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Ray and Peter Lek

Along with the rest of the DC-9 crew, the Lek Brothers made it down to Austin last week for a look at the music festival with more of a dance and DJ focus.

The Lanai Rooftop Lounge, Hair of the Dog and Barcelona were a few of the venues they hit up. They caught up with DJ's from the Dallas area like DJ Select, Schwa and Big J.

Check out the shots in our slideshow here.

[Last week, we asked a few bands to check in with us from time to time over the course of the week to tell us about their SXSW experiences. Now, with the fest over, those diatribes are starting to show. Johnny Lloyd Rollins' take on the fest is a little different from the others we've posted so far. For one, none of his showcases were sanctioned SXSW events. And, second, he videotaped his entries. Ah, technology. Enjoy.]


Explains Rollins: "RJ Wafer and Kirk Miller (metro mix NYC) join me for some sightseeing as we do business at SXSW."

[Last week, we asked a few bands to check in with us from time to time over the course of the week to tell us about their SXSW experiences. Now, with the fest over, those diatribes are starting to show. Here's Telegraph Canyon frontman Chris Johnson's SXSW diary, for your reading pleasure...]

Hal Samples

Telegraph Canyon, yucking it up.

Wednesday:

Playing in a band can feel like going to summer camp with your friends week after week. Our first trip to SXSW is no exception.

I'm sure someone did us a favor, or there was a clerical error that lead to us being here, but we didn't ask any questions.

Packed to the gills with enough video games, toy helicopters and junk food to ensure a good time no matter what, we set out for Austin on Wednesday morning. We arrived to find beautiful weather and tons of traffic. Fun always seems to start with no fun at all.

It could have been worse, though, and we knew it. We recently had our van totaled by a drunk driver, so we replaced it with a later model RV. The old van would overheat if you turned the AC on, so sitting in traffic in our surrogate living room was pretty much the shit.

We got set up and settled into the $10-a-night RV slot on Barton Springs Road and headed downtown to gather our wrist bands, tote bags, and free energy drinks full of enough sugar to make your sweaty ass feel like you need a whiskey drink to start turning this thing around. I spent most of Wednesday night show-hopping and running into old friends. A few unmemorable shows led to a quick cab ride back to the RV for some much needed rest.

Patrick Michels

The best photo of SXSW, in my book. And, yes, we at DC9 are clearly obsessed with Monotonix. We know.

If all goes to plan (which never happens, but we'll see), we should have a few more belated dispatches from bands who played SXSW popping up in the next couple of hours and/or days. (Speaking of which: Do yourself a favor and read The O's' dispatch. Trust me).

In the meantime, as far as DC9er commentary goes, this, mercifully, is the last we'll speak of all that Austin-related shitstorm for a while. So, without further ado:

Top five performances (not counting Metallica's incredible "secret" show), in no particular order:

• Asobi Seksu, whose sound is far more crushing and immeditate than its name, which translates to "casual sex", implies. Hope you caught these guys at Rubber Gloves on Sunday, Dentonites.
  
• At the Mohawk on Thursday night night, Akron/Family not only got the crowd dancing hippie-style to its world-folk rock, but also showcase the first--but not the last--stage dive I'd see at this year's fest. Saw this elsewhere (forget where) so I can't claim it as my own insight necessarily, but rest assured: At SXSW '09, the stage dive returned in a BIG way.
  
• France's Yelle, if only because she was able to turn the beer-soaked, sweaty, dirty confines of Emo's Main Room into the kind of all-out dance party you only see in movies. Also: Loved her Jane Fonda dance moves.
• Dinosaur Jr's "secret show" at the Mohawk, which was not only great, but was loud as fuck. The secret: The four full-stack amps set up right behind J. Mascis on stage. Yep, that was more equipment than Metallica had on stage during its show the next night on Stubb's far bigger stage down the road.
  
• And, lastly, Passion Pit, who proved on Thursday, at its first SXSW performance, that its incredibly catchy dance music comes off quite well live.

Worst performance: Gil Mantera's Party Dream, whose members should probably start rehearsing without mirrors from here on out.

[Last week, we asked a few bands to check in with us from time to time over the course of the week to tell us about their SXSW experiences. Now, with the fest over, those diatribes are starting to show. Here's The O's' take on SXSW...]

Thursday, March 19, 2009

Dear O's Journal,

It's 10:30 AM. For fuck's sake, John's running late again. I swear, he never is on time. He said we'd leave at 10:00. Geez. SXSW: Can we survive? It seems unlikely. If we can make it through without visible scars, a hospital bill, an injury sustained while saying, "Hey everybody! Watch this!," random bruises, dropping an entire pizza, sleeping, having people literally avoid me by walking a safe distance away by making a large circle, listen to "Stairway to Heaven" eight times (nearly in a row), get told to put my shirt back on (but what they really mean is put your dingle back into your boxers)... If we can make it through without those things happening, then maybe we will be OK...

