Reviews: Tamizdat Showcase @ SXSW 2001 [25-04-2001]  |  Heather Into a colder-than-normal Austin, Texas they drove: two bands from Poland, one band from Czech, and a gang of half-bred surrogate Slovak Americans. It was SXSW in 2001, and among the thousand some odd bands performing in the festival, a whole showcase night was dedicated to new sounds coming out of Eastern Europe. Performing at the funky Ritz Lounge on good ole 6th St, the Tamizdat Showcase was quite a success. Dashing the cynical hopelessness of neigh-sayers, whose mo may have been "oh well, that music is just far too out of the mainstream to be taken seriously heeeere," the shows brought in lots of interested folks, very few of them fellow countrypeople. The kind folks at SXSW were cool to book the showcase on Friday night, the 16th of March, very helpful to the artists who had come such a long way to play. It's an extreme understatement to say that the music business is competitive today, and that this competition shows its face particularly at large festivals, where all of the biggest music industry heads don their finest armour to bring their troops to the front lines. Well, to the credit of the SXSW crew, out-of-town bands without records licensed for official USA release got actual attention both in local press and in the SXSW website. Sure, we real-outta-towners didn't enjoy the coverage that say Steven Malkmus or Ray Davies did, but that stands to some degree of reason. The Austin Chronicle and the Austin American Statesman gave us mulitiple blurbs and let folks know that we were coming. T he showcase came at a time when perspectives and industries have finally begun to more honestly- not just in attempted Newsweeksish trendsetting verbage- shift towards an international awareness and some degree of appreciation. Forget about the cynical market-hungry-Capitalist aspect of this movement in thinking, let's just embrace the fact that a gang of great artists can now be invited from Poland and Czech Republic finally to gosh darn Texas USA for a great show before expectant new fans! See the whole point of Tamizdat kind of exploded with a new vigor with the SXSW showcase. Tamizdat literally means "something done (or published) over there," by extension we mean to imply the cool stuff that one person does in one place getting across rather obstreperous boundaries to touch people far away. Czechs and Poles shakin' it up in Texas? for us, that's it, that's the spirit of Tamizdat. Maybe next Laura Cantrell and Nashville Pussy should come to Prague and Sofia. In a just world, why the heck not?! First on the stage to open the evening was Skulpey, a band formed by Tamizdat's founders. Quite a short set was played by these folks, who actually admitted to their two-year pause between shows played together, since their members live in different countries. Their newer material towards the end of the set showed a more driving, more melodic and less disjointed Skulpey sound, perhaps a new direction for the quirky indie rockers. Skulpey's connection with Central Europe goes back to their roots in the small city of Trencin, Slovakia, where they started playing back in 1993. Ironically enough, drummer Palo (who is from Trencin) now lives in Austin while Heather and Matthew (who are from the USA) now live in Prague. Go figure. Next up were Poland's Ewa Braun. A blistering beginning to a mindsplitting set, these North Polish rockers would be most at home in the Chicago or North Carolina circuits, with their intense grooves which build from simple structures into walls of anxious noise. Damned airlines lost the poor band's guitars, adding to the labor of their laborious drive directly to Austin from New York, a drive which they miraculously did in a brutal 36-hr direct shot! Ewa Braun didn't let their exhaustion or their frustration show as they set up and played. Their whole set was comprised of maybe 6 songs, but each was so carefully arranged to grow carefully to the highest of suspensions, taking their good time to do so. Not sure if people were more shocked at how there can be such intensely great music that no one has heard of, or if people were just rattled by the welcome patience of their deep ruckus- doesn't matter, they were saluted mightily and played an encore. Ewa Braun are descendents of a post-hardcore, post-jazz, post-post-rock school of musical sensibility up near Gdansk. In many ways, Ewa Braun's concert at SXSW is highly ironic, since they are almost straightedge and really pour their souls strictly into music, shunning industry-hype as if it were an entirely different language. One friend, ecstatic during the end of the show, said to me "Jesus, they're playing their hearts out, like they're never going to play again!" If you are wondering about Ewa Braun's name, it's a long story but a very anti-racist one: in Poland the issues surrounding nazism are as high pitched as the issues of being politically corrent are in the USA. By naming themselves Ewa Braun, it's like the most in-your-face way to be PC, raising the issues and the stakes. Also, the band points out, there is a famed Polish actress by the name of Ewa Braun. Highly anticipated, the next band to play was Projekt Karpaty Magiczne, known to American ears as "Magic Carpathians", an intense group from the middle of Poland. PKM are well known, as founding members Marek and Anna are from Atman, who received much US attention through their releases on Drunken Fish Records. Environmentalists, feminists, trekkers, and connaisseurs of world musics, PKM play an imitible blend of ethno and avant-jazz. Bringing along (mind you, all the way from Poland) long reed flutes, digeridoos, bells, bizarre drones, tape recorded nature and vocal sounds, tablas, tastily dry bass, semi-acoustic guitar, and the particular voice of singer Anna, PKM keep people in constant wonder of what they will do next. The semi-acoustic drones of guitar set the tones, while the reeds subtly shift atmospheres, and the tablas gently moved rhythms along the bass' somewhat angular leading. Anna's vocals cut through and across, sometimes scat influenced, sometimes Eastern and modal, often resulting in snarls and high fitting whines of temperment. Ethno-riot-girl? Lomaxian-post-rock? PKM played like a band that hand the crowd in the palm of their hands, and they did. Again, encore followed. In a terribly unfortunate turn of events, original 'headliner' Jarboe (ex-Swans) could not perform: while packing for the festival, she slipped and fell on the stairs, landing herself in hospital with a rather bad concussion. A really big pity, since everybody at the concert and at the festival anticipated her "Living Jarboe" appearance (and Jarboe herself had much interest in seeing the Eastern bands). Czech ambient-trip-hop group Ecstasy of St Theresa took over the late night lead. An impressive and handsome trio, EoST represent some of the most-known in the Czech Republic's theater and film scenes: noisist and songwriter Jan Muchow, the founder of the band in its original form as walll-of-guitar band back in the early 90's, is now a prominent independent film star and producer in Prague. Singer Katerina Winterova is a star theater actress and model, with a gorgous simmering voice that can once play sultry then reach high peaks. Having achieved large amounts of success in the UK throughout the 90's, Ecstasy only came briefly to the USA once previously, playing in 1998 in the CMJ Music Festival in NYC. The show started off delicately with ambient noises developing into swirling song. EoST transport the listener from an earthly place to a lofty celestial state where electricity and melody meet. Not for the deeply rockerish at heart, EoST touch lightly but deeply sonicly. Clearly there was a piece of electro-oriented Europe in the air once they took stage, but this was a good thing and the kind of thing that SXSW seemed to invite: interesting new sounds, from different places. The crowd was comprised not only of long-time fans, but also of higher-up music industry folk. And a great crowd..
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