SXSW Tourist: My Brightest Diamond

Over at Gothamist we have a thing called Tourist, where bands from New York keep tour diaries for us. My Brightest Diamond is one of the bands doing this for us throughout SXSW, check out Nate from MBD's first entry here. And here's an excerpt.

Three days before flying out from NY to Austin for the South by Southwest music conference, I had a rather ominous dream. It was the sort of dream you wake up from panicked and not quite sure of your surroundings, perhaps in a cold sweat and a bit disheveled. I dreamt that when I arrived at the festival, the location had been switched from Austin, Texas, to Iraq. Yes, Iraq - that little blip on the radar screen of world affairs.

I asked my colleagues sheepishly, "This is South by Southwest, right? But I thought it was in Texas....this looks more like....IRAQ? Or am I just in the wrong place?" Around me were roadblocks, bombed out buildings and skeletons of charred cars, and hundreds of hipsters walking the streets as if everything was completely normal.

I arrived here in Austin yesterday to find that my dream was not really that far off. Of course, I'm yet to see a car bomb go off; there has been no sign of an AK-47 or a rocket-propelled grenade (even though I have seen my fair share of NRA bumper stickers). And as far as I know, Austin is free from any pesky insurgency standing in the way of normalcy and order. But this place is undoubtedly what I would call the Mecca (excuse the Islamic imagery) of hipsterdom. The streets have been closed to traffic, allowing throngs of punks, indie chicks, metal dudes, and acoustic-guitar toting troubadours to run free and unmolested through this beautiful city.

My Brightest Diamond will play tonight at 10pm at Antone's.