SxSW 2009 (March 16^th–23^th)

Bas and Leon of The Moi Non Plus invited me to come along on their SxSW 2009 Tour. Jan of the Hospital Bombers also joined to assist them as the sound engineer. At first we were to have some more shows in Dallas, Jackson and Fort Worth, but in the end only the three Austin gigs stayed. When The Moi Non Plus plays in the Netherlands I most of the time join stages. I play only one song with them, to keep it a bit easy and not being to upfront on stage. On Where is Everything I play along on one of my drum guitars. My lines are pretty easy on this track playing only one tone and a glissando slide (‘weep!!!’) for 3 minutes. So I went to Texas for 9 minutes of work.

We left on Monday March 16^th at 9.00 in the morning, had a step over in Washington, and arrived at 22.00 in Austin.

On Tuesday we hung around a bit at Guadelupe Street, where I saw the Coral Guitar in real for the first time in my life. In the evening we went to the presentation of Vincent Moon’s ATP NYC 2008 documentary at an All Tomorrows Party at Emo’s. I liked the doc a lot with the weird close-up interviews with the old woman blended with the totally buzzing overdriven sound recordings of the festival. It showed the live madness of Lightning Bolt and Les Savy Fav and had a similar visual roughness. A visual ultra noise terror to the max. More hardcore than the terrible German GGG bukake movies a close friend of mine prefers to watch. Moon and I had some Skype sessions before and it was good to finally meet him in real life. He introduced me to the two organisors the Primavera Sound Festival on which I had given a presentation last year and actually remembered what kind of instruments I’ve made. Jan was with a girl named Anni Rossi, who also had some performances during the festival.

In 2007 I had made the Bachelor QS for Jad Fair. When I gave him the instrument in Belgium it wasn’t 100% finished yet. As soon as I heard about our trip to Austin I contacted him for a meeting. He lives very close to Austin. On Wednesday morning Jad came to our hotel and I fixed the additional brake cable pedal to his guitar within a few minutes gladly. He had brought his newest cd called Halloween Songs made in collaboration with his brother David, a picture disc split single of him solo with a Russian band called ДжеД фэйр and his book Jump for Joy with a collection of his paper cut hearts I had been searching for for a long time. After fixing the guitar we all sat in the sun and he mentioned he had spoken to Lance Armstrong about the brake cable attached to the strings and that Armstrong didn’t understand how it worked. I had heard of the name Lance Armstrong but couldn’t really remember exactly, so I asked Jad about him and what he kind of work he had made in the past. Everybody began to laugh and I realized I had made a mistake and me was told he was an athlete. Still not aware it was the guy who had won the Tour de France for seven times. I’m not very known with sports and had to laugh too. A bright moment of exposing my knowledge about sports. I asked how Jad’s friend Daniel Johnston was doing. Many people are aware of his metal illness of course, but what bothered me was his physical health. Valentijn once told me manic-depressive people and other older mentally ill people often suffer from diabetes, because of the medication they have taken for years. Barrett also died because of his diabetes, most probably for that adverse effect. Fair sadly told Johnston has problems with his liver and on top is not living to healthy. He is fond of drinking Coca-Cola, as can be seen in the famous documentary. Remarkable enough he even puts in extra sugar in his 500 ml drink. Not one or two lumps, but quiet an ammount. It’s a sad story, which shocked me a bit. We talked for half an hour more about other stuff and than had to head upwards town. The Moi Non Plus had two shows. My first 6 minutes to take care of. We started by doing a daytime show at the Dutch party. Lucky Fonz III and Lele also played, and some other bands. Fonz is recommendation for his witty performance and Lele is impressive for being such a fun raiser for the audience. In the evening we did a show for a very small audience. After us an Italian band was playing which was great fun to look at. They were trying to rock really as hard as possible, but didn’t really succeed on it. I liked the Italian guitar player a lot for his cool poses on stage. It was a fun show to watch.

Thursday we had no performances and we went to a party of ‘Sup Magazine at a building somewhere on the first floor where Micachu & The Shapes did their performance. I didn’t know them, but Leon had proposed for that reason to visit this event. They surprised me a lot. Afterwards I briefly met her and her manager and made a future appointment in Holland in May. Meanwhile Leon and Bas were doing a DJ set at an American Apparal parking lot sell out. I left Micachu to go search for them and needed to pee, so I walked in a bar at 6^th street. In the bar a loud heavy metal trash rock band was playing. In Holland we call such bands ‘farmer land punk rock bands’. The band had made quiet some arrangements for the live show including two hot chicks dressed in white uniforms and wearing police hats and mini skirt and white pantyhoses. They carried real white painted fake shotguns and at the end of the song they walked down the stairs during the climax and finished the song with pretending to shoot the front line of the 25 people audience. I stayed for the next song in which the two girls crossed borders. On their legs they had strapped a metal bar and during the solo in the following song they started up angle grinders to make rainbows of shiny metal sparkles.

When I arrived at Bas & Leon I was instructed to buy some beer for them at 2^nd street. When having bought the drinks I walked around the corner where Marie-Pierre all of the sudden was sitting at a table. I had only seen pics of her, so we were both pretty surprised to meet so accidentally. She was sitting there with a friend and I joined, which led to Bas and Leon not getting their beer in time. I think they were pretty pissed when I arrived one hour later. I thought it wasn’t that long I had stayed away. Me and time, not a good team. After remeeting we went to a venue called Mohawks and saw Jeremy Jay, These Are Powers and Women play and had a deep drinking night.

Friday was the third The Moi Non Plus show at Todd P’s place at Ms Bea’s. The gig had some issues. Bas was having problems with the voltage for his effect pedal. His D string broke and the amp dropped out during the last track. Anni Rossi was with us and she was excited about my instruments so we agreed I’m going to try something out for her in future. Perhaps I succeed on fixing a bowing machine. I hope so…

After diner I went home. I was tired of all the music all day long.

Saturday morning Jad had a performance at the Wood Yard Art Gallery, where he used my instrument at the end of his performance. The gallery was an interesting place covering a lot of contemporary arts including the paper cuts of Jad and David. I bought a cool magazine about outsider art, named Raw Vision. After Jad’s show Marie-Pierre proposed I had to come along watching a two-piece girl band called Nite Jewel she arranged the European booking for.

Afterwards we saw the Dirty Projectors. We than went to Mohawks seeing the blasting performances of PRE and HEALTH. We met the guys from Women, These Are Powers and Ponytail and Vincent again.

Rossi asked us to join her to the Spin Party she was invited for. It was a real L.A. V.I.P. Party, with all kinds of funny looking people. Boys dressed like Tommy Lee or otherwise looking quiet ridiculous and a lot of girls had put hamburgers in their brasseires. On stage there was a band hopelessly trying to copy Dinosaur Jr., resulting in some kind of an average American college rock band sounding like Lemonheads. Free sigarettes were given away, so we gathered 20 boxes of sigarettes for Jan and left soon afterwards.

On Sunday we went for a swim and during the evening we went to a Barbeque at the house of the drummer of Jeremy Jay. Monday back home.

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