Frank Kimenai is present at the yearly SXSW festival, he will give us live blog updates from Austin! This is the third part in the series!

After 2 relatively easy days of gigging, Thursday was gonna be a busy one. Started out with lunch with the guys from the Philly Fest, a new festival in Philadelphia, that’s being organized by 2 independent promoters that are friends of my friend Shawn. Met them last year, and helped them out a bit a while back with contracts etc. They are cool dudes, and it was good to hear that the first edition of this film and music fest went well. Had an interesting talk about how to raise money for festivals. These guys are working with a lobbyist that searches for sponsors for them. He gets a 15% cut of the sponsor money after he hauls in $60.000,- The guys are also working together with this big stock broker from Philly, that invested $300.000,- in the fest together with a group of other investors. They bought “shares”  in the festival, and expect a return on investment of 19% in a year. Hope it will work out for them. It’s interesting to see the constructions that Americans have to raise money. I guess a litte entrepeneurism wouldn’t hurt Dutch festivals, but all in all, these constructions seem high risk…

After lunch, I went to Emo’s to hook up with my friends from Norwegian experimental doom metal band Altaar. Haven’t seen them in a while, so it was good meeting up and hanging out with Sten and they guys. We watched Kverletak, which was actually a pretty good show, with a lot of young kids dancing some sort of a cross breed between moshing and breakdancing. Funny to watch. Hung out with the guys for a while and found out that one of them is playing in a death metal band that I wanted to book for Incubate, called Obliteration, and the other one in a black metal band that I wanted to book, called One Tail, One Head. Small world, once again. After some beers, we decided to check out Beerland, where the Chaos in Tejas showcase was on. Great line-up with Altaar, Cult of Youth, Zola Jesus, Liturgy and a bunch of other cool bands playing. Too bad that nobody was really there during the Liturgy show. They ripped!

So, time to go see the The Hague showcase. After my blog post caused a lot of commotion last year, I was really curious to find out if this year went better. They chose a way better venue for it than last year. It was in Red Eyed Fly, a nice and smaller venue on Red River, not as posh and pretentious as the one of last year. I walked in during Pop Up Animal kids. It wasn’t that busy, about 70 people there I guess, mainly people from the Hague and the Netherlands, but also some US crowd. To be honest, I think the band was quite ok, but I still don’t think it makes any sense for a band of this size to play here. It just isn’t to a level that it makes a difference here yet. After that, The Deaf were on. They had a pretty decent crowd, I’d say about 150 people, and drew some friend from last year and the prior shows, some I guess you could say that they have some kind of a following here. Wich is good ofcourse. Music wise, I think the Deaf are an amazing bands, and if they try really hard, and hopefully connect with some local band, or a US lead in general, like a booking agent, or a manager, they might be able to do something in the States. There’s just so many bands over here that you really need to make a difference, otherwise it’s absolutely of no use to play here. Americans have enough mediocre bands of their own. My Norwegian friends liked it, by the way…. ;)  About the showcase. I still think it is well spent tax payers money. With all due respect for the bands, I think showcasing for a small city like The Hague, on a big festival like SXSW, is more like window dressing. I think the way to do it, is find a functional connection with a (couple of) strong partners, like labels, e-zines, local bands, or booking agency. Promote it together, involve each others network, and create synergy, because this way, it just doesn’t really make a difference, and the investment is not sustainable at all.

So, after the free The Hague beers, I went down to see Roky Erickson with Billy Gibbons. I saw Roky last december in Antwerp, which wasn’t all that good. He had the same band here with him, and they still weren’t all that good. Billy Gibbons only played 2 songs, and no solo’s or whatever. It weren’t the best 10 bucks ever spent, I guess I’m kinda done with seeing Roky playing live…too bad.

I went down to see John Maus, who I missed (but will see on an Incubated show in Tilburg), and saw a bit of Castanets, and briefly bumped into the guys from the Black Atlantic, who are doing extremely well here in the US. Geert, their main man, told me that they were doing a tune for a US TV series (that payed well!!) and that their video will be screened in about 10.000 Mac Donalds and Taco Bell restaurants here in the States for a week, because some marketing dude liked the music and the video. Good for them, altough I honestly must say that it wouldn’t be my choice to get screened at MacDonalds and Taco Bell, especially when you have strong punk roots, like the Black Atlantic guys….

Anyways, after that, I tried to get into a Pitchfork showcase, but it was way too busy. So I met up with my friend Stuart from the London noiseband Dethscalator, and we hung out at the Nanotear showcase in Barbarella. Nanotear is a management and booking agency from Portland, run by one of the nicest dudes you’ll ever meet in music industry, Nathan Carson. Him and the guys from YOB stayed at my place during the last Roadburn festival in Tilburg for a week, because they couldn’t fly out due to that Volcano. I got to know them pretty well, so it was really nice seeing all of them again. The showcase Nathan put up was really good. He got asked by the venue to do it, so he didn’t have to rent out the room or anything. A rarety here in austin. I saw Arabrot, Worm Ouroboros and the devestating doom metal from Yob, and it was all good! Especially Yob, they ripped the place apart. Hope they will make it to Europe in september, so we can book them on Incubate.

Last but not least, I saw Charles Bradley and the Menahan Street Band at Stubb’s. It was simply amazing. Mix the best of Otis Redding, Marvin Gaye and some James Brown, and you have Charles Bradley. Backed up by one of the best soul bands I’ve ever seen, this was simply the best show I’ve seen on the festival. Hope to see them, or any of the high quality Daptone records bands, real soon back home.