D.C. was well-represented this year at South by Southwest, with a ton of local bands present at showcases like DC Does TX and others. Amid the massive festival's insanity, I caught a sampling of D.C. talent, from These United States and Wild Flag (featuring Mary Timony) to Ted Leo (hey, he lived here for a while) and Bad Brains. Shooting the Brains' whole set, without injuring myself or my Nikon as a mosh pit raged around me, will long remain an incredible (albeit slightly scary) memory.

These United States

Wild Flag

Ted Leo

Bad Brains

Additional photos from these sets, as well as for various other SXSW bands like The Kills, Duran Duran, and Wanda Jackson can be found here over the next couple of days.

—seems, it's getting in the way, and I'm afraid now to browse Reliable Sources and accidentally click on your inevitable "featured" offer for discount antidepressants.

Last year's Sweetlife Festival was a free, four- or five-act assembly of local acts masked as an excuse to buy some expensive salad and lousy frozen yogurt Pinkberry knockoff in a Dupont Circle parking. Yeah, that ain't happening again. This year it costs $55 and a trip to Merriweather Post Pavilion to rock out "sustainably" with this lineup, headlined by The Strokes and joined by Girl Talk, Lupe Fiasco, Ra Ra Riot, Crystal Castles, and others. When salad hawkers tell you to "go green," they're not talking about Mother Earth.

Speaking of environmental initiatives that are sure to influence policymakers, the Environmental Film Festival is back. TBD has a "manageable guide" to this treehuggers' fortnight, if "manageable" means your computer can queue up a few dozen YouTube videos on a single page. Mine could not, so here's Matt Siblo's text-only preview.

Andrew Beaujon unmasks Franklin Schneider, the cheekiest contributor to DCmud, the oddball real-estate blog run by an actual real-estate agency. Schneider's reply to Beaujon's request for an interview: "fuuuuuuuck!!!!...what are you, in the market for a waterfront condo???"

The Post Style section leads off with Philip Kennicott's stark assessment of the images coming out of disaster-strewn Japan. First came videos of the earthquake and resulting tsunami—"immediate visions of horror, inundation, muck and destruction"—followed by images of the chaos unfolding at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant, "the steady, fixed view of a faraway industrial plant, hazy, vague and remote." Viewed together, Kennicott asks, "which is more frightful?"

Chateau Marmont: stop trying.

If you're in Austin, Texas this week (for, you know, music and sending out obnoxious tweets), DC Does Texas, featuring Carol Bui, Typefighter, The Caribbean, and others starts at noon at Lovejoy's on Neches Street.

Mike Madden finds strong evidence for what might be the worst bar mitzvah ever in this DIY Bieberism by Zachary Freiman, son of music producer and D.C. expat Scott Freiman:

Oy.

BREAKING: Snoop Dogg sent out a series of heartbreaking tweets early this morning. R.I.P. Nate Dogg.

Washington City Paper: How did South by Southwest go this year?

Janine Wilson:  SXSW was a great time this year. I had five non-SXSW showcases around town and they all went swimmingly. My favorite was for GoGirls—a community of independent women artists—they were also webcasting the showcase and during our set I was told some folks from Argentina were watching and enjoying our music. Very cool. I ran into Matthew McConaughey at Antone’s and slid him a copy of the new CD. I absolutely believe "Wakin’ Up in Texas" should be in a Sandra Bullock movie so now I’m one step closer… While I was leaving the bathroom at Guerro’s (great Margueritas!) I saw Val Kilmer—stars everywhere!

WCP: Did you make any business connections or was it just a fun time in front of an appreciative crowd?

JW: I absolutely made contacts—new and old—that’s part of the reason to be there! It’s a great way to schmooze although there is so much going on it can be a bit daunting. We did have appreciative crowds, too.

WCP: Did you grow up singing? Learn in church or school or shower or elsewhere or later in life with assistance from others?

