My sister Justine got up at 3:30AM to see the boys off; we'd stayed up all night after the Key Club show to get ready for the plane flight to Austin. If you happen to catch her freshly awoken from just a couple hours of her night's sleep, you'll find her mute and extremely automatonic and zombie-like, with her eyes narrowed to slits and head pitched at a slightly downward angle such that she somehow miraculously is able to avoid hitting things when she shuffles around without really looking forward. It took us half an hour more to get the van packed up, and when we actually were set to leave I found Justine lying ventral-side down in pencil-dive posture on the kitchen floor, which position I think she must have been in for at least fifteen sustained minutes. It was very nice of her to send us off.

Actually I was scheduled to fly to Texas several hours after the rest of the guys, so I took the band all the way down to LAX, and then drove back up to the Valley to get a couple hours of sleep. As it turns out I probably should have set my alarm for 7:30 instead of 7:45; what happened was that I got up, packed up my stuff, drove to a gas station to fill up the van's gas tank, called my mom to meet me at the Burbank Airport, hauled ass to said airport to return the van, and then my mom picked me up and drove at such a pace that I arrived at the Van Nuys Flyaway (a sort of suburban bus terminal whose buses go directly to LAX) at like 9:30AM, and there was a bus set to leave at that exact time, but as it turns out it sat at the curb for five more minutes and they still wouldn't let me on; this in turn meant that I had to wait 30 minutes for the next bus, which put me into LAX at say 10:40, and I had to wait fifteen more minutes for the bus to go all the way to Terminal 4, and I got into the American Airlines queue and saw that they had a 45-minute cutoff for checking in; I was taking off at 11:45, which gave me a little over 240 seconds to check in, and believe it or not I was swiping my credit card to check in at literally 11:01 and the machine told me I was too late. I made some immediate but still very polite appeals to the check-in agents behind the counter, and the resulting conversation has led me to believe that you will not find more pitiless and mirth-deprived people than LAX check-in agents coming off the graveyard shift.

I thus had to settle for placing myself on stand-by for a later flight. Not that I was in any particular hurry to get to Austin, but not having a flight securely in hand was pretty nerve-wracking, although I took some solace in the fact that the same bullshitty bureaucratic process would surely have some effect on the number of passengers on the flight I was hoping to get on. And as it turns out, I got onto a direct flight to Austin that actually put me in town five minutes earlier than my original itinerary was supposed to.

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Anyway, Austin's much greener than I would've thought, though to be honest my previous concept of what Texas looked like was populated with oil pumps, mesas, tumbleweed, Confederate flags, and basically not much else, and thus not at all any kind of realistic expectation, really. Most often you will hear Austin described as the most liberal town in Texas (an "oasis" according some, who I can guess have some concrete judgments on what the rest of the state's about), an info-tech mecca, a college town, and a place where people are very friendly and smoke a lot of marijuana (which characteristics are generally said to go hand-in-hand). Oh and the music scene is unlike anything I've ever seen: 6th St. is bursting with clubs and bars, and I have to think the liquor-license per square-foot figure is higher in Austin than any other place in the nation, and by a long way; then it seems like every local you run into plays the guitar or writes songs or helps out with a friend's band. They actually block off huge chunks of downtown to through-going traffic during weekends, presumably so that carousers can move point to point without drunkenly staggering into the path of a car or being struck by a drunkenly-operated car.

The first night in Austin I was extremely sleep-deprived and confused, and the events of the evening seemed very bizarre and disjoint, like they were orchestrated by Lewis Carroll and Dali if they were Texan and maybe less so trippy than they were just stoned benignly on Mexican pot. By the time I got into town it was 8PM and very dark, and the shuttle dropped me off in East Austin (sort of the requisite ghetto area that rich cities just seem to have to have) in front of an ill-kept and somewhat serial-killerish house whose porch was littered with cigarette butts and the partial skeleton of what I think was a baby cow or a very large canine. The only light came from behind the curtains of a side room at the front of the house, from a neon sign of some kind. Then Aidan, Dan, and Mark sprung from the back seat of an arriving taxi, the timing of which still strikes me as both serendipitous and really kind of strange. After a brief exchange of greetings, the three of them went immediately to sleep.

