Antytila

KARABAS LIVE ABOUT SXSW 2018 / ANTYTILA

16.03.18

The Ukrainian music band told Karabas Live about their trip to one of the largest International music festivals in Texas - SXSW.
In February, the Ukrainian music band «ANTYTILA» was invited to take part in the International festival South by Southwest (or SXSW), taking place in the USA,
namely, in Austin, Texas. The Kyiv band performed there on March 14.
Annually hundreds of musicians and music lovers from different countries gather in Austin for 10 days. The labels representatives arrive aiming to discover new musicians for themselves and the audience. SXSW is not only music: film screenings, lectures, innovations and technologies representations are held here.

Karabas Live asked the members of the band «ANTYTILA» to tell about five main things having impressed them in Austin.
KeepAustinWeird
The whole downtown where the SXSW festival is located is filled with unusual, weird characters with no complexes. They're everywhere but soon you get used to them. 

The Afro-American wandering from bar to bar with his jeans slipped down to knees in light-green underparts intentionally fitting the snickers, or a group of teenagers with huge earphones weaved into hair, an old lady freestyling to a harp, or a guy placing rose petals in the shape of vagina directly on the crossroads - it's just a small part of that weird you can come along in Austin, and not only during the festival.

The city is also LGBT-friendly and you feel it everywhere. In general the motto "KeepAustinWeird" is realized totally.
Music

There is no habitual festival format here, where there are main stage and other stages with different genres. All festival program here is spread around local clubs, hotels and rooftops.

And if you came to see a particular performer, you have to find them in the schedule and come to a particular club or venue and the better as early as possible, 'cause sometimes the queues become really enormous. For example, the Pussy Riot played on the opening of music part. But because of a big rush it was very hard to reach their performance.

Between all the music events, there are promoters wandering in search of something fresh and interesting. We performed at the same stage with musicians from Jordan (JadaL), France (Deluxe), Brazil (Filipe Catto). 

Food

Everything here is spinning around BBQ and tacos. As Mexico is close a great deal of cultural and cooking traditions are taken exactly from there. There's even a diversity of Texas cuisine named Tex-Mex (Texas-Mexican). There is plenty of street food on the festival - you can find whatever. We only haven't come across fried cockroaches, though it seems we just didn't manage to search carefully enough.

I-Tech/Crypto

The SXSW festival is not only about music. Taking a flight here we had no idea how much attention is paid here to technology and IT fields! Half of the festival schedule is filled exactly with IT-events. Among them there are also quite new areas related to block chains and crypto currencies.

There is also a trade-show, an exhibition representing brand new technologies in show and entertainment areas. You can find KUKA robots as well as different kinds of VR-gadgets there. By the way, while ANTYTILA were prepairing for performance at Sheraton Backyard, the other band from Ukraine MacPaw were representing their binary code art. Austin is considered the city of IT and technologies. The headquarters of DELL, Facebook and Google offices and a great many of those pushing them forward are located here.

What is more, there are real batmobiles exhibited within the festival. And they are not models. All of them are real operational machines, except the “guns”.

Eclecticism 

In Austin, there can be an old one-storeyed wooden house wall to wall with a skyscraper and host the Sony office for the period of the festival. And nobody bothers, everyone got used that everything is admissible and fits one another in a weird city. And this eclecticism is everywhere. Food, architecture, people. 

During the festival period, the city leaves New York far behind in the number of tourists from different countries. The streets here have a bright colourful kaleidoscope from people of different nationalities with no fear of self-expression and having a different look. The picture of Austin accepts everyone to its cityscape.

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