Oh wait, what? We're going to promote; to work? Huh. Hmm. Stuff.

Patrick Michels

While most of the DC-9 crew enjoyed SXSW's offerings at a safe distance from the stage, note-taking and reflecting on the music, some of us did battle up by the stage to get concert shots, throwing elbows and telephoto lenses.

We've got a handful of band photo slideshows, along with some other photo sets that'll give a pretty good idea what it was like down in Austin last week. In case you missed checking out our photo coverage, a rundown of our slideshows (and who's in them) follows after the jump.

Jesse Hughey

King Khan and the Shrines Friday night at Emo's.

Two days after returning from Austin, my feet, back, ears, lungs, and liver have finally stopped throbbing in pain, but the memories--most of them great--will last a lifetime. Here are a few I didn't get to share while I was there.

Bands I Regret Missing: Delta Spirit, Awkquarius, Peelander-Z and Wavves (even though a friend texted me to report the band's set was "Bo-ring"). But most of all, Late of the Pier, whose crazy-ass CD I wrote about here and whose crazy-ass live show Pete wrote about here. In fact, I left Devo a bit early to catch Late of the Pier's 1 a.m. set at Aces Lounge Friday night, only to find a handwritten note explaining it was canceled "due to technical issues." But when life gives you lemons you paint that shit gold, so I headed to Emo's Main Room for King Khan and the Shrines. Which brings me to my next memory...

Dallas' own Erykah Badu had herself quite the weekend, turns out. More eventful than yours, I'm guessing. Unless, that is, you somehow managed to...

• ...evade a stalker (as Unfair Park unearths this morning) and get delayed on your travels to SXSW.
  
• ...have your manager announce to the audience at your free SXSW Auditorium Shores performance--just before it was set to start--that you wouldn't be able to make it down because of "travel issues," as one source at the show told us on Saturday.
• ...have the crowd at said performance scatter and leave when it found out you wouldn't be playing (according to the same source)
• ...somehow, against all odds, make it to Austin in time to perform a couple of songs with your side project The Cannabinoids anyway, much to the delight of those fans who'd remained.
  
• ...perform a couple of shows in Austin, and none in Malaysia (as we'd wondered). And, not surprisingly, annoy a bunch of Malaysians in the process.
• ...perform alongside Common and Kanye West at Kanye's "secret" Saturday night show at the SXSW Fader Fort, as the above video shows.

And, let's not forget the fact that she just had a child a few weeks back. Clearly, this woman is a superhero.

Patrick Michels

Yelle turned her Emo's performance into an all-out dance party on Saturday night.

Act: U-N-I, a backpacker hip-hop duo from Inglewood, California.
Where: Speakeasy
What It Was Like: Stumbling into a nice surprise. There's a high energy feel and definite grittiness to U-N-I's sound, thanks to beats that blend the backing tracks of modern acts like The Cool Kids and older, East Coast acts like Boogie Down Productions.
Verdict: Worth looking into further, for sure. The beats were pretty cool and the lyrics earicatching--"I B-boy stance, I don't Superman dance" got more than a few of U-N-I's audience members smiling. But if there's one thing working against U-N-I, it's that there's a glut of like-minded acts popping up both at SXSW and elsewhere. And though there's not necessarily anything new to the band's package, it was engaging enough to make downloading the duo's upcoming release, A Love Supreme, when it's released as a free download on March 31. After all, it's free.

Well, my SXSW trip is over. I didn't manage to survive solely on day-party free food and beer the way I'd hoped to because doing so would have been at the sacrifice of other, better shows. Plus, my experience Thursday taught me not to trust a free-beer or free-food promise. My food expenses were far lower than I expected simply because I hardly ever had time to eat. I stopped for Whataburger at about 3 a.m. last night driving back when I realized that I hadn't eaten anything since breakfast. There was so much to do, see and hear that food just didn't occur to me.

On Saturday I managed to save a few bucks by backpacking my own beer into "Mess With Texas"; a sixer of Lone Star tallboys cost less than a single Miller Lite tallboy would have at festival prices. Then after talking my way into the VIP area I almost scored a free pair of headphones from a Skull Candy marketing representative, but then he asked what band I was in. Turns out the giveaways were for musicians only.

Other freebies included an energy drink, Wi-Fi connection at The Courtyard Marriott (available to anyone, not just paying guests) and, of course, free parking on residential streets east of I-35. Mostly, though, what I got for free was exercise. I walked more over these four days than I had the entire year leading up to SXSW. So there's the bright side to the recession. Don't think of it as being too broke for a taxi or parking spot; think of it as free exercise.