What I did on my spring vacation

I attended my 21st South by Southwest music festival in Austin. This has become a reflex – I don’t even think about it, I just go. It is one of two favorite weekends of the year. The other being the Harvest Moon Regatta: 250 sports yachts beat themselves up for 2-3 days racing offshore from Galveston to Corpus Christi, and then cap it with a day or two of intensive bragging and (ideally) victory celebrations on sandy Padre Island.

SXSW is as good, but different. The annual music event has grown to superlative proportions; it may be the largest music festival in the world for all I know. Some years ago it expanded to include a 3-day interactive conference and trade show, and there is also a SXSW film festival rolled into the mix. I understand from people who care about such things that the interactive and the film festivals are well regarded in their respective industries, and you hear about this or that movie star who was seen shooting tequila shots at the Driskill Bar, etc. But for me, the music is the draw of SXSW.

Actually, the music is one of the draws. Strategically slotted in the middle of March, the festival waits for 50,000 UT students to leave town on spring break to free up space for the out-of-towners who jam the nightclubs and concert venues in and around downtown Austin. The weekend coincides with the first round of the NCAA basketball tournament. So here’s the drill: music and partying at night; catch the games during the day; repeat three times. It’s a heady cocktail: the NCAA players and the SXSW musicians all know that this is their 15 minutes of fame. For someone who enjoys live music (check) and basketball (check) it’s heaven.

St. Patrick’s Day also falls in there, which ratchets the party up still more.

1700 bands played over the four nights of SXSW 2008, up from 1300 the year before, and for the first time, I sensed an emphasis on quantity over quality. There was less of the cohesiveness and inclusiveness that has always been one of the charms of SXSW. It was as if the band count was a metric that the promoters were shooting for in order to earn some kind of a favorable consideration – similar to the way a newspaper’s circulation drives its advertising rates. That part didn’t bother me. The folks at the Austin Chronicle who created SXSW, for whom I have tremendous respect, have made no secret that the festival is intended as an industry event, with a collateral benefit to the casual wristbander who just wants to drink beer and listen to music. The downside of the SXSW super sizing is that the overall quality of the music has taken a hit. Everyone knows that SXSW is a matter of trial and error. Listen and walk on, listen and walk, until you stumble upon a gem that you’ve never heard of – like that reggae band from Monterrey at Sholtz’s, the Swedish pop trio last year, Norah Jones eight years ago. Seems like this year’s gem-to-walk ratio was low. Maybe I’m getting old.

Technology continues to make inroads, with lots of bands using sampling, sequencing and pre-recorded tracks to enhance their sound. There are pros and cons to this: the music is often better for it, but the performance isn’t. I am curious whether the SXSW band selection committee makes any attempt to determine how much of the demo CD they base their decision on will be performed live at the gig in Austin. This year I heard a lot of quartets with only 2 or 3 people on stage. Part of it may be economics. The only compensation for playing SXSW are wristbands for the band members and a $100 stipend. Recorded bass lines and drum parts must be a powerful temptation for an undiscovered techno pop band from Iceland. But for the random listener who has never heard of the Four Thors, there is a fine line between techno art and karaoke.

The other area where technology enters in is real time MIDI performance. This is where one or more performers push previously created sounds through a variety of computer effects, all to the repeating beat of digitally perfect, but un-live drum and bass. A semi-nauseating example of this was the 11 o’clock band on Japanese night: three guys grooving out behind stacks of Sony (of course) equipment, each of them continuously adjusting knobs and slide switches without eliciting any noticeable effect on the sound. All of this was layered over the only listenable component: canned drums and bass.

But there was plenty of good stuff. The gem for me was Brooklyn – a rock band from Paris playing their first show in the US. Their songs were three minute bursts of pop harmonies with interesting, short guitar hooks. It is definitely music you would play in your car. A beautiful girl playing bass doesn’t hurt. They were the midnight show on Friday at Maggie’s Upper Deck, which turned out to be one of the good venues this year. I saw British Sea Power there the following night.