ON THE FL


ON THE FLOOR Andy Stott


BBQ, beer and... beats!? DJ Mag USA stop over in Austin, Texas, for an endurance contest of sorts, to scope the electronic wave crashing over SXSW...


“N


ow hang on,” you might be thinking. “DJ Mag is reviewing a massive festival for rock, country, and similar styles of music? DJ Mag?


Guitars? In Texas?” Stay with us. As odd as it initially sounds, one of the largest band-based festivals in the world has seen a shift in musical focus in recent years, extending it well beyond songwriters and amplified stringed instruments. Aside from SXSW Film and SXSW Interactive, which overlaps with SXSW Music, the festival has had a reputation as being ostensibly a rock destination for anything from local folk acts to Foo Fighters to even Bruce Springsteen. But fast forward from its inception in 1987 to 2013, and dance music’s presence has grown at such an exponential rate over the last few years that it’s quickly becoming a force to be reckoned with on the international DJ circuit.


With only a fraction of the acts larger dance music festivals have, SXSW might not be an obvious choice for hardened clubbers, used to the behemoth the week after that is Miami. There is still more than enough to choose from that satisfies our dancing needs, even to the point that we end up missing loads of sets due to time clashes. For those that find WMC and Ultra quite plastic and fabricated, Austin offers a comparatively grounded experience both musically and culturally. EDM is all but overlooked in favour of crossover genres, bass music, and modern experimentalism. No doubt these more innovative electronic trends will continue to rise in popularity as beats continue to carve their place out in Austin, and more importantly America’s, musical landscape.


DJ Mag arrives on the Tuesday night, where a blast of warm air puts a smile on our face as we head into town from the airport. Quite soon, a group of us are at an open bar at one of the first venues we walk by on the east side of the downtown area. There’s a band playing


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inside, but the excitement of being able to comfortably sit outside for the first time since summer temporarily trumps all. Food trucks line the street, selling a range of morsels from stomach-lining stodge to posh foodie fare. Nothing is remotely expensive. Within minutes we run into acquaintances from London, Berlin, and New York, which quickly replaces the novelty of being in Texas with a feeling of being in a condensed, balmy version of home.


Not long after refueling, we arrive at Haven Night Club for the Learning Secrets SXSW Showcase. Cosmic projections bounce off the walls as an enthusiastic crowd gets down to the sounds of Classixx, JDH, and Sander Kleinenberg. We leave before Aeroplane go on to check out Surefire’s showcase in the delightfully dark and sweaty basement of Barcelona. Dark Sky are fantastic, but we’re most excited to see JETS — Machinedrum and Jimmy Edgar’s recent collaborative project. The duo do not disappoint, fusing footwork and electro at dizzying bpms, which in turn gives us the energy to head off to houseparties on the outskirts of town for an absurdly long time.


Wednesday starts out as a painful reminder that willpower and common sense are necessities at SXSW. Five days of unlimited free booze, cheap food, endless after-parties, and a variety of debauched distractions is a recipe for disaster if you don’t pace yourself. We lumber over to the convention centre to grab our festival badges and slump over to Fader Fort, which serves as a central meeting point, a great place to glimpse bands. Next up is the Hype Hotel, where instinct tells us not to try the free Dorito Cool Ranch tacos being handed out. This is quite possibly the first sensible decision since landing.


Night falls and we head to another Surefire event on the Lanai Rooftop to catch Brooklynite Braille throwing down. We spend the majority of the evening at a goth


club called Elysium, for what ends up being the best few hours of the whole week. Andy Stott’s murky take on techno has an almost hypnotic effect on the crowd, while John Talabot livens things up with his Balearic disco style. We run to a nearby bar to witness a very bizarre situation, in which Loco Dice and Richie Hawtin expertly drop techno bombs at a smallish venue that’s not entirely packed to the gills. As sometimes happens at SXSW, where every building in Greater Austin has a musical act on at the same time, headliners that normally draw crowds can often be accidentally overlooked amongst the hundreds of simultaneous options. We jog back to Elysium to see Optimo. The Glasgow-based duo smash through an hour of leftfield jams and pounding classics that finally revive us straight from death’s door to the front of the room, fist-pumping and whooping all the way. The ill-advised, late night party sequence repeats itself once more.


By Thursday morning, the booze and street food is starting to wear thin, but thankfully we’d booked into Wunderbar, a free German lunch buffet soundtracked by DJs from well-known Teutonic labels like Kompakt. We wander into Viceland, Vice’s car park-turned- outdoor stage, where we get our hip-hop fix from a variety of underground MCs and DJs. A sterile white room selling a Beats by Dre speaker contraption is in an adjacent structure, but by this point we’ve begun to tire of the constant branding downtown and buy some tacos to take back to our quiet backyard for a brief respite. Nighttime sees us hit the Night Slugs party, the Percussion Lab showcase, and the ‘Sup Magazine private houseparty before the biggest treat of the day, K-X-P from Finland. The robed trio mix disco-punk rhythms, free jazz, and arpeggiated Kosmiche squelches, which rev us up for yet another round of poor decision-making on when to eventually go to bed.


By this point our bodies are begging us to write off Friday, but we somehow manage to head back into the centre of Austin for a woozy sway to Optimo’s JD Twitch, Jackmaster, and Rustie at Showcasing Scotland. Time starts to do funny things, as it does after a few days in


Pics: STEPHANIE KIMBERLEY


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