JW: I did grow up singing in musicals in school, a little church choir, lots of records and radio. I have studied with some great vocalists as well—Pam Bricker and Lisa Rich here in D.C. and Katie Agresta in NYC.

WCP: How did you and Max Evans meet and start working together?

JW: Max and I met while I was working at Counts Western Store that used to be on Wisconsin Avenue near Tenley Circle. Mr. and Mrs. Counts used to hang with the likes of Patsy Cline and Roy Clark so they had lots of good stories. Max would stop in before his guitar lesson across the street so we became friends. He played in a group called the Thangs here in D.C. and then moved on to Austin. He moved between NYC and Austin for a few years and when I started working on my first album in Austin, I tracked him down in NYC but he  was moving back to Austin a week or two before I was going to be there so that worked out perfectly. When he moved back to the D.C. area we started to perform and write together. Nice full circle.

WCP: You’ve shifted over the years from blues rock to Americana and guitar-pop—how do you explain this transformation if you think that description is accurate?

JW: I have been down a musical road of sorts—I was performing  rockabilly at the very beginning, then moved on to blues and now roots-rock/Americana/AAA whatever you wanna call it—I’m still trying to figure that one out exactly. It seems these days you have to be extremely pigeon-holed. It was just my natural progression not so much a conscious decision but just my personal musical journey.

WCP: Who is in your current band? Can you tell me a little about them and how you  started working with them?

JW: My current band is Max, Tommy Hannigan on bass, and Clark Matthews on drums. Both of them are part of the cream of D.C. musicians and I’m very fortunate to be playing with them. Clark played with Tom Principato for many years and Tommy with the Shambells, Catfish Hodge Band, and various bands in Austin and Dallas, Texas. On keys we sometimes have Mookie Siegel (David Nelson Band and formerly Donna Jean and the Tricksters) or Brian Simms (Junkyard Saints). For the CD we used New York guys who were  absolutely fantastic.

WCP: Are your lyrics autobiographical or a combination of the personal and the fictional and things you’ve heard from others? Or other?

HW: My lyrics are mostly autobiographical but also observations of others and life. I also get ideas from anything from overhearing conversations to movies/TV and yes, my own imagination!

WCP: What summer local and national gig plans do you have?

JW: We have a busy calendar with many summer concerts series and festivals and we’ll be adding more as we go along. The website is kept up to date so that will give you more info should you need it. As of right now I’m planning a CD release in NYC (no date as of yet) and my hometown of Columbus, Ohio, (some high school classmates started a “Bring the Janine Wilson Band to Ohio” page!). I do want to tour more but nothing immediately on the books.

Janine Wilson & band performing for free Saturday April 24 at noon at  Magruder Park,  3911 Hamilton Street, Hyattsville, MD.  (301) 985-5020

Sleigh Bells: Hipster-hop party yelps salted with butt-rock guitar riffs. Not the revolution.

Moon Duo, Pocahaunted, and No Age after the jump

Moon Duo: Wooden Shjips guitarist Ripley Johnston and a young lady with a keyboard poured stoner-haze over drum machine loops during the WFMU showcase at Encore. The discerning record nerd would recognize subtle nods to vintage psych, as well as lo-fi trance legends like Spacemen 3, Suicide, and Loop. But if you weren't keyed in to the band's reference points, you might have just thought you were watching a guy with a wizard beard practice guitar solos.

Pocahaunted: Part freak-folk throw-down, part pagan rite, and part thrift-store costume party, Pocahaunted's performance at the Not Not Fun showcase was weirdly uplifting. Think Tom Tom Club jamming with Sun Ra.

No Age: The L.A. based space-punk band played a surprise set at the Ecstatic Peace showcase Friday night, doing new stuff from it's upcoming LP. A new guy, working the nobs on a sampler, filled out the duo's stripped-down sound nicely. You can't help feel a little bad for him, though. It's hard to be the guy tasked with twisting an FX-send on a mixer while the rest of your band is rocking-out.