At that point I realized I was hungry. I had no concept of where I was and didn't want to hunt around in the dark looking for a restaurant, so I decided to order some food. The house was filled with many things, variously arranged and dusty and speckled with white strands of dog hair, but no phone book I could find; eventually I found the number for a pizza parlor off of an old but suspiciously non-empty pizza box sitting under a bookshelf in somebody's bedroom. This pizza I would eventually share with Emma, the house's obedient and extremely hairy mutt, and then with a house resident called Preston, who'd at some undetermined time returned home and taken a shower, all without me noticing. Preston was wearing nothing but a towel around his waist and spoke in an extreme Texas drawl; he explained that he was originally from Houston and that he'd just gotten laid off from his job. After eating three slices of my pizza he holed away in his room (where both the aforementioned neon sign and suspiciously non-empty pizza box were located) to watch NBA highlights on TV. After this, Aidan/Dan/Mark dragged themselves up and went back into town to watch some bands, and I declined to join them on account of feelings of disorientation.

I was organizing my tour photos and (unsuccessfully) trying to find an unsecured Wi-fi connection when two fellows named Bob and Jesse walked in the front door; they introduced themselves as a house resident and friend-of-house-residents, respectively. They worked at a local hotel and had just gotten off for the day. Bob plays in a local band called The Dirty Sound and is earnestly proud and unembarrassed of the fact, and almost right away he offered to demo his band's recordings for me through the speakers of the living room television. While we listened, Jesse asked if I smoked pot, and when I said I'd never tried it, he seemed a little defeated, like I'd implicitly denied him permission to light up right then and there, for which I felt sorta bad about, but I didn't say anything. Then we talked for twenty minutes about how much Bob and Jesse disliked bums. After that, I remember trying to sleep on a couch covered with Emma's hair (BTW which hair I am still digging out of my clothes and crevasses of my laptop keyboard like four days after the fact, and I have no idea how any of it got there) and being awoken or kept awake by a sequence of progressively weirder distractions, like first Emma skittering around and howling in the grips of some kind of doggie paranoia (she was clearly terrified at something that was not there), and then the So So Modern guys gathering their stuff to take into the RV outside (which they were using as a guest-house), and after that any number of house residents and/or friends-of-house-residents shuffling in and out the front door, including some guy who thought I was Jesse, and I know this because he kept calling me Jesse and shining the screen light of his flip-phone into my face even though I was very obviously trying to appear to be asleep while he was doing that.

Actually the house we were staying at had exactly four proper tenants, Andy, Bob, Jennifer, and Preston, but they are very laid-back about having friends and random musical guests infiltrate their living space unannounced and at all hours of the night. They'd quite generously volunteered to billet So So Modern through some semi-official arrangement with the SXSW administration. The Austin locals living and regularly visiting that house--I personally met maybe a dozen or so and I'm sure there must have been more--turned out to be more or less extremely cool and generous and relaxed people across the board. I have to admit to feeling pretty far removed from their lifestyle and worldview, but either they didn't sense the culture gap, or it just didn't matter to them. They had no airs of urbanity and sophistication. I thought they were aggressively friendly and informal, but in a way that was neither judgmental nor self-conscious, and in general I found them way easier to talk to than all of the cosmopolitanite music industry insiders and fans that I met through the festival itself, who as a whole were kind of Hip and Cool and basically incapable of having a conversation about anything except the hipness and coolness of their past experiences in direct relation to bands and/or the music industry at large, which frankly since I am only peripherally related to such things tended to bore the shit out of me. Plus, there's a kind of psychological distance that West/East coasters and city folk (into which group I would place most of festival-goers) keep around themselves that's refreshingly absent in your average Austin local.

