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.
PHOTO: NY TIMES NEWS SERVICE
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.
But there were also new twists on past styles. Maps & Atlases, from Chicago, packed the intricacies of progressive rock into much shorter attention spans. Black Moth Super Rainbow, from Pittsburgh, played pulsating, mesmerizing songs on vintage keyboards, with vocals filtered electronically through a vocoder, while animated videos unfurled in neo-psychedelic splendor overhead. Luminous Orange, from Yokohama, Japan, swerved between sunny pop melodies and unlikely but invigorating shifts of key and tempo. Illinois, a band from Pennsylvania, flaunted a banjo in rowdy songs that mingled Merseybeat rock, skiffle and punky absurdism.
This year SXSW had a stronger hip-hop presence, recognizing both the new prominence of Texas hip-hop — there was a packed 1am set by Devin the Dude, from Houston, a few days before the release of his new album — and hip-hop's long success as a street-level, do-it-yourself phenomenon. Public Enemy, which revolutionized hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, played one of the festival's free amphitheater shows, leading an audience of thousands in chants against US President George Bush.
In a music business that can no longer center itself on sales of hit CDs, even for the lucky few that have them, SXSW has thrived as musicians piece together careers in other ways: from touring, from selling their own music online, from licensing their songs to movies or advertisers. If the festival has an overall message, it's that musicians need to build their own support systems and hustle for themselves. For most musicians, performing rather than recording will be the bulk of a career, and with six sets a night in more than 60 clubs — along with countless affiliated and unaffiliated daytime and late-night shows — SXSW prizes live performances above all.
And is also a festival that celebrates perseverance as much as trendiness. At the Convention Center longtime musicians — Pete Townshend of the Who, Emmylou Harris, the Memphis soul mainstay Booker T. Jones, the Brazilian songwriter and minister of culture Gilberto Gil — spoke about careers, memories, ideas and inspiration. (Then Townshend went out and jammed as a surprise guest in the clubs.)
There were reunions of the Stooges, the Buzzcocks, the Saints and Booker T. and the M.G.'s. Mary Weiss, the lead singer of the Shangri-La's, was promoting a new album, and Stax Records celebrated its 50th anniversary with appearances by Isaac Hayes and William Bell. There was also a set by Jandek, the pseudonymous Texas who has released 49 albums on his own label since 1978 and didn't perform in public until 2004 — perhaps the most independent musician in a festival devoted to self-sufficiency.
Stern had another song that summed up South by Southwest's lessons: "Keep on!" she sang as her guitar lines ricocheted everywhere. "Keep at it!"
On a harsh winter afternoon last month, 2,000 protesters marched and chanted slogans such as “CCP out” and “Korea for Koreans” in Seoul’s popular Gangnam District. Participants — mostly students — wore caps printed with the Chinese characters for “exterminate communism” (滅共) and held banners reading “Heaven will destroy the Chinese Communist Party” (天滅中共). During the march, Park Jun-young, the leader of the protest organizer “Free University,” a conservative youth movement, who was on a hunger strike, collapsed after delivering a speech in sub-zero temperatures and was later hospitalized. Several protesters shaved their heads at the end of the demonstration. A
The term “pirates” as used in Asia was a European term that, as scholar of Asian pirate history Robert J. Antony has observed, became globalized during the European colonial era. Indeed, European colonial administrators often contemptuously dismissed entire Asian peoples or polities as “pirates,” a term that in practice meant raiders not sanctioned by any European state. For example, an image of the American punitive action against the indigenous people in 1867 was styled in Harper’s Weekly as “Attack of United States Marines and Sailors on the pirates of the island of Formosa, East Indies.” The status of such raiders in
As much as I’m a mountain person, I have to admit that the ocean has a singular power to clear my head. The rhythmic push and pull of the waves is profoundly restorative. I’ve found that fixing my gaze on the horizon quickly shifts my mental gearbox into neutral. I’m not alone in savoring this kind of natural therapy, of course. Several locations along Taiwan’s coast — Shalun Beach (沙崙海水浴場) near Tamsui and Cisingtan (七星潭) in Hualien are two of the most famous — regularly draw crowds of sightseers. If you want to contemplate the vastness of the ocean in true
On paper, the Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) enters this year’s nine-in-one elections with almost nowhere to go but up. Yet, there are fears in the pan-green camp that they may not do much better then they did in 2022. Though the DPP did somewhat better at the city and county councillor level in 2022, at the “big six” municipality mayoral and county commissioner level, it was a disaster for the party. Then-president and party chairwoman Tsai Ing-wen (蔡英文) made a string of serious strategic miscalculations that led to the party’s worst-ever result at the top executive level. That year, the party
RSS