Also seen: Dam Funk, Sex Worker, Wet Hair, Eternal Tapestry

Saturday Recap: Nada. Nothing. I had to catch a plane at 6 am, so I missed (Insert sad emoticon here).

Deleted Scenes: Having rolled into town in the wee hours of the morning, Deleted Scenes was looking a little worse for the wear at yesterday's show. But however disheveled they were, the bar–a grimy sports dive about a mile out of Austin–had them beat. True troopers, they delivered a pretty good set anyway. New songs threw some double-kick drum and Casio DG-20 into the band's spacey indie-rock.

Yellow Fever: Slant 6 and Quix-o-tic frontwoman Christina Billotte had one of the best singing voices of the early '90s–equal parts bored and bluesy. But she's M.I.A. these days, so Austin's Yellow Fever will have to do. The duo–with its eerie melodies and spare instrumentation–is an adequate stand in, though. The crowded tent at the Other Music showcase was probably the wrong place to hear them. Better to catch Yellow Fever in somebody's living room, where they would be spared the competition of a chatty 100 person-strong bathroom line.

More after the jump

Dum Dum Girls: Juxtaposed against the sweaty mid-afternoon masses, L.A.'s Dum Dum Girls–clad in black dresses, dark sunglasses, and heavy lipstick–looked like they had been beamed in from another planet. Or perhaps plucked from Elvira's pencil box. The band's set at the Other Music showcase was drenched in reverb, so much so that apart from the word "baby" it was hard to decipher any of the band's lyrics. But between the clothes, the hair, and the band's gothy girl-pop message came across perfectly clear.

Love of Diagrams: Back for its first U.S. tour since 2007, Melbourne, Australia's Love of Diagrams performed a set drawn largely from its new record Nowhere Forever. I liked it, but they're friends, so take that as you will. The new stuff is heavy and expansive–a grittier take on '90s shoegaze legends like Ride. Buddies or no, I don't think there's any arguing that Love of Diagrams have the best rhythm section in the Southern Hemisphere.

Explode Into Colors: I only caught five-minutes of this set, but what I heard I like. All-girl post-punk heavy on the percussion–a modern answer to ESG with a bit of dancehall reggae flavor.

Ray Davies: I showed up to La Zona Rosa early in order to wait around for the Roky Erickson (see below) with no idea who else was playing. At first I thought somebody was playing Kinks covers, but it turned out to be the real thing. Davies played most of the set accompanied by another guitarist, but at the end a full backing band came on stage to belt out a few of the hits.

Roky Erickson & Okkervil River: Having watched the Roky Erickson documentary, I'm slightly bewildered that anybody could get him on stage at all. Austin folk-rockers Okkervil River succeeded, somehow. I had high hopes that they'd hit the stage with a killer version of "Slip Inside This House." That may have bit a bit of a lofty expectation. Who knows, though, they may have played it–since it was already 2am, I didn't stick around too long. The band did do a pretty good take of "Two Headed Dog" and Erikson still sounds pretty unchained, although he would have sounded more so had been willing to sing directly into the mic.

Also seen: Real Estate, The XX

Tennis System: Apparently Tennis System had a rough trip down to Texas. According to guitarist/singer Matty Taylor the band's shows in Richmond and Lexington were shut down by the cops before it could finish its first two songs. Noise complaints, apparently. That's bad news gas money-wise, but it's great for myth-building, I guess. The sound-guy at Rusty Spur, Tennis System's first SXSW gig, wasn't exactly draconian about noise, but he did make the band back the volume knobs off of the Dinosaur Jr.-setting. Some dude who looked like Kid Rock's younger, skeezier, brother sat at the bar four the first few songs and bobbed his head.

Hozac Records, The Walkmen, and Flying Lotus after the jump.

