Over the next four days, we’ll have a team of six music writersJason Crock, Grayson Currin, Eric Harvey, Marc Masters, Kelly Reid and Paul Thompsoncanvassing Austin, Texas, during this year’s annual media-and-music mayhem, South by Southwest. We’ll be writing about a strong group of nearly two dozen local acts in Austin this week (from The Rosebuds, Megafaun and The Love Language to Chip Robinson, Terry Anderson and Roman Candle) and many of the several thousand national and international bands crowded down near Red River District and beyond. We’ll have daily updates from all the writers, as well as quick takes and tidbits throughout each day. Hit the jump for writer bios and stay tuned.
Jason Crock has contributed to Pitchfork Media since the beginning of 2005. He resides in Chicago, where he works as an editor at a publishing house in the near suburbs. He has also written for UR Chicago and the Chicago Reader. He is a graduate of the University of Pittsburgh and is pursuing his Masters of Arts at Northwestern University.
Grayson Currin “is in Texas to report on crummy alt-country garbage.” (Thanks, Crannieblaster.)
Eric Harvey is going into debt as a PhD student and Intro to Comm instructor at Indiana University, splitting time between the departments of Communication & Culture and Ethnomusicology when he’s not at the Video Saloon. He’s planning on starting his dissertation on the intersections between online music fandom, intellectual property statutes and music marketing in the fall, which he hopes becomes even more exciting than that description. He’s written record reviews and occasional columns for Pitchfork Media for 2.5 years, has had other writing published in the Arizona Republic newspaper and the academic journal New Media & Society. He blogs rather infrequently at marathonpacks.com.
Marc Masters lives in Arlington, Va., and writes for Pitchfork, The Wire, the Baltimore City Paper, the Independent Weekly and Signal to Noise. His first book, No Wave, a history of the radical music and film movement in late ’70s New York, was released in 2008 by Black Dog Publishing. During the day, he edits television shows for PBS, Discovery, National Geographic and the History Channel. He likes Jandek.
Kelly Reid is a Dec. 2008 graduate of N.C. State University where she majored in English, focusing on creative writing and journalism. During her time at N.C. State, she wrote for the Technician and also served two years as the music director for WKNC 88.1 FM. She helped establish the weekly WKNC event ‘Local Beer Local Band” as a reputable music show and also organized the fifth and sixth annual Double Barrel Benefit concerts, which featured such acts as Polvo, Bowerbirds, Annuals and Sorry About Dresden. Currently, Reid lives in Raleigh, N.C., where she balances the life of waitress and writer. She will tweet the fest here.
Paul Thompson is a freelance music journalist based in Chicago and an integrative arts instructor at the Pennsylvania State University. He realizes how confusing that sounds. His writing has appeared in Pitchfork, the Independent Weekly and the last several pages of various yearbooks.
