We're back in New York where people are trying to recover from SXSW, here's the last entry of Nate from My Brightest Diamond's Austin tour diary he kept for us. Read the first part here. Over at Gothamist we've got Pela's tour diary...we totally snuck in to their hotel room and found it under their pillow.

SXSW DAY 2: A DAY, A NIGHT TO REMEMBER

In contrast to my first 24 hours here at the SXSW festival, last night's activities proved genuinely debaucherous and entirely amusing. Whereas Thursday night found me wandering the closed down streets in somewhat of a daze, Friday brought a different attitude with it.

I ended up in downtown by around 11am, free to roam for a good 7 hours before the My Brightest Diamond load in. Shara had an interview near the convention center and James had to pick up our drummer at the airport, so I was on my own. My first order of business was a short walk, placing me in the middle of a party thrown by the Australian Music Council. For some reason, walking into a location filled with Aussies makes me a bit uncomfortable. It's not really the accent, or the attitude, but something about Australians in the US seems offputting to me; like they're spies for some secret subversive organization. Plus, there was a lot of leather jacket action happening, and I'm suspicious of anyone wearing leather on the middle of a relatively hot day in the middle of Texas. At this party, the booze was free as was the food, but I found myself short of appetite on accounts of the blaring guitars and the gratuitous leather.

I walked in just as a band was finishing, and helped myself to a free beer. It's funny walking into a party and not knowing a single person there. I'd even go so far as to call it liberating. I stood solitary behind a long-bearded fellow with blue-blocker sunglasses and a Wolfmother hat (of course) and watched the band finish. After the set I sat down for a bit and took mental notes on the scene. The next band to play was
called "Children Collide." Now, I haven't enjoyed a punk show in years; in NYC bad punk music is about as common as pidgeon poo. But this trio had something special. It was a combination of Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and Nirvana - a blend which proved both fun to watch and appealing to my ear. I helped myself to another beer and departed, somewhat satisfied with my taste into what Aussie rock has to offer.

Around 1, our drummer, Brian Wolfe, arrived somewhat exhausted from a mildly disasterous commute. He had missed his connecting flight from Dallas to Austin because of a delay suffered at the hands of Friday's freakish March snow storm. We chatted for awhile and caught up on Diamond matters and on the dionysian nature of this whole mad scene.

My next destination proved to be a great surprise and a perfect picture of why this festival is like nothing I've experienced in music before. I took a cab to a tiny little brewery in a warehouse district 15 minutes south of downtown to see "Dirty Projectors" again. The cabby, Benjamin, kept on asking me as we circled the warehouses, "are you sure there is music here?" I replied with medium confidence that there would be. We
turned a corner to see a handful of hippie-looking types, to which Benjamin exclaimed, "ooop, there they are." Indeed.

The Independence brewery was modest in stature, with a make-shift bar in the front serving three difference kinds of Independence Ales (I'm partial to the dark), and 6 huge silver vats in the back. The stage was essentially a three-foot drum riser; the rest of the
bands shared the same footspace as the tiny audience of about fifteen. The first band was a prog/noise band from LA called "Health". Because of all the concrete and the cube-shape of the room, this was an overpoweringly loud performance. But it was exciting to watch, to say the least. They started with a chant which reminded me Native American hymns, and burst into a furious blast-beat filled freak out. And when I
say freak out, I mean F R E A K O U T. I took a roll of film and was captivated by these guys, even when the bass player's rig went on the fritz. To my great surprise, I looked to my left to see a woman cradling her newborn baby to her chest as the little one slept like a rock (no pun intended). I chalked this up to being one of nature's little miracles.

The next band was called The Apes. I didn't really like the stuff too much, but seeing it in this environment somehow redeemed them as I realized that my usually hyper-critical music snob ear had been rendered mute. Before her set, Angel D from the
Projectors hung out and cracked jokes with me about the hippies and how this was an extremely odd place to find a woman with her infant. As they started their set, I struck a conversation with a dreadlocked, bearded fellow named Nugget. Unfortunately, the free beer and obliteratingly loud music had temporarily fogged my conception of time, so I checked my watch and called Benjamin the cabby in one quick motion.

I returned to the downtown around 6pm, and the evening's debauchery officially began. After our load in at Antone's, I walked down the block to meet up with my friends Michael and Adam at Exodus on 6th Street. They, too, had just completed loading out for their show with The High Class Elite. We had some drinks around the way before heading back to Exodus for their show at 9. I am the usual bass player for
The Elite, but seeing as my bass responsibilities with My Brightest Diamond have been in demand, my substitute, Robby, handled the low end business. I had never met him before, and he's a HUGE guy. It totally shocked me to meet him. Having never seen this band except for from the on-stage perspective, I had a great time watching my friends on stage. And for his part, Robby did a great job on bass. Seeing as my show with My Brightest Diamond was only an hour after the start of the High Class Elite set, I had to depart after only 4 songs. Even so, I thought it was kickass, to use a juvenille expression.

I got to Antone's right around 9:30, and swiftly put on my game face. The crowd at Antone's was extremely thick, and the energy in the place was enough to give me a case of the butterflies. Also, we hadn't played since our last show on our European tour, so there was a certain palpable sense excitement on all of our faces. Modesty aside, we rocked. Everything was tight, everything in the dynamics was right, and we had a great time. Shara almost took my head off with an epic axe-chop guitar move at one point, but my stage radar helped me execute some successful evasive manuevers.

After the set I headed back to Exodus to meet up with my boys from the H.C.E to do some heavy drinking. That's easy to do when the drinks are free, and by midnight I was jolly drunk. Stumbling, bumbling, we made our way to a party at Habana Calle where a band called the Deers were playing. They were great. For some reason they introduced themselves as "Broken Sexual Chocolate", and I was the only one in company who bought it. Hook, line, sinker. I believe my response was, "That's a funny band name." My friends turned and laughed at me. We also met up with my buddy Gabriel and his fellow bandmates from a band called the Unmentionables. We had some laughs, some booze, some conversation.

Now the evening began to get foggy. We met up with friends from the band Locksley at Stubbs, caught the last of the last set of the night, and continued our perambulation. After passing by a couple of vomitous casualties of the evening, we ended up wandering for an hour to get to the Blender party on Congress st. This was a scene, and held our attention until about 5 am. As we walked back to homebase, the streets of
Austin were empty, and I found myself applauding the stamina of my companions and me. We really did it up. After a trip to Jack-in-the-box (or J in the B, as we call it), we bedded down at around 6am. All in all, this was an epic evening, and a perfect end to a stellar day.