on.

actually they might have kept going after that, but i went back to meet matthew where we had parked our bikes twelve hours earlier. we recounted our divergent evenings (he'd seen the watson twins, andrew bird, perry farrell, badly drawn, and good bad) over goodflow oj at kerby lane, then biked the rest of the way home in the wide, wide empty streets.

SxSW, blow x blow

PART TWO

[PART ONE here]

from left to right: rose, (riot)becki, gwenno. (huh? there's nobody else in the picture!)

day two started with breakfast at quack's and bike-borrowing, which i'd thought would, but actually didn't, take too long for me to get to the fort in time to catch the pipettes. we dismounted just as the set-opening drum beats of "your kisses..." (i think?) drifted across the courtyard, and i was inside with stylin' white wristband before the end of "it hurts me..." - matthew had sadly been in too much of an exhausted stupor the night before to r.s.v.(i.)p. with his name and "affiliation," but at least mine went through and was apparently up to the fader/levi's standards. so i got to see the 'pettes, er the pipies, who i've decided should be pronounced "pip" rather than "pipe" or "peep" (well, that's how they say it, right?)

it was almost disappointingly exactly how you'd expect, which is to say it was great (since i'm me.) even as i've grown to really like a lot of album very much, the live setting conveyed it fine but didn't do too much to enhance it. it certainly didn't clear up much of the mystery surrounding the group, as far as where exactly the creative impulses are coming from. it was kind of amusing watching them perform with a backing band (almost more like a backdrop band - but they were definitely solid) of indie boys in matching yellow shirts, which didn't quite match the polka-dot aesthetic. as for the girls, they were so made up and polished that they almost seemed plastic, or somehow hyperreal.

mostly because of that, it felt much closer to a musical theatre performance than a rock concert. which is cool - i like musical theatre. still, my favorite part of the set was when there was a false start to one of the tunes and the girls broke face and giggled for a minute. that made me think it might have been cooler if they did have a looser stage presence and acted more like themselves (at least in between songs); even though that's perhaps contrary the perhaps-logical dictates of the girl-group musical aesthetic. i think the music is strong enough for the project to work more like a "normal" band that happens to have a very strong and campily exaggerated '60s pop influence, rather than what's basically a novelty act based around a gimmick that requires a specific mode of visual presentation as possibly their most defining characteristic. (a snarky hipster zine that was making the rounds described them as something like "as hip as simultaneously degrading women and empowering them.")

from there (short-ish set - hitting the obvious highlights but not my darkhorse favorites "i love you" or "a winter's sky," nor "school uniform," natch.) m and i biked back out lamar to waterloo records, where a sizable line was already forming outside (during sparklehorse's in-store set) for lily lallen. we saw her going in while we were waiting in the queue...but we could barely see her half an hour later when we got inside and she was actually playing. it was just her singing, an acoustic guitar and a piano, and no more than five or six songs. she covered "heart of glass," and the kooks song again (except this time she said it was amazing, or maybe that the band was...) in general i was more impressed than the last time i saw her...but that's not saying too much. the setting did show off her voice, which is very pretty. like i said, i couldn't really see the rest of her.

we stuck around to see the ponys, who failed to impress me or even make much of an impression - they seemed like a competent but very normal rock band. (my favorite part was the record store dude announcing beforehand that they had been authorized to sell copies of the album - "audiophile vinyl, very cool stuff.") then we left to go to the whole foods flagship mama store across the street, where matt got a live nut patty after much deliberation, but back in time to see busdriver, who had started his set at least ten minutes before schedule. that was definitely the highlight of the three - in fact, he rocked the crowd so hard that they demanded an encore (for an instore!), which only happened one other time the whole week that i saw. (sxsw crowds are pretty hard to impress.) it was mostly new jams, which had markedly less interesting beats and clunkier hooks than the couple of selections from fear of a black tangent - "unemployed black astronaut," of course, but also, weirdly, "befriend the friendless friendster" - but the real standout was a lengthy freestyle, mostly ruminating on record marketing and sales (fittingly enough for the venue.) anyway bus is a weird and hilarious dude, though i do wish he would enunciate a little better, not that it would necessarily help much to understand his warp-speed flow.

next up (after a confusing meal break) was trying to get into the "stax 50 revue" at antone's, which i probably should have known was a lost cause from the start, but for reason i thought that maybe not a lot of people would know what it was, or something. nobody likes soul these days, right? oh well.