Hozac Records Showcase (Rayon Beach/The Girls at Dawn: Everybody at this showcase, held at Austin's Trailer Space Records, looked kind of like a Peter Bagge drawing. That's appropriate, though, given Hozac's catalog of slanted and gritty garage-rock singles. Austin-based trio Rayon Beach opened the show–delay drenched vocals trying to muscle their way through a wall of fuzz. If a better there's a better band riffing on The Urinals' legacy right now, I cannot name it. The Girls at Dawn played some O.K. teen-girl-zombie pop, too.

The Walkmen: Apparently the New York City-via-Washington, D.C. indie-rock band has been hard at work on its fifth record. They dropped a few new songs into the set at Stubbs BBQ last night, but had lead singer Hamilton Leithauser not called them out as such, I would not have noticed. The Walkmen's schtick–heavy reverb guitar, heavy reverb organ, super-solid drummer–is still intact. Leithauser's singing still strives to locate the middle ground between Bob Dylan and Frank Sinatra. Not bad.

Beaches: Five Australian women–three guitars, bass, and drums–playing scrappy instrumentals after a whole afternoon spent drinking. Sort of like listening to three copies of The Clean's Compilation simultaneously. In my book, if you band has three guitars, you can't fail.

Warp Showcase (Flying Lotus):
Overheard while waiting for Flying Lotus to take the stage: "These guys are the Dream Theater of electronic music." Those words–spoken by an audience member at the Warp Records showcase–are pretty right on. If Warp's recent crop of beatmakers has anything in common with prog rock, it's that they share the credo "More is more." L.A.'s Flying Lotus, who headlined, packed his 40-minute set with dense instrumental hiphop run through a laptop Cuisinart. It's hard to look like a rock star while you're working knobs on a computer, but Flying Lotus kept a good rapport with the audience, periodically halting the onslaught to tease a crowd predominantly composed of journalists. "Make sure you tweet that Flying Lotus is killing shit right now," he said.

Good morning! This is the fifth post on this Web site about the death of Alex Chilton. I found out about it last night via Twitter, and an hour later, the influential Big Star leader was beginning to feel overmemorialized. Everybody wants their piece of Chilton's death.

And that, especially in this case, is OK: For me, and for a lot of people, Big Star was like The Wonder Years but cool, inhabiting that anxious, bittersweet teenage universe I associate with a number of films from the '70s but that truthfully none of them nails as well as #1 Record/Radio City. That disc collects the band's first two albums, and I bought it seven or eight years ago in a shitty used CD store on Rockville Pike that's probably not there anymore. I'm fairly sure the clerk told me it was perfect. He also recommended Television's unfortunate early-'90s reunion album, but I didn't know enough at the time to realize that should've raised some flags.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this, and I don't have any Big Star memories as acute as March Hirsh's (you should really read his tribute). All I know is that the chorus of "The Ballad of El Goodo"—all shimmering guitars, sad-angel harmonies—still releases all the right chemicals in my head.

IN OTHER NEWS:

The D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities' latest issue of its ART(202) Journal is online.

DCMumboSauce.com reminds purveyors of mixtapes: Include a tracklist!

The New York Times' Ben Sisario ponders the stakes of South by Southwest. Conclusion: They're not very high. When I wrote about New York's CMJ Music Marathon in the fall, I landed on a similar thesis.

Here is a video from David Byrne's ill-advised song cycle about Imelda Marcos.

I spent most of the day just en route. Last year I took two extra days off and drove to SXSW with some friends. It was an OK road trip–we stayed in some crusty motels and spent a day in Nashville. This year, for convenience's sake, I decided to cough up the cash for a plane ticket. Anyway, I'll spare you the further details of my passage.

Same with the afternoon, which was mostly tacos and naps.

My host, former City Paper City Lights editor Mike Kanin, invited me to sit-in with his psych/noise/improv band Expensive Shit at a pre-festival show they were playing. For 14-minutes I tried to do my best Hawkwind-era Lemmy impersonation, but my three-quarter scale bass–once owned by former City Paper Arts Editor and indie-pop enthusiast Leonard Roberge–wasn't really having it. I had a good time, though.

