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9:39 PM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
# > “You see that? They’re building a condo here; they’re totally messing with Texas.”
— OH on East 6th Street
9:00 PM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
# Nightfall on 6th can only mean one thing: IT’S ABOUT TO GET REAL.
5:25 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# After nearly a day spent listening to straight electro-pop, ducking into a blazing set of speed-sludge by Nashville’s Diarrhea Planet felt oddly calming.
5:19 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# The b-girl bouillabaisse and on-stage aerobics of Charli XCX would make Neneh Cherry proud.
4:47 PM CDT posted by Angela Watercutter
“I don’t find music on Tumblr. I’m a huge SoundCloud rat. I used to be on Myspace and I feel like all those people either went to Bandcamp or SoundCloud, not Tumblr. … So the whole Tumblrwave thing was interesting to me, because I never discovered any of those [Tumblr] artists through it. Being from New York, I feel like I met all of those people first. Joey Bada$$ and Kitty Pryde? Like, I definitely met them at PS1, not on Tumblr. … I executive produce my stuff from the Internet. It’s kind of like internet dating for me when I collaborate. Basically, someone will hit me up on SoundCloud or I’ll find someone on SoundCloud and say, ‘Can I have a beat?’ Then they’ll send me options and I’ll have this stack of beats that I can choose to rap to and have a mixtape out of.”
– Rapper Le1f on the (probably poorly-named) #Tumblrwave phenomenon and making music on the web. (Check out his amazing track “Wut” above.)
4:20 PM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
# Last night’s [photo] leftovers: Icona Pop @ Viceland.
[Officially the cutest musical duo in all of Austin right now!]
4:02 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# Lord Huron: Venturing deep into the heart of power-pop Americana, without ever detouring into Squaresville.
3:30 PM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
Last night, as the sun set over Austin, one man dance band Robert Delong absolutely destroyed at a show on the west side of town. Already dubbed the next big thing by the likes of MTV, Billboard, and VIBE, Delong is known for making music with game gear like joysticks and Wiimotes. Still, I admit I had my doubts about whether or not he could live up to the hype.
But hot damn, that was a ridiculous set.
Waterloo Records set up a stage in their parking lot, hosting hours of semi-intimate shows under the blaring sun. As the crowd wound down for the day and attendees began to check their phones, presumably making plans for the rest of the evening, a die-hard core of young folks stuck around, talking in excited spurts of unbridled joy.
Photo: Heidi Callaway (above, right) tours with Delong, painting fans and spreading the word through crowds on the road.
As Delong set up his gear, his street team — known as the Tribe of Orphans — painted each others faces with the “tribe’s markings” in preparation for the set. Their mission is described on Delong’s website: “Abandoned but not lost, we seek radical dance parties in your city.”
And this was definitely radical.
3:13 PM CDT posted by Laura Hudson
# In the midst of the crowds near the convention center: street yoga
2:22 PM CDT posted by Brian Raftery
# Glasgow’s CHVRCHES: Oversized hooks + pinpoint-precise keyboard attack + subtly winking banter = great Scots.
1:50 PM CDT posted by Angela Watercutter
“[There]’s not a very concrete touring circuit for middle or small groups in the Middle East – if you’re Red Hot Chili Peppers, sure. … But we had to piece together all of these small promoters. A skate team in Alexandria put on the show for us. But it was fun — very rewarding spiritually, and, well, not financially, but the money doesn’t matter because we got so much more out of it.”
– Black Lips drummer Joe Bradley on the band’s recent tour of the Middle East, which will be chronicled in an upcoming (and as yet untitled) documentary by Bill Cody, who launched an IndieGoGo campaign to complete the film.
12:32 PM CDT posted by Angela Watercutter
# Dave Grohl — the legendary drummer for Nirvana, founder of the Foo Fighters and now documentary filmmaker with the recent Sound City — delivered a fantastic keynote Thursday about the importance of music and musicians finding their own voice (and ignoring The Voice). A few highlights from his remarks:
Grohl counts “Gangnam Style” by Psy as one of his favorite songs of the last decade. “Fuck guilty pleasure,” said the neo-sincerity musician. “How about just pleasure?” He also took a shot at a popular musical tastemaking website: “Paging Pitchfork, come in! Come in, Pitchfork! We need you to help us determine the value of a song. Who fucking cares?”