no dice there (will they do a tour? oh man they need to do a tour. guess not though) so i went to uncle flirty's to check out their "nordic nights" (three evenings of all scandinavian artists) - specifically to see marit bergman, a young swedish i'd heard of but hadn't entirely believed existed, on the hope that she would be like a cross between marit larsen and margaret berger, or maybe ingrid bergman (ingmar?) she turned out to be a fun and energetic performer, with a bit of broadway-style brassiness to her stage presence (she made good use of the odd but attractive curved metal railings around the semi-circular stage.) her music is very '60s-inflected, also somewhat broadwayish singer-songwriter pop, with big, lush arrangements (she had an eight piece band, including two guys who both played tambourine on several of the songs.) it somewhat recalled the pipettes at times, without the gimmickry, or a more dramatic and less winsome camera obscura.

the faah-bulous ms. bergman and her tambo-urine ensemble

the crowd was fairly thin, but not embarrassingly so, and when marit announced that the next song would be a dance competition, there were two couples brave enough to take the floor, along with one enthusiastic hipstery dude, and me of course. the dude and i admitted to one another that we really wanted the prize, a very small white marit bergman t-shirt with a cute line drawing that on closer inspection turned out to be of a ninja stabbing a bunny. in the end she awarded it to me since she figured i was the only one who might be able to actually wear it - and i dutifully put it on over my other shirt so as to make myself look even more ridiculous. she was quite warm and friendly in our brief interchange after the set, and i got a copy of her cd from her manager, who was giving them out for promo purposes. (everybody was impressed by the foreign language blurbs on the cover sticker.)

stayed for a couple songs by the next band, a danish country outfit called funky nashville (instead of going to see joan as police woman), but gave up on that fast and went in search of something else to do. decided not to pay $25 to get into antone's after all for sondre lerche, sparklehorse, and small sins with nan. managed to meet up with nicolette down on south congress at an all-day festival of local music and crafts which was then coming to a close (but not before i saw a bit of local favorite david garza's party-style rock/folk jams, including a cover of local classic "wooly bully"), but almost as quickly back north across the bridge (followed by some silly folks who were inexplicably taunting me by calling me "leg power.")

ultimately the only other music i heard that night (except for ween's chocolate and cheese, which was bringing some philly flava to the halcyon coffeeshop) was a late set by my old buddy brandon patton, part of the dubious "heart of texas quadruple bypass festival" (one of a handful of "festivals" timed to coincide with southby.) i had noticed brandon's name on the mega-list of free shows, and tried to contact him, but ended up just surprising him at the gig, which was in a ridiculous pirate-themed bar. couldn't stay for the whole thing (b/c matthew was tired, except that after i left we spent a half-hour trying to get into an after-hours party), but i did get to hear the dynamite "counting the paces" (his signature tune as far as i'm concerned), and some nicely rocking new tunes (gotta say the set-opening confessional folk piece was pretty cheesy though.) unfortunately i never managed to hook up with him later in the festival, but hopefully i'll catch him back on the east coast.

more soon...

TXTing in Texas: the Mincetapes SxSW Report

(or: taking livestock, longhorn edition)

(is this an ape or an android? you tell me.)

PART ONE

i swore that i wouldn't "liveblog" from the conference... there's still something repulsive about that concept (or at least that phrase), reeking of all this PDA SMS RSS BS interpenetration of RealLife and the web two point oh, i dunno, suppose i'm implicated as much as anyone, with my old-fangled straightforward putting up of words and sometimes even images online. isn't it bad enough trying to juggle my celly and digicam while i'm supposed sublimating myself in the sacrament that is live music? the upshot is more work now, because, naturally, you require a recap. and you know this one's gonna ramble. so let's get it.

can i just say that the experience was superlative, and leave the adjectives at that? no i probably can't, but i'll try to limit those interchangeable superfluous superwords, to maximize their effect. certainly it was an overwhelming and often exhausting several days - physically mentally emotionally - but almost entirely in the good ways. despite spending four days doing little with my body besides standing in line and standing (or more usually dancing) at shows, my legs, back, and feet were miraculously not sore, especially beyond the first day. i did wake up every morning with an ominous sore throat - less the result of alcohol, second-hand smoke or sleep deprivation than just a ton of shouting and singing-along - but it always cleared up after a few hours, with the help of a wide assortment of beverages.

austin itself, ostensibly the primary focus of my trip, of course ended up seeming rather secondary to the music, but integral to the experience nonetheless. i liked it a lot - might say i loved it but i know that the immensely pleasurable weather during my stay (mild, cool and even overcast much of the time, sunny and perfectly warm a few days) was a dirty trick and that most of the time it's got to be intolerably hot. still, i loved there being all those coffeshops/cafés that serve alcohol and food and are open late (or always) - why don't we have those in philly again? matt (matthew stangoni i should say), playing tour guide as well as tour manager, made sure i saw kerby lane, austin java, halcyon, jo's, and especially spiderhouse (though not magnolia or the alamo draft house), and didn't fail to point out the bats that live under the bridge or the tower where that guy shot a lot of people.

