slowjamz

Tue, 27 Mar 2007 10:03:40 -0600

flava4prez.

Mike

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 19:26:15 -0600

Sloan ROCKS! too bad we had to watch it dangling from the front window of dirty dogs, cuz we couldn't even get the drummer to sneak us in the back door or bribe anyone. heheh.

seanab**ts

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 17:43:35 -0600

"flanking stage left at La Zona Rosa is the best spot in the house" GREAT, now everyone is going to pull the flank stage left. I'll go right from now on.

nari

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:31:48 -0600

5. BURNING STAR CORE @ Spiro's The ear splitting noise heard during soundcheck rather than a mistake was a portent of things to come. Burning Star Core is the project of C. Spencer Yeh. After the lights dimmed, he got out his violin, rosined up his bow, and began with a gentle ambient loop. The line out on his violin was connected to a mess of equipment filling the entire table, so that the sound that came out bore no resemblance to violin. Instead, we heard dense, undulating noise so caustic and beautiful it'd put Merzbow to shame. For the denouement, he settle into pitched noise and slowly turned down his boxes until the clear tones of a violin playing a perfect 5th emerged. 4. THE DIRTY PROJECTORS @ The Peacock I could live in a Dirty Projectors show. Their sound similar to Joan of Arc -- very clean, "angular" guitar lines that jump around from note to note in a disjointed fashion. On the second video "Imagine It," you can hear the sprightly cluck of their intertwining electric guitars. They also experiment with vocals vascillating from barbershop harmonies to screams to hiccuping arpeggios--reminiscent of Animal Collective. They have humongous stage presence and energy with a very aerobatic drummer. Their set was all too short. Check them out! My videos are under username narikiri on youtube. 3. TETUZI AKIYAMA @ The Hideout Tetuzi Akiyama is a guitar great who used textbook minimalism for his Hideout set. Each song was just a chord or a fragment of riff or a bluesy lick repeated over and over again. This sounds like a recipe for snooze music, but in fact the songs played out like energetic jams, and were ever-changing as he subtely altered the volume and style of attack. Even though his songs were made up of simple elements, they were an absolute endurance test to play, because they were so dense, without rests or pauses, and because they droned on uninterrupted for great lengths at a time. Sweat dripped down his face as he swayed and bobbed his head in concert with the music, closing his eyes frequently. His finale was a purifying drone on a blaring major chord. He announced that "The duration of this piece is 40 years, but I'll just play a little." :) This song was minimalist perfection, just a chord repeated over and over again for several minutes. But even though the notes were the same, the sound was dynamic and evolving, as high harmonics and other hidden features of it emerged the longer you listened. It was mesmerizing and wonderful. 2. CHARALAMBIDES @ Salon Mijangos The Charalambides played a set of moody, piercing, emotionally intense duets. They have been described as neo-psych rock, though they resist a label that does justice to their unique and otherworldly sound. The cornerstone of this performance was the synergy between Tom and Christina, two seasoned performers who know each other better than they know themselves. Tom's playing was unhinged, with his passages of rumbling, thunderous fuzz and his soulful electric guitar solos. But it was Christina, queen diva of experimental music, who stole the show. Her vocal arsenal includes ghostly, ethereal utterances, plaintive singing, chanting, moaning, screaming, and most notably here, a range of echoes, warbles and other effects to distort her heavenly wail. At one point, she belts out a long, powerful note while she fiddles with nobs that twist and distort her voice into a stabbing staccato. In another moment, her voice fluctuates in and out while it is looped on top of another note just microtones apart for a dissonant, palpable vibration. But even when Christina's voice is unfiltered, it's charged with a deep urgency that is jets forth like pressured water from her vocal fountain. It is that intensity combined with their free, semi-improvisational form that makes a Charalambides performance so affecting. And I can say without a doubt that the setting, mood, and the right muse all came together to make this one of the best Charalambides performances I have seen. 1. BORIS @ Spiro's Rumba Room Boris won the festival. I've seen them before and they still blew me away. Their song development, their sound, and their showmanship are all off the scale. They played 40 nonstop minutes of pure, blistering metalgaze, the title of which I believe is Feedbacker, but I'm not sure. The piece begins with just the electric guitarist and bassist stating a slow, dark theme with dripping wet guitars. After several minutes of cranking out this wailing, moody theme while slowly growing the feedback and distortion into a dense wall of sound, the drummer finally enters the stage and holds up his mallet, gesturing with his other hand in a "gimme" motion while the crowd goes nuts. Uh oh- STOP! GONG TIME. In a scene of almost Spinal Tapish heavy metal theatrics, he crashes his mallet into the Gong repeatedly while the stage was obscured by a solid wall of metal signs flying up from the audience. CRASH! CRASH! CRASH! Now it's time for Boris to earn the name of their recent album: DronEvil. The guitarist breaks into heavy, trudging, fuzz-laden chords conjuring up the evilest Black Sabbath sludge train. The pace picks up and she breaks into a screaching, wailing guitar solo high up on the bridge while the drummer pounds away like a galloping heard, his long locks flying everywhere with each brutal slam. This ride goes on for an eternity, until finally he overturns his cymbal stand and crashes it into his drumset in a moment of rock n roll orgy. Everyone in the audience was left stunned and transformed by the show. I was amused to watch the guy standing next to me just start screaming "YES! YES! YES! YES!" over and over again like he had just had a religious experience. Even Marissa Nadler recently posted a bulletin saying "Boris is my new favorite band." I've been watching my video excerpt over and over again since the show. Best SXSW performance EVAR!!1

adamr

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:26:50 -0600

It is done because we are an elite race of robots that pee in laserbeams and burn kittens for fuel. Not really. It's done because many bloggers that write for an online entity (i.e. Austinist, Gothamist, Deadspin, etc) are invoking that ethos. "We" are writing on behalf of Austinist, or representing that ethos. It's a stylistic choice that "we" are paid millions of dollars to make. It's formal without slipping into the vague, clinical 3rd person: "one should see this movie if s/he likes gratuitous sex and violence." Also, if you think about it, it can sound even more elitist, and obnoxious, to repeatedly invoke the first person singular. "I think this blog is stupid...it's my contention that you should listen to coldplay at full volume...you should listen to me and what I say."

werd

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 16:14:43 -0600

"My least favorite thing about SXSW bloggers is when they refer to themselves in the plural first person." Really, what is all that about? Doing that makes it seem like each blog post is the product of a super-elitist, lame-ass "hive mind" when it's really just one doofus.

rude rick

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:59:09 -0600

My least favorite thing about SXSW bloggers is when they refer to themselves in the plural first person.

Lala

Mon, 26 Mar 2007 15:43:53 -0600

Yay for Montreal. They pretty much *almost* owned SXSW this year.

Austinist: SXSW Hangovers: Austinist Top Fives for SXSW 2007