NOW IN 3-D >>>

For my inaugural night at Austin's SXSW music festival, I might have behaved somewhat lazily, hustling over to one venue and staying there for the duration of the evening's programming. To be fair, Emo's Jr. is one of Austin's most renowned clubs (also the only Austin venue that myself and the Seattle musicians I'm crashing with had already heard a lot about), and their showcase last night was curated by the taste-makers at Pitchfork Media. Literally every band on deck was amazing, so I think I can be pardoned for my lack of adventurousness. 

The performers were segregated along pretty traditional, genre-based lines, with the electronic acts playing on the cramped indoor stage and the rock bands playing on the venue's roomier outdoor stage. Acoustically, this made perfect sense, but it also bifurcated the crowd, save for the brave souls willing to pinball between stages, squirming their way through the packed house.

I started out at the outdoor stage for No Joy's set. Frontwomen Jasmine White-Glutz and Laura Lloyd were phenomenal, rocking out on complementary noise-pop riffs while the band's male half served as rhythm section. White-Glutz and Loyd wore almost identical outfits-little boots, black knee-high socks, torn stockings, high-wasted denim cutoff shorts-and did enough headbanging and flaxen hair-whipping between them to compensate for the crowd's noted lack of movement. The ladies re-tuned their guitars after almost every song, but with each instrument running into a menagerie of pedals, they managed to make these necessary lulls sound like strange, distorted ambient pieces. Their riffing was ferocious and impressive-a keen reminder that shoegaze-y bands, while mellow on record, are almost always incredibly heavy live. In the crowd, I spotted Alex Gehring, bassist for Ringo Deathstarr, an Austin-based band with a similarly gauzy, gain-soaked sound. If she's a No Joy fan, it wouldn't surprise me.

Following No Joy, I ducked inside for the remainder of the evening. Denver's DIY-crossover rave artist Travis Egedy/Pictureplane was up next, and his set, while fleeting, was one of the better ones I've heard from him. Unlike the especially bored-looking underage skater boy chilling up front by the stage, I was having a blast watching Egedy burn through the best and most intoxicating cuts from his Dark Rift LP. "Goth Star" in particular sounded terrific, with Egedy adding new arpeggiated embellishments via his Microkorg synthesizer. "I forgot to put on eyeliner," Egedy joked mid-set. The free-spirited musician also told the sweaty, gyrating crowd, "You can live your life however you want" (come for the dance music, stay for the motivational speaking, I guess). Throughout Egedy's set, colored strobes went off and visuals-being edited and "DJed" live by a dude on stage left-were projected at a wonky angle behind the stage. It was a little difficult to make out what, exactly, the visuals were, but I know they included cartoons, porno footage, and GAP commercials. He closed with a new song that absolutely slayed. His new record is hotly anticipated, and if his new material is any indication, it will employ just as much savvy sampling as Dark Rift.

There was a fairly long wait between Pictureplane and the night's next indoor performers, Mount Kimbie, which was partially ameliorated by the projection of 3-D music videos against one of the walls of the club. Volunteers had been handing out Pitchfork-branded 3-D glasses all night long, so when the videos started, it solved the night's first big mystery, namely: WTF is up with all the glasses? The clips of Deerhunter, Wavves, and Das Racist were rad, but weren't exactly mind-blowing (to be fair, neither was Avatar). People who like to bitch and moan about Pitchfork's pervasive influence can relish this new  development: the website's annexation of a whole 'nother dimension.

When Mount Kimbie finally "mounted" the stage, they were slow to set up, beset by gear issues and miscommunication with the sound guy (it's hard to get that throbbing, skull-splitting dubstep bass just right). By the time their set started, the interior of Emo's had become, for the first time last night, almost unbearably packed. Shoulder-to-shoulder with the rest of the crowd, I cringed through Mount Kimbie's set-clearly, the UK duo was playing their synth melodies and triggering their Roland drum pad samples with absolute precision, but the mix was all wrong. The band attributed it to a lack of "mid-low" tones, but their high end sounds were also excruciatingly shrill. Their heavily-reverbed bass was overpowering, and even their elegiac guitar chords where marred by feedback. Nevertheless, watching them pound out halfstep rhythms live on a partial onstage kit was impressive to say the least, and their ethereal rendition of "Maybes" (from their EP of the same name) made for an ideal set-closer. The band, clearly frustrated, encouraged fans to see them again later in the week (at a different club), and as soon as they were done playing, they cracked open some tallboys and started drowning their sorrows.

The night was capped with a performance by another UK electronic act, Gold Panda, who looked like a Jedi as he danced around with his hood up, triggering samples. His hour-long set was virtually free of pauses (I counted maybe three total), and the whole room was seriously vibing on it. He was blessed with a far better mix than Mount Kimbie, and the volume of his throbbing bass hit the exact right sadomasochistic sweet spot. "This is my jam!" a girl next to me screamed as GP (real name: Derwin Panda) launched into his second song, "You," from his Lucky Shiner LP. Throughout his set, Panda dramatically accelerated and decelerated his beats, stacking new slabs of percussive loops over them continuously and demonstrating an expert knack for manipulating the audience. Endorphin levels in the crowd were seriously high, and after Panda wrapped with "Quitter's Raga," they demanded an encore. The Emo's management was not having it, and the throng, dazed, dispersed into the muggy Austin night.

It would have been nice to catch a couple more of the outdoor bands, particularly SF jammers Weekend, but navigation inside the venue was treacherous at best. Tonight, I intend to be a lot more peripatetic. I'll let you know how that goes...