Results tagged “sxsw2009”

They brought all their usual tricks to Waterloo Park for Mess With Texas 3 on Saturday the 21st, disrobing and parting the crowd in half right off the bat. Singer Ami Shalev then jumped into the open space in the middle of the audience, rolling around on the grass with his fellow band mates much to everyone’s amusement (or was it bemusement).

Austinist music writer Tom Thornton recently went back on Andy Langer's show on News 8 Austin to discuss how the economy affected SXSW, the secret performances that everyone seemed to know about well in advance, and the role that Twitter played during the festival. [News8Austin]

Though it’s been years and years and years since their debut (back in the days when Live was one of the world’s most relevant bands), they’ve recently brought their practically-mythologized live show back on the road, and the early bird crowd at Mohawk on Friday was damn lucky for it.

Another one of those “stick around here all day because every band is awesome” shows, the Radio Room was home to this event on the 19th. The crowd enjoyed sets by Cursive and The Avett Brothers, but the top highlights had to be an intimate set by Daniel Johnston and a blistering set by The Wrens, both clearly proving that the magic is still there.

Austinist Presents Gonna Gonna Get Down 4: We were definitely pleased with the plethora of talent we had tapped for our day show on the 18th -- Telekinesis, Here We Go Magic, J. Tillman, Elvis Perkins in Dearland, Vetiver, and The Mae Shi all made an impression on our guests. Highlights had to be the ferocious hardcore-metal assault of Young Widows, channeling the Jesus Lizard just hours before David Yow took the stage at the Austin Music Hall, and the amazing live show from Akron/Family, who are currently touring to support their upcoming release, Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free.

Reprinted, for your convenience, from our master list.

Flatstock, the ultimate showcase and market for the world's best gigposter artists, starts today at Austin Convention Center. Presented by American Poster Institute (API) and SXSW, the show runs through Sunday and is open to the public.

Find out who won here.

Thanks to everyone who made it out to our fourth annual day party at the Mohawk! If you would like to share your photos from the party with our readers, tag 'em 'austinistdayparty' on flickr. We'll have more photos of the bands, plus video, shortly.

Oh America, sometimes the Western democracy living in your attic just wants to be invited downstairs for breakfast—instead of scrounging for the crumbs you left on the chesterfield after going to work.

On Saturday, Vinyl Entertainment (along with MTVu, PaperTank Productions, Lucky Rabbit Films, and Study Breaks Magazine) presents Party To The End, a six hour extravaganza at The Compound. Entertainment comes in the form of live music by PHANTOGRAM, Solid Gold, Buddy, The Story Of, CLIPD BEAKS, as well as a DJ set by Play-N-Skillz.

Langhorne Slim is an enchanting folk singer/songwriter from Brooklyn. He leads the band - also consisting of Malachi DeLorenzo on drums/vocals and Jeff Ratner on bass/vocals - with steady acoustic strums and a soulful, organic, sometimes quaking voice.

Thanks to yelpers, rotten tomato throwers and a veritable uprising of basement bloggers, the old saying has become truer than ever before: Everyone’s a Critic. Exploring this modern trend (and taking the time to remind us of pre-blog America) is the 2009 SXSW Documentary Feature For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism, which calls movie reviewing a “profession under siege.”

Billed as an “unromantic comedy,” Sorry, Thanks is a contemplative and heartfelt detour from standard romcom fare, a skillfully made ensemble piece that makes no excuses for screw-ups, but tells you it’s okay to love them anyway.

Leading up to SXSW week, we were warned that the state of the economy this year would equate to less money being allotted, fewer sponsors in the mix, maybe even a decline in the amount of free music on every corner in town. And gasp, quite possibly a shortage of free beer and tacos. For the large part, it can be safely said that has not been the case. We’re still anticipating day shows galore and nightcaps aplenty -- keep checking our big post with information on SXSW and related events.

Here's the quick points regarding street closures and general traffic info for SXSW Music week, mostly culled from a festival press release:

For those viewers few and far between who found Slumdog Millionaire infuriatingly glib about poverty instead of heartwarming, we recommend Garbage Dreams, a documentary about the Zaballeen, a group of impoverished Egyptians living in Cairo who survive off of the money they make from recycling the trash of others.

Bugs! Gross or amazing? According to the premise of Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, a documentary directed by Jessica Oreck, our aversion to the insect and arachnid kingdoms may be culturally conditioned, rather than innate.

Here's a look back at a few entries from the vaults of Le Diamant Brut. These are bands we've profiled in the past who are playing SXSW this year. Following a little about the artists is a list of shows they're playing during the fest, and we say it's a musical imperative that you make it out to at least one of them.

