Marnie Stern was onstage alone with her guitar in one among more than a thousand showcase concerts at the annual South by Southwest Music festival.
She wasn't exactly a typical singer-songwriter. Her guitar was electric; her backup band was an iPod clipped to a belt loop, and it blasted crashing, galloping drums and her own recorded guitars as she layered on frenetically repeating runs and slashing chords. "Connected, connections, connected, connections," she sang.
South by Southwest Music is four hyperactive days of making connections for musicians, recording companies and every other business touching on music, from concert bookers to copyright lawyers, publishers to Web geeks. Started in 1987 as a regional showcase, SXSW Music, as it is called, has grown into the US's largest music-business convention, with more than 10,000 registered attendees this year and many more hangers-on. For those four days, it seems, everyone is here because everyone else is here.
The Internet can now make every musician's demo recordings available at a click, but it doesn't proffer them with a smile and a handshake. As convention-goers filled the two club corridors of downtown Austin, East Sixth Street and Red River Street, their nametags invited new contacts.
From before noon to near dawn, musicians performed short sets at clubs, parties, amphitheaters, street corners, tents, backyards and probably hotel rooms, hoping to impress the right person and get their next deal. South by Southwest has become an increasingly international festival, with more than 20 percent of the performers from abroad.
One was Lonely China Day, a band from Beijing that brought a profoundly meditative tone to songs with lyrics from ancient Chinese poetry, inexorable guitar buildups that could appeal to fans of Sigur Ros, and twitches of electronic rhythm from a laptop.
There were government-supported delegations from Australia, Britain, Canada, Finland and Japan, among others. Many bands played multiple shows, sometimes two or three in an afternoon, like the Fratellis, a hearty Scottish trio who, when I saw them, strummed acoustic guitars and sang deft, catchy, 1960s-flavored songs about romantic ups and downs.
There were also hundreds of bands that had scraped together gas money, packed up vans and driven hundreds of miles to play for 40 minutes to clubs half full of people already considering the next set. And there was music for virtually every taste: doomy heavy metal (Zoroaster, Boris), supple Brazilian pop (Tita Lima), brutally innovative electronica (Amon Tobin) or charmingly nerdy indie-rock (Menomena).
While many of the bands were new — or relatively new, with a handful of albums on small labels — much of the music deliberately looked back. The Black Angels, from Austin, revived not only a Velvet Underground song title (The Black Angel's Death Song) but also the measured pace, ritualistic intensity and seething guitar of the Velvet Underground's drones, coupled with ominous incantations with echoes of Jim Morrison. The Besnard Lakes, from Montreal, drew on a more benevolent 1960s sound: the expansive, almost orchestral buildups of Brian Wilson and the Beatles' Hey Jude, so that songs with titles like Devastation and Disaster swelled into reassuring anthems.
Tokyo Police Club, a Canadian band whose oldest member is 21, reached back to the terse, kinetic structures of post-punk bands from the late 1970s like Wire and the Cure, while the Wombats, from Liverpool, merged punk-speed, guitar-charged pop, usually about love gone awry, with the oohs and ahs of Beach Boys harmony.
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