meanwhile i somehow managed to make more new friends and acquantainces than i've done in at least the last six months in philly, and fall into a stronger sense of community than lately too. not too big a mystery how in fact - the combination of matthew's solid little crew of folks and the abundantly social atmosphere of SxSW itself, in which it's possible to strike up a conversation with almost anybody standing next to you in line or at a show (unless they're wearing a badge...then it's just intimidating) and be guaranteed a common interest. (theoretically one should be able to do that at a show in philly, but i just don't see it happening as much - or maybe i'm just not in the habit.) hard to know how much to just chalk up to these dizzying circumstances, but austin definitely came off as not just a friendly-ass town, but filled with a lot of folks with whom i could feel some connection. it just...makes you think.

(the artifical community of SxSW is also just a crystalization of the real community of the music industry. not that i really communed with many industry folks at all. it was interesting to be in the minority of people who weren't there for professional reasons...or was i?)

we (mostly me, matt, jenny, nicolette, who were the central crew along with elizabeth and sarah, and ol' nan '05) had a running metaphor of SxSW as Life, with the four days standing in for a development from babyhood to maturity, wherein we were to learn many valuable lessons, such as to keep low expectations. it held up pretty well (um, perhaps because southby is in fact, part of life), and by the end i had indeed learned a lot about how to navigate the festival, if nothing else. early on day 2 (adolescence) matt and i borrowed bikes, which gave us independence and mobility; we both carried backpacks that day but by day 3 gave up that dependence on material possessions and made do with what fit in our pockets. i had intended from the outset to avoid stressing myself out by trying to maximize my time and squeeze everything in, and ultimately it turned out that i was able to see practically everybody i wanted and make pretty damn efficient use of my time without getting stressed out. meanwhile, i partied but i paced myself, i had a transcendant spiritual experience or two, i fell in love a few times (more on that later), and generally reapt the bounty of my youthful folly in the blossom of my old age.

before i get into the specifics of what happened, which will almost certainly include far too much detail, here's a rundown by the numbers:

i saw
26 artists* (performing full or almost full sets)
and
12 more** (from whom i only caught partial sets)
from
10 countries***
at
13 venues****

*Amy Winehouse, Apes and Androids, Architecture in Helsinki, Brandon Patton, Budos Band, Busdriver, Datarock, Earl Greyhound, The Federation, Girl Talk, The Good the Bad and the Queen, Junior Senior, Lily Allen, Marit Bergman, Marit Larsen, Menomena, Nellie McKay, Peter and the Wolf, Peter, Björn and John, The Pipettes, The Ponys, Prototypes, Rjd2, Scanners, Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, Tunng

**Davey Jones' Locker, David Garza, Funky Nashville, Fujiya and Miyagi, Grand Island, Headlights, Irina Bjorklund, Lesbians on Ecstasy, The Pack, The Pipettes (again), Simian Mobile Disco, Stars of Track and Field, Todosantos

*** US, UK, Australia, Sweden, Norway, France, Denmark (and Finland, Venezuela, and Canada if you include the partial sets)

****Beauty Bar Patio, Chugging Monkey, Emo's, Emo's Annex, Exodus, The Fort, Jo's, La Zona Rosa, Mohawk, Northby Tent, Treasure Island, Uncle Flirty's, Waterloo Records
_________


amount spent on tickets: [$10 + $15 + $20 + $15 + $12 + $15 =] $87
lowest price for wristbands (guaranteeing no cover and admission to all shows until they decide to only let in badge-holders) seen on craigslist before we started spending money on tickets the first night: $90
amount spent on concerts per artist seen: $3.35 per artist (not counting partial sets)

amount spent on alcohol: $0
alcoholic drinks consumed: 8(+?)
non-alcoholic drinks promising to restore, regenerate, replenish, rejuvenate, renew, and/or otherwise improve my physical experience: g.t.'s trilogy kombucha®, the ginger people's ginger soother®, ℞ehab®, rockstar®, nutriwater®, airborne®, and goodflow juices (orange and grapefruit)
number of these managing instead to repel, revulse, reject, and/or regurgitate: well, only a couple

free ice creams and popsicles enjoyed: 4(+?)
free bbq: none, interestingly enough, though i did have an unwitting opportunity
enchiladas/tacos/flautas/wraps consumed: at least 10
best freebie: peaches guitar pick (part of the "sxsw survival kit")

# of purple ink stamps on my wrists/palms/back of hands: a whole bunch

conference anthem: "young folks." matthew's prediction was that they'd be whistling it in the streets. (sigrid snickered and wrinkled her norwegian nose, but there's no question i heard this song more times that week than any other, and i somehow managed to avoid seeing pb+j live more than once.)

text messages sent/recieved over the four days: approximately 193*****
suggestions for renaming the conference accordingly: SMSw; TxtW; um, the Verizon Music Conference at South by Southwest.

