Ohmpark: SXSW 2008 Day 1: Wednesday

The festival season is in full swing here at Ohmpark as we are now in the thick of South By Southwest. This is about the polar opposite of a fest as you can get from Langerado, and so far it has been an amazing experience. After spending many hours traveling yesterday, we finally arrived here in Austin, TX and headed downtown to pick up our passes. We were trying to catch the Akron/Family show at the convention center. We were only able to see the last few minutes, but they were an incredible couple of minutes. Hopefully I can catch them again sometime this weekend.

After that we walked around the city and grabbed some grub and some Fat Tire beers. The downtown scene sort of reminded me if you took Key West or New Orleans downtown and filled it with hipsters and rock stars. It certainly appealed to me. We went back to the convention center to catch Earlimart next. They were playing in some room that was decorated very fancily called the "Bat Bar" that I'm guessing was broadcasting their shows to some Direct TV channel. Everyone had to wait in line outside until they started, and then everyone ran in. They had professional video cameras everywhere and some dude telling us to cheer and stuff. I'm guessing it was similar to what a MTV live broadcast would be like. It felt really fake and weird, and even Earlimart was joking about it. The show was great though, as they played some new stuff from their next forthcoming album.

After some more walking around and taking in the atmosphere, we headed to Orange Twin party, but we got there too early and weren't really digging what we heard. We decided to check out the Brooklyn Vegan party down the street. We caught the end of Deer Tick, who was pretty cool. We decided to get up close for the next act, Jeffrey Lewis and The Jitters, even though we had no clue what it was. It was a wise decision because i think it was the best show of the day and my first discovery of the fest. Jeffrey Lewis is a very unique singer/songwriter who is the epitome of an artist. In addition to performing awesome songs with extremely clever lyrics, he also had storybook comics he had drawn and to go with some of the songs. Check out these videos:

We stuck around the party to catch Kaki King next, who was really good as well. We had listened to the album that came out Tuesday right before we left, so it was cool to catch her and her band doing their thing. Here is a little bit of that:

I hurried over to Emo's next to catch Autolux. They were a band that I had discovered when I went to Coachella years ago and had been wanting to see live again ever since, so it was very exciting to catch them again. It seemed like they had some delays getting set up, so they only got to play 5 songs, most of which were new ones that should be on a forthcoming album I hope comes out soon. All three members of this trio rock hard and despite all the annoying pubsters down front waiting for The Black Keys next, it was a great, short set.

We closed out the night by catching a cab to the University of Texas campus to catch some weird unofficial show we heard about online. Basically, they had a huge amount of bands, and each one would play a two song acoustic set in front of about a hundred kids all sitting on the lawn in front of the UT tower. Some acts did acoustic guitar stuff, some folks brought a large band setup, there were even some rap acts, and there was so much crowd interaction.. I've never seen anything quite like it, and it was a ridiculously surreal and a one-of-a-kind experience. Here's a taste: