Don't Mess With Texas: SXSW 2011 New Music Sampler, A Free Taste of SXSW



For a music person, the South By Southwest Music Festival is the ultimate music immersion experience. This year's festival wrapped up last night and those of us who could not go are left with only news, reviews, and videos to describe the proceedings. Once you've gone, not going leaves you a very empty feeling this time of year.

On a routine visit to Amazon yesterday, I found that they offered the above sampler as a free download. Based on my previous experience at the festival, it is a large job to go through the thousands of bands who play there to find the ones you want to hear. Listening to this sampler today, I was very pleasantly surprised to hear twelve interesting and varied tracks that are well worth a listen.

While there's no way that any one sampler could give a complete or authoritative picture of this huge festival, this free sampler does a real nice job in giving you the quirky flavor of the event. The collection has all kinds of music but nicely avoids the sort of noisy indie bands that sometimes seem to dominate the SXSW schedule.

I expected that all of the bands on the sampler would be unknowns, and they are with the exception of Chris Bathgate, who I just happened to see at SXSW 2008. He did a good set then and he sounds equally good here. For a nice taste of the SXSW experience, this sampler is just the ticket.

Download Amazon Sampler Here.
Official SXSW Music 2011 Website.

Comments

Sara said…
Awesome! I've been folloing SXSW on XPN and Facebook. Look forward to listening to all these tracks. Thanks for the link. (And welcome back!)

S.

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