SXSW Day 3 (Friday): School Of Seven Bands


All photos by Clint Miller

The three of us that embarked on this road trip a week ago have been hitting it hard everyday and after staying up until nearly dawn Thursday night, we had to catch up a little it on sleep. So unfortunately we almost completely missed Friday’s day parties. We did, though, make it to the Asthmatic Kitty showcase just in enough time to catch DM Stith. This day party was very much in the peripheral of the where the main SXSW action was, and there was only a small, comfortable crowd for this one. They played in a garage of some art center, and the vibe reminded me of WonderRoot. I have been listening to DM Stith‘s full-length, Heavy Ghost, like crazy for the last week so this was a show I was very excited about. The album seems to possess a lot of instrumentation and production tricks, so I was skeptical as to how good he could reproduce the songs live, but with a fairly minimalistic 3-piece setup, he played his stuff beautifully.

After that I walked around the area near that day party and checked out a few others nearby. I caught a little bit of The Mae Shi at some interesting venue that had an outdoor roller skating rink and while they were playing, the crowd surrounded them with a big parachute looking thing that the band played under. It was a cool scene, and I think I’m coming back to this venue for something again later today.

After that we headed to the Radio Room where our choice of showcase for the night. First up we caught Micah P. Hinson. I listened to one of his albums one the way to Texas and it was pretty cool. He seemed to have a ton of technical difficulties for this show, and while it didn’t really match up to what i heard of his studio work, I did enjoy the set. His clothing was a hodgepodge of clashing styles, and it paralleled his music. He would go from a Texas sort of country to loud noise jams at the drop of a hat.


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