SXSW: Colourmusic and the Shape

By Bill Jensen At 10:30am Mar 21, 2008

IT'S FINALLY-EMPTYING-OUR-SXSW-MEMORY-CARDS FRIDAY

Colourmusic, "Yes!" (MP3)

So five British guys decided to come to Austin and play a little prank on us Yanks.

"Let's wear all white jumpsuits," one of them said.

"And we'll say we're from Kansas!” said another one.

"No, Oklahoma!" chimed in another. "Just like the Flaming Lips."

“Awesome. They will never know. We will play our brit rock. We will get them all sexed up. We will swirl our guitars, and make the pit pogo. It will be grand.”

“And we’ll call ourselves Colourmusic,” said the last one. Ah, the spelling almost gave them away.

“But we’re not shaving our beards, right?” said the first one.

“Hell, no,” they said in unison.

And there they were on Maggie Mae’s rooftop on the last night of SXSW, pretending to be a handful of bearded guys from Oklahoma.

SXSW Day 5-The Triumph of the Blogosphere...High Times at High Times...Why in God's Name Am I At The Perez Hilton Party?

By Jeff Weiss At 04:00pm Mar 20, 2008

Bloggers are every journalist's favorite whipping boy. If a shitty band gets too popular, blame the bloggers. If the standards of professional journalism have eroded too much, blame the bloggers. If by 2010, Vampire Weekend has inspired legions of college freshmen to dress as ironic yachters, blame the bloggers. Ultimately, it's as easy to scapegoat the blogosphere as it is to blog and at worst, blogs are benign (at least music ones), at best you discover a lot of good music for free. The horror.

Most importantly, the blogosphere knows how to party, which I discovered at the blogger-promoted Hot Freaks party on Saturday afternoon, a place where Al-Queda could've wiped out 82 percent of the game had it gotten enraged by one post too many about the peace-promoting qualities of the Arcade Fire (Osama hates Neon Bible). I'm not exaggerating either, the place was a veritable Elbo.ws chat room (for those keeping score, that may have been my nerdiest joke ever). While watching Islands, Lykke Li, and Japanese cartoon psychos Peelander-Z, I stumbled across My Old Kentucky Blog, Gorilla Vs. Bear, Aquarium Drunkard and Rock Insider. Other bloggers in attendance who I didn't have the pleasure of meeting included Chromewaves, Largehearted Boy and You Ain't No Picasso, who was presumably searching for Picasso.

South by Southwest in six words or less

At 01:10pm Mar 20, 2008

We’re still recovering from last week’s SXSW festivities. Too much beer, too much sun, too much beer in the sun. The one thing we didn’t get too much of was all the music happening in Austin. But with thousands of bands performing over four days at hundreds of clubs, there were only so many places we could be at one time.

Thankfully, some guy from The Morning News listened to more than 750 bands that played the music fest and wrote six-word reviews on all of them. We’re still regretting we didn’t make it to Vampire Weekend’s Friday-night showcase – we were at the Merge Records showcase or, more accurately, we were stalking Zooey Deschanel – but thanks to The Morning News recap, we’re so glad we skipped the Paul White Quintet’s concert: “My old jazz teacher’d love this.” -- Michael Gallucci

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Tags: SXSW, Music

Meet Paul Ford, the 763 mp3 Guy: He Covered the Waterfront like No Other, from Over 1,000 Miles Away

At 06:06am Mar 20, 2008

It’s probably safe to say that nobody’s South By Southwest experience this year was as comprehensive as that of Paul Ford, an editor at Harper’s and a blogger at the Themorningnews.org.

And here’s the thing – Ford never left New York City. Instead, he downloaded the SXSW 2008 Torrent File, which included single mp3s from 763 of the bands that went to Austin. (Just under half the total acts that appeared there.) And then he listened to every single one of them and wrote a six-word review of and assigned a rating to each one.

Here are a few Houston examples:

The JonBenet’s “Black Lion”: “One admires such remarkably vigorous stupidity.” (Two stars.)

Fatal Flying Guilloteens “Reveal the Rats”: “Should people from Houston sound British?” (One star.)

Chingo Bling’s “Do It”: “Chingo’s shit here is utterly ridiculous.” (Four stars.)

My mind boggled at this towering achievement, as did many others. I had to talk to this guy. – John Nova Lomax

Houstoned Rocks: So your piece is the talk of my little [rock critic] world.

Paul Ford: (Laughs) I, uh, you know, I guess that’s good.

HR: So you didn’t even go to South By?

Tags: Music

SXSW: Quasi-Celeb Candids from Austin

By Camille Dodero At 03:56pm Mar 19, 2008

Elijah Wood at the Playboy party; photo by Lacy Weathersbee/Playboy

If you've deigned to scroll through the thousands of blog droppings about this year's South by Southwest, you'll notice that, as usual, the coverage is littered with an inordinate amount of (oft-faux-) celebrity sightings. Juvenile to report breathlessly, but spend four days in a small land area with a very high concentration of (arguably) notable performers and it's very likely that you'll be drunk, spot Diplo shirtless in the crowd of a Dark Meat show, and find yourself reflexively taking a picture. This was why Al Gore invented the Internet, right?