As Scottish indie pop band Camera Obscura were tuning up in advance of a 5 p.m. set, covered from the blazing sun by a huge canopy, lead singer Tracyanne Campbell asked the audience: ‘Are you hot, and freaky? A bunch of hot freaks?” The crowd yelled in approval, but not because they were anticipating the […]
Eric Harvey
SXSW09, Day 3: Actual Women This Time [Eric Harvey]
[/caption] Yesterday, while standing in the back of the room at Emo’s watching a typically stunning performance by Brooklyn’s The Dirty Projectors, I noticed out of the corner of my eye an especially short girl standing right behind me, leaning up against the wall. I’m an especially tall guy by most measures, so I quickly […]
SXSW09, Day 2: Another Pretty-Great British Band, The Wrens, Girls and Women (with no actual girls or women), and That Bizarre Feeling of Time-Space Compression [Eric Harvey]
Time and space are both weirdly compressed at South by Southwest, which you don’t realize until you’ve done the festival for two 12+ hour days. You see a dozen shows in a day at a half-dozen bars, and don’t have to walk all that far to see them. It’s different than something like Bonnaroo because […]
SXSW09, Day 1: Shilpa Ray, Wave Machines, Max Tundra, Akron/Family and A Parallel Universe of Imagined Economics [Eric Harvey]
‘South By Southwest is the ultimate middle-finger to the recession!” I’m paraphrasing Shilpa Ray, who gabbed this bit of wisdom between songs during the first of her eponymous four-piece band’s sets at the festival on Wednesday night. And sure, a fiddling-while-Rome-burns perspective (and of course I’m sure, somewhere this week, there literally is fiddling) on […]

