SXSW-A year after we fested

If you happen to be in Texas, or are following along on the net, you’ll know that SXSW started 2 days ago and runs till the end of the weekend. If not, you’re like me. That’s not true, yesterday I read this entertaining article with hundreds of six-word reviews on ALL the bands playing SXSW, along with links to mp3s.

Being reminded that SXSW is on again right now, I was inspired to revisit the whole topic and see if I had learned anything since then. I went to SXSW last year with my band, Brave Radar, and landed back home in Montreal thinking, “never again…”. I was reacting to music festivals in general, but also to a huge American festival that I found to be really overwhelming and pretty unnecessary for where we were at the time. Here are some of the things I wrote home about (on the blog) and a few unpublished notes.

From “Brave Radar at SXSW-Who we’re playing with“:

I feel a bit strange playing a big festival having barely ever played a show in my life, and really not being that good at my instruments, but there are a million other shows going on each night, and it’s gonna be a great opportunity to see some bands and do the festival thing.

When we left for Texas, we had been practicing together for 2 months, really not long at all. Our showcase would also be our first real show together EVER. So that was bizarre. I was optimistic, but also just hoping for a vacation, the weather being pretty similar to what it is in Montreal today (ie. gross). I was also overworked at the time.

After yesterday’s practice, I met up with George downtown to put up posters for this Saturday’s Assembly Screening [...] This morning I went down to Marty’s print shop to okay the assembly scriptbook proof. It looks great! They should be printed by tomorrow and then it’s folding-and-stapling party at my place [...] This afternoon I’m working out Liederwolfe arrangements and helping Conor prepare his song for the show. I’m also getting a passport and having a practice with my other band in the evening. Then it’s girly drinks at Cine to catch up with two ladies who I haven’t seen in far too long. Hopefully I can get my shift off work tomorrow to have some brainspace to pull together the last minute Assembly details and just rest a bit.

I left 3 days after the performance and screening party for the Assembly Relay Project, with all its scriptwriting, filmmaking, live music, chapbook producing, and coordination. Working out trip logistics, my first eeep was the price of getting down to Austin and being able to play our shows.

From “Miracle Fortress playing Assembly Screening and SXSW weak points“

We’re putting out close to $1000 for flights, $200 for a rush passport, plus maybe paying for a hotel because our home stay didn’t work out, all to get down there to play two shows. And now after emailing everyone playing our showcase to ask what gear we need, the sound guy for our show says that no one but the headliner gets a backline. All the other bands playing have to go splits on the gear, which is gonna be something like $300 for a drumkit and amps, and our setup is relatively simple. From what I know, bands don’t get paid from the door for playing the fest, and I don’t even get a festival pass (which is what other bands are paid in) because Conor was originally booked as a solo act.

To contrast, at Pop Montreal, we got artist wristbands as well as being paid out of the door after Pop took their cut for gear rentals. And for us, “getting to the show” in this case meant walking our gear down the street to our local cafe. While people had other qualms with Pop’s money policy, I was thrilled with how we were treated by everyone.

SXSW was expensive because we were coming from far away (though not as far as many bands); and we don’t have a record label to help out. In fact, at that point we didn’t even have a record, though Conor had plenty of CD-R releases that he brought to give away. Other bands were more prepared than us, but also, they had a reason to be there: their manager was showing them to a label person, they were looking for some exposure before their album came out, they were on tour and stopping by SXSW to play a show, they had been booked for off-festival shows in interesting venues with good bands… But I think most of these bands also took the whole festival with a grain of salt.

To this day, when you google “Brave Radar”, a lot of the results are the list of SXSW bands that got blogged and reblogged on everyone’s sites. So in that way, it’s great publicity if you have a press kit to shop around. You can arrange for lots of good press around the festival and be on people’s minds both in and out of Texas.

In my post “SXSW-First few days of the fest with your hosts Brave Radar“, I took issue with the swag bags, the festival guide, and the badge/pass system. I also talked about Austin in general, as a city, as an arts community, and as a place to travel to.

By the end of the festival I was too wiped to publish this last post. So here it is, a year late:

The first part of South By (as the locals seem to want to call SXSW) was overwhelming in the way that traveling hundreds of miles with little sleep to arrive in another country in 25 degree weather tends to be. After settling in a bit and getting a sense of the festival, Austin’s week-long invasion became overwhelming in wholly new and exciting ways.

