With a lot of other commotion going on Saturday at Austin City Limits like alt-country, indie rock, hip hop and electro-pop, it could be easy to miss the multitude of sounds coming from the Dell stage. From earthly folk to out of this world experimental rock to maniacal gypsy jazz, the music of this stage requires more than just a passing interest. The music even ends in enough time to catch the headlining acts of Beck or Robert Plant & Alison Krauss.

With a name somewhere between a Looney Tunes character and a delta blues player, a musician with a handle like Langhorne Slim could be anything, but it’s really no surprise that he’s a soulful folk singer. He has a seasoned sound that draws from the very roots of American music. His perfectly imperfect vocals and down-to-earth acoustics make him a great soundtrack for early fall. Slim gained a following while touring with the Trachtenburg Family Slideshow Players, and now he’s heading to ACL with his band the War Eagles (Paul Defiglia and Malachi DeLorenzo).

Thumbing along twanging and pinging acoustic strings is the Swedish folk singer/songwriter of Argentine descent, Jose Gonzalez. There’s plenty of hum and harmony within these sentimental sounding tunes, and the mood he invokes is easily felt by those within his sonic blast radius. His last release, In Our Nature, came out last year, and it was met with sizable positive buzz. Not bad for a guy who was studying for his PhD in biochemistry before his music career got in the way. It’s ACL, and then Gonzalez is off to Beirut, Dubai and Tokyo.

Occasionally intriguing and maniacal but always entertaining, Man Man are a couple of guys with a great big sound that’s monster blues meets indie experiments meets circus troupe. In face paint and similarly matching outfits, this rowdy band of knaves bounces around the stage while playing instruments like the clavinet, Rhodes piano and xylophone. Reviews raving about their live show are nearly endless, and the group is sure to make a smash at about 3:30 on the Dell stage.

Spiritualized is essentially Jason Pierce, aka Jason Spaceman, and a rotating band of musicians which has changed ever since their beginning in 1990. The spacey, experimental rock outfit has six studio albums under their belt, one of which even garnished an “Album of the Year” title from a popular music magazine. Songs oscillate from hearty tunes full of sounds layered upon one another bringing with them a sonic punch to slightly more stripped-down numbers with acoustics and orchestrations. Then, of course, there are the songs that sound as if they are taken straight from the recordings between cosmonaut and ground control.

Shielded behind a luxurious beard and long, grizzly man locks, Iron & Wine’s Sam Beam unleashes some of the most vulnerable, gorgeous folk songs that ramble in the most down-home sort of way. Rising from humble beginnings in South Carolina, Beam has a way with words and making them hit home in the most earnest of ways. His soft and smoky vocals flirt with warm and grounded instrumentation creating a comfort zone that extends well out into the crowd. Having only been on the scene now for a few years, Iron & Wine caused some big buzz with their cover of “Such Great Heights” along with their inclusion on the Garden State soundtrack and the albums that followed. Beam now lives outside Austin.