(Expensive Shit photo by Alexis Wolstein)

Spinner, AOL's upstart music Web site, approached this year's South by Southwest festival with Texas-sized ambition: It would interview every band and artist performing there—all 2,000 of them.

And so Spinner put out an APB to writers experienced and un-: Give us an interview, we'll give you $50. Don't worry about being familiar with your subject; just listen to enough to write a pithy intro. Never done a Q&A? Totally cool. We've prepared some questions for you.

The assignments went out through Seed, AOL's algorithmic content-assignment site. What started out as embarrassing—interview after interview featuring variations on questions like "Beatles or Stones?" and "How did your band form?"—yesterday became very embarrassing, when Spinner's editors sent a frantic e-mail to their contributors: File your interviews. Please!

That's the thing about hiring untested writers: They may suck at deadlines. Or they may suck altogether.

Or they may not suck at all: Browse through Spinner's South by Southwest Q&As, and you'll read some insightful stuff that goes off the Spinner script. But mostly, Spinner's South by Southwest coverage has been amateur-hour (via Arts Desk contributor Leor Galil). And often, the bands noticed. Take this Japandroids interview:

What's your biggest vice?

Probably last year's September issue.

What's in your festival survival kit?

Water and a seat.

What's your biggest vice?

Probably last year's September issue.

With several dozen D.C. artists attending South by Southwest, it was inevitable that some would end up in the Spinner hot seat. After the jump, check out how they put up with Spinner's citizen scribes.

–

INTERVIEWEE: Vandaveer, the gentle, folky project of former These United States member Mark Charles Heidinger.

INTERVIEWER: Simona Rabinovitch, who "covers music, pop culture and travel for the Globe & Mail, Lonely Planet, Dazed & Confused, and more. She's also an editor at Zink Canada, works in TV, and is writing her first book. She enjoys carrots, basslines, and practicing her Russian accent."

THE INTERVIEW: Heidinger gives a few honest (if jokey) answers before realizing he's participating in the least human interview of his life. From the end of the interview:

Who was your first celeb crush?

According to the scrapbook my mother kept, when I was seven I wanted to be a "mommy." When I was eight, after the Big Talk, I wanted to be a daddy. Ergo, my first celeb crush was Michael Jackson but my first self-aware celeb crush was Madonna.

Beatles or Stones?

Definitely.

What's the craziest thing you've seen or experienced while on tour?

The mirror in the morning.

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Dry. And wry.

–

INTERVIEWEE: The Mynabirds, former Georgie James member Laura Burhenn's soulful, classicist claim to the legacy of Dusty Springfield.

INTERVIEWER: Anneliese Curtis Place, no Spinner bio. Great MySpace page, though.

THE INTERVIEW: Burhenn's either oblivious or a good sport. She doesn't even wince at the cookie-cutter questions:

Describe your sound in your own words.

I had always wanted to make a record that sounds like Neil Young doing Motown. After Georgie James broke up, I went back to the idea of hymns and melodies that have been passed from generation to generation. I went into the studio to make this Neil Young doing Motown thing. I had been listening to a lot of Dusty Springfield, Bobbie Gentry, and other amazing female singers like Carole King and Grace Slick. A little bit of gospel, soul and a little bit of straight country. There is something very comforting about it. The whole record is really about loss and recovery, I wanted to make music that felt comforting, that people felt familiar with, like family.

As opposed to, like, someone else's words?

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Undercooked.

–

INTERVIEWEE: DJ Gavin Holland, who's about to move his popular Nouveau Riche dance party to the new U Street Music Hall.

INTERVIEWER: Rika Nurrahmah, no bio. According to Nurrahmah's blog, the writer is a "Junior in the Scripps School of Journalism at Ohio University who bathes herself in the dandy pleasures of life."