He recorded his first songs using a tape player and tape recorder. He would record the guitar part then play it back while recording the drum beat. “Eventually I figured out how to be a one-man band,” he said. “I was multi-tracking songs in my bedroom.”
He called Foo Fighters “the stupidest fucking name” and said that coming up with a name is the hardest thing a band has to do. The name of his first band at 13 years old was “Nameless,” a group whose impressive gigs included “play[ing] the Rolling Stones’ ‘Time is On My Side’ at a nursing home.”
Nirvana’s iconic album Nevermind “was the sound of three people playing like their life depended on it,” Grohl said about their recording session at Sound City, the studio that is the subject of Grohl’s documentary.
5. The Rock Against Reagan concert on July 4, 1983 was a major turning point in his life and he still remembers the Dead Kennedys starting a massive uprising on the National Mall. Shortly thereafter he dropped out of high school, joined a band and went on the road. Pretty soon he heard “the five words that changed my life forever: ‘Have you heard of Nirvana?’” he said. “They had songs, they had Kurt [Cobain]. What they didn’t have was a drummer.”
- On what happened after Cobain committed suicide: “When Kurt died I was lost. I was numb. The music that I had devoted my life to had now betrayed me. I had no voice. I turned off the radio, I put away my drums.” But he ultimately recovered and recorded what would be Foo Fighters’ debut album. By himself. ”Eventually, that feeling that I had on Independence Day, 1983…. That feeling came back.”
12:25 PM CDT posted by Angela Watercutter
In a world of Netflix queues, iTunes movie rentals, and 3-D IMAX screenings, there are still purists who believe that the best way to watch entertainment is the VHS tape. And many of them are in Rewind This!, a documentary on the VHS subculture that debuted this week at SXSW.
It delves deep into the love of the magnetic tape medium, digging up not only the VHS tape’s disruptive past as the original TV programming time-shifter, but also exploring the culture of collectors and remixers that have sprung up around the largely defunct format. It’s a scene that director Josh Johnson, producer Carolee Mitchell and cinematographer/editor Christopher Palmer know all too well.
“We were all living in Austin at the time and we were really involved with the film community – the filmmaking community, but more significantly the film-obsessive community,” Johnson told Wired about what lead them to make the doc. “Several of our friends — primarily Zack Carlson, who’s in the film — were all actively acquiring video tapes at the time because they were the only way to access these films that had started to become obscure that weren’t released in later formats. That idea was very exciting, the idea of this disappearing chapter of film history.”
12:23 PM CDT posted by Michael Calore
# Last year at SXSW we saw a fantasy/horror movie from Norway called Thale (link is NSFW).
Shot on a very low budget by director and writer Aleksander Nordaas, Thale (pronounced “tall-eh”) centers around a couple of sanitation workers who stumble upon a mysterious, mute woman in the basement of an abandoned cabin. It turns out she’s actually a huldra, a mythical wood sprite with the ability to form a psychic link with a human, and also swiftly disembowel them. Oh, and she has a cow’s tail. Great stuff.
Recently, we learned that Thale has earned a stateside distribution deal through XLrator Media. The U.S. theatrical release is April 5, but Thale will be available as video-on-demand next week, on March 21. Physical discs will be available starting April 23.
Congrats to Nordaas and his crew, including the excellent Silje Reinåmo (shown above) who played the title role. It’s a good movie, seek it out if you love horror, dark fantasy, indie films, or Norwegians.
10:21 AM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
# Who knew the Hulk was moonlighting as a pedi-cab driver during SXSW?
10:17 AM CDT posted by Michael V. Copeland
Photo: Robin McCall
Peter Thiel and the Founders Fund gang threw a party during the South by Southwest Festival last weekend. The barbecue was good, the band (Ra Ra Riot) was great, but the house was crazy.