The weirdest thing was probably the way that “free” stopped having any value as promoters advertised more and more profligate gifts, if you would only stop by their party. Bands stopped other bands on the street to compare goods and exchange details on where and how to get the best treatment. Gifting Suites at the Blender building, free food at the BBQs, free drinks at almost every party so long as you rsvp-ed, and hundreds of thousands of flyers to let you know about every possible chance to get something free from someone rich. I joked with one guy at the trade fair who was handing out mints and keychains with a Memphis logo (I’m not sure whether he was promoting some music fest in memphis, or just the city in general), “you must just be trying to get rid of a whole case of these, eh?”. “Yeah, you want one?” he reached into a case and handed me a giant bag of Memphis mints, a massive box of Memphis gum, and a Memphis keychain. “You sure you don’t wanna take more keychains? Give them to friends?”

This spirit of freebies and wasteful media when combined with the local tv and radio culture gave me a pretty depressing image of American life. For the first time, I felt like the States were a truly different country with a character that I couldn’t easily understand. And Austin was being touted as the politically and artistically progressive island in the middle of conservative Texas.

SXSW is doing more this year to think about sustainability, which you can read about here. But among the 10 things they suggest to help “stop global warming” are:

1. Drive less
Walk, bike, carpool or take public transport more often. You’ll save 1.5kg of carbon dioxide for every 5km you don’t drive!
[...]
6. Avoid products with a lot of packaging
You can save 545kg of carbon dioxide if you cut down your garbage by 10%.
[...]
9. Turn off electrical devices
Simply turning off your television, DVD player, stereo and computer when you’re not using them will save you thousands of kilograms of carbon dioxide a year.

And then stuff like “Plant a tree!” and “Recycle more!” Hmm.

Festivals take bands out of their contexts with neighbouring bands and connections to other arts and transplant them into a concentrated culture where their only connections are to their own bandmates. For me, this meant getting to know my bandmate, Conor, who I realized I didn’t really know that well, when I sat down next to him to fly thousands of miles. SXSW lacked the community that music scenes provide, where hype and industry are at least somewhat overshadowed by the energy of creative collaboration.

Our Saturday showcase was a really mixed bag. The bill was set up so that after each band the crowd was entirely turned over for another one. And I missed some of the other bands playing because I was running around trying to figure out how to pay for the backline.

It wasn’t until after our showcase that I could relax and have enough of a sense of Austin to feel motivated to see any shows. Which was inconvenient because the festival ended a day later. In general, SXSW was a pretty uninspiring. A lot of people I talked with agreed when I said things like, “Yeah, I’m not really in the mood to see a show tonight.” At one of the biggest music fests in North America, that’s probably not a good sign.

I was turned off by bands who seemed stressed to make a good impression with label folks. SXSW has no unifying style or quality in the bands they choose, beyond popularity (which really doesn’t explain why we were there, but I think there have an international quota…). I would have liked to feel that somewhere, someone was discriminating between good and bad music, even within a range of styles. The festival definitely isn’t open to everyone equally. But on what basis are line-up decisions made? It seemed to be a matter of hype. SXSW is great for bringing the most talked about bands from various countries and scenes together to put on hundreds of shows and parties for audiences comprised mainly of the media.

Aside from the shows, there was the poster fair, Flatstock, which was pretty neat. Tons of great poster artists all in one place. There was the trade show (mainly corporate junk, but a few interesting vendors: Creative Commons, smaller online distributors, regional showcases). There are tons of panels to compliment the related festivals on film, arts management, and web technology.

Seeing Dirty Projectors was my festival highlight. They played in a beer warehouse out of town with our friends in Miracle Fortress, and some other pretty great bands, though Ponytail is the only one that comes to mind. We got drunk in the middle of the afternoon and were hungover by dinner.

SXSW was actually a great lesson in figuring out what I dislike about making music, so I wouldn’t trade the experience. But I would recommend talking to other people who have been before you decide to go. It’s not the same for everyone, but it’s good to have a sense of what you’re going into, and how you can come out feeling like it was worthwhile. For me, it was this weird mixture of traditional American down-home rock n roll with a huge corporate element. Not my thing. But maybe we’ll be back in few years if it makes sense then.