THE INTERVIEW: Holland gives a pretty interesting interview, even though the stock questions are more band- than DJ-appropriate. This one's just weird:

If you had to be on a dating show, how would you pitch yourself?

Dead sexy, ambitious, loves to party, skilled at DJ-ing, and tender and caring. I am a great boyfriend!

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Smoky.

–

INTERVIEWEE: Nadastrom, the house duo of DJs Dave Nada and Matt Nordstrom.

INTERVIEWER: Patrick Shea, no bio.

THE INTERVIEW: Shea works the terrible canned queries into a pretty cohesive interview. Not bad.

For those of us who can't guess, how did you come with your band name?

Dave: Man. It was definitely not the first thing that we were gonna do. You know, obviously it's a partnership and wanting to reflect both our names as individual producers and artists. By the way, Nada is not my last name, it's a nickname I got from this punk band I was in called De Nada. The sad part is, a lot of people will kind of miss that. But the sadder part is when people call us 'Nada Storm.' And sometimes it's our friends.

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Mesquite.

–

INTERVIEWEE: Meredith Bragg, the delicate folkie who's way more adventurous than he gets credit for.

INTERVIEWER: Jessica M. Alexander, no bio.

THE INTERVIEW: There is absolutely nothing about this Q&A that suggests Alexander has ever listened to Bragg's music. The intro:

As part of the Kora Records showcase, Washington D.C. artist Meredith Bragg makes a second appearance at SXSW, with a new record forthcoming in 2010. Spinner recently spoke with him about his visit to Texas, where he'll play some new songs and get out of the blistering cold.

So I've learned that: Bragg has played South by Southwest before, he's recording an album, and D.C. is cold.

TEXAS BBQ GRADE: Plain fucking awful.

Come to find out, one can make more than just novelty sounds with one’s body (sort of). If you don’t believe us, you should check out the 2nd International Body Music Festival, which will happen Dec. 1–6 at various locations in the San Francisco Bay area. Artists include D.C.’s own Step Afrika!, “accomplished” flamenco performers Fátima Moreno González and Silvia Moreno Gil, and beat boxer Kenny Muhammad, who—for good reason (please, please, please click here; the bit with the New York Philharmonic is kind of priceless)—also goes by “the Human Orchestra.” For those of you who feel like breaking out the ol' cupped-hand-in-the-armpit trick for audience testing, there’s also an open mic. Venues and prices vary; tickets were, as of this writing, still available.
What is Music? 2009
If you’ve got plans to be in Australia during the second week of December, you’re in luck: From Dec. 12-19 Sydney, Melbourne, and Perth will play host to the 2009 edition of the What is Music? festival. Quoth the organizers, “[a]fter a thunderous return in 2008, the What Is Music? Festival is back again attempting even more ridiculous and sublime experimental music programming!” Yee-haw! Notables here include John Wiese, who last visited the festival as a member of Sunn 0))), and something from Japan called hercel, which organizers have described as “man/woman, painful/ecstatic, creation/destruction, foreign/familiar and lots more tasty dichotomy action.” But the clear highlight is a closing night performance at Melbourne’s Iwaki Auditorium called 50/50, wherein 50 bands will play in 50 minutes. We’ll choose to take the literal route here, and assume that that means 50 different acts each get a minute to present themselves—and we’ll further assume that you’re now totally sold. Venues vary; tickets can be had, apparently, by calling Australia.

SXSW 2010
Wanna know how close this year’s edition of the South by Southwest multi-purpose gathering is? You’ve already missed both the early registration and band submission deadlines. And showcases—or at least showcase sponsors—are already being announced. The latest belongs to England’s Bella Union, who’ve had a hand in records from Beach House, Abe Vigoda, Wavves, and Fleet Foxes. Whether or not any of these bands will find themselves included on an official Bella Union showcase wasn’t revealed, but we wouldn’t be shocked to see any of those folks appear somewhere in Austin this March.