The fifth annual HONK!TX blasted into town last weekend. This festival of street bands kicked off with performances on South Congress on Friday evening and continued at the Adams-Hemphill Park (north of the UT campus) on Saturday. The festival concluded Sunday afternoon with a parade and band revue in East Austin.
The current exhibit, Tom Sachs: Boombox Retrospective:1999-2015, is worth a trip to the downtown location of The Contemporary Austin. Through April 19th, both floors of The Jones Center are dedicated to this unusual installation by artist Tom Sachs.
By now you all are probably sick of reading my entries about South by Southwest 2015. But I wanted to add one last post about some unusual things that I saw over the last ten days.
The final day of SXSW was wet and dreary. Standing around in the rain did not seem appealing, so I hung out again at the Austin Convention Center. While there, I visited the Music Gear Expo and the Flatstock 48 Poster Show, and listened to a few more bands. I was glad to hear that the free concert at the recently-remodeled Auditorium Shores was canceled. It would have been a shame to wreck the new turf so quickly.
Folks are calling this day “South by South Wet.” Two weather fronts converged in the early afternoon, dropping temperatures and causing rain showers for the rest of the day. Like many others, I stayed indoors and rotated between the three stages in the Austin Convention Center in the afternoon. The rain temporarily slowed down in the early evening, so Bill and I walked up to St. David’s Sanctuary. The place was packed, partly due to the excellent artist lineup, but also because the entrance line was inside.
It’s hard to fathom how many bands are in town for SXSW, and impossible to hear even a fraction of them. According to the SXSW website, this year features “over 2300 bands representing 57 foreign countries at over 100 venues.” That’s a lot of music.
Convergence Day—the last day of SXSW Interactive, the first day of SXSW Music, and a continuation of SXSW Film—was made every crazier by St. Patrick’s Day partiers. A VERY full day!
My SXSW Day 4 was an eclectic variety of celebrity, tech futures, transportation, travel, and food sessions. No movies for me today, which meant that I got to eat both lunch and dinner for a change.
Today was another SXSW Interactive day for me, with one film thrown in for good measure. I didn’t see much of Bill, but I believe he did the exact opposite and attended mostly movies. I also wandered down a few aisles of the huge trade show that opened today. But it’s been a long day, so perhaps I’ll write about that another time…