Britannia Manor II, as it is officially known, was built in 1987 by Richard Garriott, known by addicts of the Ultima video games as Lord British. Apparently the Lord is looking to unload the manor for $3.5 million (down from $4.1 million). There were tours available if you pledged $10,000 to Garriott’s Kickstarter campaign to fund a new game Shroud of the Avatar, but nothing beats moving in. So for those of you who spent hour upon hour, and all your pocket money, on Ultima games, here’s one more really pricey opportunity to live out your video game fantasies.
“Captivating and magical,” is how the 6,900-square foot castle is described by the Austin real estate agent with the listing. “Like how I would have designed a house when I was seven,” is how one partygoer summed it up. Somewhere in between lies the truth.
7:02 AM CDT posted by Laura Hudson
# Getting recursive at the Icona Pop show at Viceland as the crowd goes wild during their performance of “I Love It”
6:01 AM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
# Our very own videographer Mike Ruocco (hidden there in the bottom left of the photo) has been touring to and through SXSW with Laura Stevenson and the Cans!
Yes! You should be jealous!
Also, I’ve gotta say, even though I was stoked on them from living vicariously through Mike’s tour diary so far, I definitely fell in love after seeing them perform on the back patio of Barbarella.
Stay tuned for the second installment of their Austin adventures!
5:30 AM CDT posted by Ariel Zambelich
# Got to meet up with Dimitri Simakis (Everything is Terrible!) to talk VHS and his latest movie appearance in Rewind This!
…Also to tell him that I’m really jealous of his amazing glasses.
5:01 AM CDT posted by Michael Calore
It’s not every day you get to throw giant cubes of light across a room and watch them explode against the far wall to a soundtrack of blasting techno beats. But some days are better than others.
Sonos was determined to do something really unique to promote its just-released Playbar wireless speaker, so the company commissioned an interactive digital art installation called The Playground. It’s set up inside a small hut on Sonos’ makeshift headquarters here at SXSW, which is open to conference attendees.
You enter the room by walking through a couple of blackout curtains. In front of you are five digital projectors, a low table with a bunch of computers on it, and a Microsoft Kinect peeking out at you. An iPad running Sonos’ controller app is off to your left. All the way at the other end of the room is a Sonos Playbar mounted on the wall, and behind you are a pair of Play:3 speakers serving as satellite audio sources. Throbbing away somewhere under all the computers is a Sonos Sub (a wireless subwoofer).
You cue up a song and the room springs to life, with white blocks and rings of light bouncing around along with the music. Then, you take the driver’s seat, positioning yourself directly in front of the Kinect. When you wave and sway your arms, bright blocks of light fire along the walls away from you, and their vertical positions on the walls are determined by the position of your arms.
If you remember the videogame Tempest from the 1980s, it’s kind of like that. In fact, the comparison is especially apt since the Sonos Playground installation is appropriately retro and very trippy.
I started off with some modern rock tunes, and it lulled me into sort of a meditative trance. But then I threw some Squarepusher at it to really see what the visuals would do. And man, did things get crazy.
After that, I played “Birds” by Neil Young, a quiet song that’s mostly piano and vocals. The walls grew calm, with peaceful ripples of light emanating from the Soundbar at the end of the room.
The visualizer is a custom piece of software written by Blair Neal and Daniel Scheibel, two of the four artists involved. The other two are Zander Brimijoin, who served as art director, and Aramique, who came up with the concept and provided creative guidance.
Daniel designed the program to not only react to the peaks and frequencies in the audio (as most visualizers do) but to study the track to see where it builds and trails off. When it sees a build coming, the visuals try to mimic the emotional swell the listener would experience by adding swirls, spinning effects, and other visual tricks to enhance the peaks in the song.
The team programmed the audio analysis software in Cinder, a C++ framework. The installation itself is running on three networked Mac Minis, which power the projectors, and a Windows PC to collect input from the Kinect.
Also, almost all of the audio in the room was being pumped through the Playbar, and although my short video doesn’t do it justice, the audio was impressively loud and clear. That’s one powerful and sweet-sounding speaker. It had better be — it just went on sale this month for $700.
1:16 AM CDT posted by Michael Calore
# The Black Angels, Buffalo Billiards, Austin TX