Here's Dan expounding his vision for a new tune, and Aidan surely wishing he had a battery-operated synth or a guitar of his own. What little media coverage of SSM I've found tends to cast Grayson as the leader/frontman, and although he has the most bonafide musical credentials and tends to handle most of the group's business-related matters, I think they operate as a democracy, even with songwriting. Actually I'm not a big believer in true democracy when it comes to music (or politics, for that matter)--I tend to think that someone has to very politely and respectfully assume the driver's seat--but thus far it seems to work out okay for SSM.

This is Dan with a real mammalian vertebra, pretending like it's an alien spaceship. I don't have a video of it, so you'll have to imagine him making machine-gun and engine noises while running around with the goddamn thing in his hand.

Here's an NES that saw a fair bit of late-night use (primarily Super Mario Bros. 3 and Tetris, the NES version of which has no multiplayer option, unbelievably enough) during our stay at the house. The tour has been thoroughly suffused with the presence of video games. I would say we've talked more about gaming than visual art, movies, books, or television; the only subject that comes up more is music, and even then video games still occur prominently: a significant number of bands we saw or talked about demonstrated heavy game-soundtrack/8-bit influence, I'd say including SSM itself.

This comes apropos of nothing: Mark's a big-time lefty idealist, but boy is he down with classic American junk food. If rumors of SSM's medium-term relocation to the US come true, one of their imminent challenges will be to keep Mark from blowing the band's resources (not to mention his arteries) on curly fries and pizza-by-the-slice.

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So So Modern had only one scheduled performance, which was on the last night of the festival. There were a few promising leads for playing parties, but those ended up falling through, and in the end we had loads and loads of time to drift around and explore the festival. As it turns out, official SXSW performers (which SSM were) are not automatically afforded access to SXSW events; instead, a single SXSW act (SSM counted as just one) has the option of receiving a single (as in for one person) all-access badge, or the paltry sum of $200, which either way seemed exploitative and unbelievably cheap given that A) most bands stay for four days and put a lot of money into the local economy to feed and entertain themselves, and B) SXSW is, as a whole, nothing less than a titanic subsidy for both local businesses and national marketers of all stripes. SSM had been advised just to take the cash, which at first seemed like a huge mistake, but turned out not to be such a big deal after all, since the band had some connections here and there, and anyways many of the cooler performances occurred at free and unofficial venues that didn't fall under the formal auspices of SXSW itself.

And also, we spent a ludicrously embarrassing amount of time hanging out at The Hideout, a cafe on the corner of 7th and Congress that had decent coffee, breakfast tacos (the very idea of which if you are at all a fan of breakfast and of tacos will quite nearly cause you to blow your anticipatory foodie wad), and most importantly completely free Wi-fi. The guys in the band are computer dorks, and great chunks of our time in LA and Austin were spent assaulting MySpace and Gmail en masse in a laptop huddle. My excuse was that I was trying to write something about the tour, but I'd be lying if I said I wouldn't choose sitting in a cafe and web-surfing over walking around looking for live shows like, say, three times out of five. The others claimed to have been doing band-related communications and catching up with assorted family and friends, but I have a hard time imagining what exactly all that entails and why it'd take at least 90 minutes a day, which I think is a pretty generous lower bound for the amount of time we've spent at our computers.

So So Modern's idea of centering a US tour around their SXSW appearance wasn't entirely original, which meant we'd be running quite often into other New Zealand bands heading gradually eastwards over the course of the trip. There was a rather glitzy showcase show sponsored by the NZ Music Industry Commission, but due to not having a label or not being well-connected or not being stylistically accessible enough, and in spite of apparently being quite popular in Wellington, SSM hadn't been invited to play, and in fact they hadn't been placed on any guest list and technically had no way of getting in. Fortunately, we ran into a girl called Joe (or Jo) who, as far as I could tell, was friends with just about everyone in the Wellington scene, and she played the I-just-flew-ten-thousand-miles card with the guy at the door (who wasn't interested in a fight and probably wouldn't have cared one way or the other) and so all six of us got in without a hitch.

Here's Dan, Joe (or Jo), Grayson, and Nick from Cut Off Your Hands.