Winter and snow offer a sort of pay to play combination. There are the sunburns in January from hitting the slopes, or the fact that playing the world's most glorious game requires that you endure frigid temperatures and fasten knife-like blades on a surface as hard as concrete. "Snowblindness" is a condition that occurs when you essentially become blinded by light in the middle of the dark winter, but this is a documentary about a more serious variety.

Clark Lyda and Jesse Lyda are first-time filmmakers based out of Austin and New York City. The documentary they produced and directed about the T. Don Hutto family detention center in Taylor, The Least of These, is having its world premiere Monday as part of the SxSW Film Festival.

In We Live in Public, acclaimed director Ondi Timoner pieces together footage from two of Harris' past projects, one of which was "Quiet", a chronicle of 100 people living in an underground bunker in Manhattan for 30 days, their every movement recorded (voluntarily) and broadcast online by Harris, until the cops shut it down. Maybe it was the indoor shooting range that did it? Following that experiment, Harris and his girlfriend decided to broadcast their lives 24/7 online for six months—until she had enough and moved out. This from a man who began one of the first online television networks and made millions through web consulting. Harris, "the greatest Internet pioneer you've never heard of," lived in public, and eventually lost his sense of self and his mind. And we could watch it all online.

In Observe and Report, Rogen plays a mall cop obsessed with Brandi (Anna Faris, the House Bunny herself!). When Brandi gets flashed by a…well, a flasher, he takes advantage of the situation, warning her that the perv might return to kill her and telling her that she needs protection. Hey, it’s a smooth move if you’re a lonely mall cop with nothing to lose. But with Rogen’s ne’er do well energy (and the fact that he’s a friggin' Mall Cop), we feel it's safe to assume he’s probably fighting a comically uphill battle.

Burma VJ, a documentary by Anders Østergaard, pieces together this undercover footage—which might seem a bit shaky at times, since some of the videographers were carrying their cameras hidden in bags—taken by the Burmese reporters as they put their lives on the line to make sure that the world knew about the plight of their people. The film is likely to show more of the real story than we ever saw on our television.

Akron/Family is a band unlike any other in the current indie scene: they sport three part vocal harmonies, they can folk it softly, they break out the classic rock, and they do all of it with an attentive eye on the higher planes and greater depths of existence. Not only that, but they're going to be a little busy in Austin next week, playing four shows, including a headlining spot for Austinist's day party, Gonna Gonna Get Down IV, at the Mohawk on Wednesday the 18th. Just about to release their stunningly cathartic new album, Set 'Em Wild, Set 'Em Free, we were lucky enough to hit up founding member Miles Seaton for a wide-ranging talk on the pursuit of truth, the SXSW blender, and why he's optimistic for the future of humanity.

The PureVolume House, where we'll be hosting Local Music is Sexy 7 tonight, opened last night to much fanfare — perhaps too much. One of the guests made off with a fancy gaming notebook that had been loaned by computer maker Alienware. Below is the message sent out by Josh Rowe, who's running the PureVolume space:

The plot of A Film With Me In It centers on a struggling actor who finds himself surrounded by people that are dying in suspicious ways; ways that aren’t easily explained as simple coincidences. As he and his friend try to figure out the best way to explain their presence at all these random deaths (that look like murders), things get quite complicated.

In part a genre history of 50's era sci-fi movies, Monsters from the ID promises footage of rickety-looking pre-CGI robots and aliens, along with reels of scenes in which scientists make love to women in high heels and round-collared dresses. For kitsch-seekers, the 50's flashbacks will deliver. However, director David Gargani, has bigger fish to fry, as the movie makes clear when it transitions from a meditation on the cultural factors which influenced the resurgence of sci-fi during this decade into a polemic on the need for Americans to reclaim their past love affair with science and technology—before the rest of the world passes us by.

After data entry drone Dory is fired for freaking out on an annoying coworker, he finds work as a nighttime janitor in a boring Seattle office building. Alone in this low-pile carpet universe, Dory and his crew drink, smoke, and party down in the empty cubefarm. But what they don't realize is that they've become the subject of an off-the-record corporate experiment involving a bio-engineered food additive that produces some, er, bizarre side-affects, including hallucinations, stomach cramps, and asexual reproduction. Sort of.

Andrew Bujalski's third feature, Beeswax (as in "none of your,” though we haven’t seen it so we’d hate to suppose) is being billed as “something like a legal thriller for anyone who finds ‘legal thriller’ to be an oxymoron.”