*****not counting mass textos. judging by the speed with which that filled up the storage capacity of my phone, that's as many as i usually exchange in three months or so. alyssa thinks i should write about this, because it probably betrays something interesting about modernicity or some such. maybe so...but on the other hand it just kind of makes sense, since most everybody involved in the con are at shows most of the time, and so can't talk on the phone, but need to coordinate the next stop on the agenda. one almost wonders what it would have been like before text messaging rose to prominence. and then one remembers.

______________


celebrity sightings (unimpressive):
• john darnielle and sharon jones (outside of their respective shows which i wasn't able to get into - i said hi but they didn't notice)
• simian mobile disco (on the street wednesday morning)
• john pareles (slipping out about two songs into fujiya and miyagi's set)
• james iha (on the street before good bad queen saturday afternoon - wouldn't have recognized him but someone pointed him out)
• brandon stosuy (of pitch4k sorta-fame, watching GBQ)
• marit larsen (flutter flutter...um, seen at the northby tent norwegian showcase, after her three-song set which i missed)
• amy winehouse (backstage during sharon jones performance saturday night - amy's two backup singers danced with sharon on stage during "genuine")
• probably some philebrities on the plane/plane/train back to phil, but i'm not very good at philebrity-spotting. the very tired guy on the septa seat in front of me (with a red wristband) seemed like he might have performed at the conference though.

___________


well, i guess that's about all you needed to know. just kidding! of course you deserve and shall receive nothing less than a full painstaking blow by blow account. but it's getting to be past my bedtime just now.

well, i already more or less covered day one: day party at the mohawk; ran into nan; apes and androids rocked my world; architecture did the whirlwind (which apparently requires two people to play the temple block part) and some songs about beef and chicken; no luck @ 4AD showcase (though we did get to see emma pollock from behind through the band load-in door - she sounds pretty much like the singer from the delgados); luck with mellow beardos tunng (who i keep wanting to think were finnish) and that irrepressibly tight'n'plucky swedish sandwich.

one thing i didn't mention about pb+j is that at one point (i think it was in the middle of "paris 2004") a fight nearly broke out less than ten feet in front of us. it was more of an aggressive staring contest between a couple of clearly insensitive inebriates, but it eventually required physical intervention from adjacent audience members. seconds later, ten feet to the left, a couple kissed passionately - so there you had pretty much the full spectrum of human emotion on display. so i commented to caitlin sxsw (as my phone knows her), whom i'd just met and bonded with over the swellness of swedishness (actually, first she and matthew bonded over being from colorado.)

actually she's kind of pertinent to that point i didn't make earlier, since our friendship (has?) developed almost exclusively through text messaging. we did eventually meet up again, on saturday (day 4 - i'll get to that), but in the interim we conducted a handful of exchanges; most memorably the following:

me: I'm heading back to scandinavia
caitlin sxsw: Come to sugar's
me: Where?

(pause)

me: Who's there / where is it?

(extended pause during which i ask the older woman working the door at uncle flirty's if she knows where sugar's is, assuming that it's a venue. she doesn't know for sure but thinks there are several of them, maybe on lamar.)

caitlin sxsw: It's a strip club! Ha
me: Ah. Ha!
caitlin sxsw: It should be silly
me: Are you there??
caitlin sxsw: Yes

(pause)

me: Well where is it?
caitlin sxsw: I don't know. but the cabs do
me: Not sure i'm up for that tonight. Stumbled across the pack and am enjoying that. Maybe we can meet for some day stuff tomorrow
caitlin sxsw: Deal

notice that this exchange could easily have been abbreviated, notably if caitlin had just included all of the pertinent information in one message. but how much more nuance there is when it's extended this way. now that's a real connection developing, some real repartee! um yup.

but i'm getting ahead of myself - day 1 ends with jenny (or was it nico?) giving us a ride back to the house, some feverish research on the next day's shows, and late to-bed.

as now i must once more. but! i'll be back tomorrow with actual reportage on actual concerts, and (fingers crossed) even some photography!