The NZ showcase had a crowded tent where bands were being given maybe 15 minutes to play, not really enough time for anything significant, but enough for a properly spectacle-ish background to music industry elbow-rubbing. A good portion of the attendees were well-dressed and wielded wine glasses, and I sort of think that the majority of people occupying the performance tent were primarily there because they were standing in the incredibly long hospitality queue (and free food or not there was no way we were waiting in that line), and only secondarily to listen to the bands play. I'll concede that I tuned out a good deal of this party, for reasons of feeling fairly irrelevant to the scene, and also not wanting to insert my nose into other people's conversations. I believe SSM were there mostly to catch up with old friends.

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More by coincidence than out of design, we seemed to run into the same bands over and over again, and I got a tiny bit of exposure to the NZ pop scene, about which I knew absolutely nothing prior to the tour.

I'm most familiar with Cut Off Your Hands (formerly The Shaky Hands, until their arrival in the States and subsequent rights conflict with an identically-named US band), since they played a few dates with SSM in Hollywood prior to South-by-Southwest. Pictured here are Nick and Phil, who incidentally own some pretty rad Tupac and The Chronic t-shirts, respectively. Off-camera are Brent the Drummer and Michael the Guitar Player, whom I had a very long and nerdy conversation re: video games with and who was just about the only non-blues guitar player I've seen in the last week and a half who played a Stratocaster, and might I add he actually digs it. FYI the much-maligned Strat is more or less a pariah in 21st century indie rock--basically everyone plays a Tele or some sort of oddball Fender, like a Jaguar or a Jazzmaster. I think that the Strat's association with classic guitar-wanky music (cf. Hendrix, "God" Clapton &c, i.e., guys to whom I pay all due respects, but still) is basically inescapable, and it occupies this weird and profoundly unhip space of being neither classically retrograde nor satisfactorily obscure. It is ubiquitous, but then not quite proletarian or nostalgic of anything particularly cool. I mean, I play a Strat and I can't help but think it's kind of cheesy and square at times. Anyways.

As far as I could tell, The Mint Chicks were the consensus choice for the hottset shit out of NZ at SXSW. Their style is premeditated to be equal parts edgy and Pop, so it's easy to see why that's the case. Kody, the Mint Chicks' frontman, looks like a darker Jude Law and was probably the most glammy guy I met in our four days in Austin, but nevertheless seemed like a nice guy and even remembered my name (I think) after SSM's set a few days later. I don't mean to disparage their songwriting at all, but the best part of the Mint Chicks' live set is Kody's ability to hurl his microphone out bola-style and then toe-kick it back into his hand, a maneuver which must have taken quite a bit of practice to get performance-worthy.

Andrew, the dude from Die!Die!Die!, played guitar with a broken hand, and when I saw them a second time at a party in East Austin he kept jumping and unapologetically landing on his knees, and by the end of the set he'd distributed not a small amount of his blood across the concrete. Similar tactics for punk-rock performance have been around for ages now, and it's hard to avoid thinking that this kind of thing is at least partly an ironic gimmick, but one really has to give proper credit to any actual spilling of blood.

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I actually got away without paying a single cover fee for any of the shows I saw at SXSW. That's probably only possible if you're extremely well-connected, or if you deliberately avoid the big-name performances, which is what we ended up doing.

My favorite band that played at SXSW was Health, an experimental noise group from Los Angeles. They're esoteric enough that it hurts a little to try to describe their sound; Mark called them "a hardcore Animal Collective", which I suppose is about right. Their drummer, BJ, was extremely gregarious and friendly and never failed to make the same dick joke (I'll let you figure it out) when he told people his name. I liked them enough that I actually bought one of their t-shirts, which I basically never ever do. It's also worth mentioning that SSM eventually played their set on Health's gear, which Health loaned to them without hesitation.

Mark's friend Maria's friend Helen took us out to a house party one night, and although I was initially kinda suspicious of the idea, it turned out to be the best musical experience of the festival for me. When we got there, there was a band called Yellow Fever playing pool-side. They played slightly twee pop songs with girl-girl harmonies and chords like Nirvana songs, only without the distortion, in other words the kind of music where it just makes sense that there's a toddler dancing in the foreground while the band's playing.

(And boy have I always wanted to play in band with a co-opted and epithetic and ironically naughty name like "Yellow Fever"--my personal favorite's always been "The Slants"--but I can't get over the fact that it'd call attention to the fact I'm Chinese and somehow insinuate that I was trying to make some kind of meaningful social statement through my music, which, uh, not really. More than anything else, I just think it's funny.)

Very close to the craziest shit I've ever seen was the set by Monotonix, a band from Tel Aviv. I earnestly dug what the drummer and guitar player were doing (big-time, hopelessly outdated 70s-style riff-rock with heavy beats), but their lead singer was transcendently insane and completely stole the show from every band playing that evening. They started their set by mounting pouches of paper onto the drum kit and spraying them with lighter fluid and lighting the drum kit on fire. The lead singer subsequently extinguished the fire midway through the first song by pouring beer over the drum kit while it was still being played. Then he sprayed an entire can of Gilette shaving cream (which afterwards I found on the floor and thought about taking with me, but ended up not keeping because it was pretty gross) on his face and jumped into the crowd and charged after individual audience members. I was standing off to the side and couldn't avert my eyes: it was like watching the most hilarious slow-motion train wreck ever. Anyone standing directly in front of the stage must have been absolutely terrified. Then the singer jumped onto the bar, taking random swigs from bottles on the counter and hurling these little paper cones (the origin and function of which I'm totally unaware, but there was a fuckload of them) all over the dance floor. They closed the show with an extended drum solo during which the lead singer took individual pieces of the drum kit out onto the floor so individual audience members could play along; ultimately the drummer was sitting on the kick drum (which was being held up seven feet in the air by the crowd) playing the snare and crash (which were also being held in the air by the crowd). It's been half a week since then and I still don't know how to make sense of any of it.

After four days of waiting around, SSM finally hit the stage at midnight on the final day of the festival. Although the crowd seemed to really enjoy the show, it was filled with a lot of friends and pre-existing fans, and I'm not entirely sure their SXSW appearance will have a significant effect on their reputation outside of Wellington. While it's already pretty hard for me to make any objective observations, I do think their time will come: I'm pretty hard to impress, but I do believe SSM are a good band, really good even, and not less significantly there's a growing market for bands like them in Credible Hipster Circles; they're exactly the kind of band a Pitchfork writer would drool over grandiosely while name-dropping Derrida and campy 1960s sci-fi within the same sentence.

I had my first and only Roadie Moment during the show when the hi-hat fell over and we had to tape it up hastily between songs. After that, Dan looked me in the eyes and said, "Water. Get me some water."

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After helping the band clean up their gear, I left the venue more or less immediately so I could get a couple hours of sleep before my plane flight. Halfway back to the house, I realized I had no cash to pay the shuttle driver in the morning, so I turned around and walked back into town to look for an ATM. After that, I again made it halfway back to the house, only to get a phone call from Grayson, who explained that it was impossible to get a cab downtown and so they had no way of getting the gear back. When I made it back to the house, I asked Preston if he could do me a big favor, and instead of suspiciously looking me over or hesitating (which I think would be most people's response), he just nodded and said, "I might say yes." So we took Preston's surprisingly fancy SUV into town, which by this time was a car-and-pedestrian clusterfuck of epic proportions, and hauled SSM's members and gear off a street corner like so many Saigon embassy airlifts.

When we got back I busied myself with various tasks like arranging bags and getting papers straightened and figuring out the logistics of getting to the airport, stuff so menial and numerous that you lose sleep over them without realizing. At one point I asked Aidan to help me sort through the gear in the back Preston's SUV, and a couple of female friends-of-house-residents who'd actually attended the SSM show followed us outside. I've yet to consult with Aidan about his take on this, but I think they were flirting with us, e.g., at one point one of them said that I very obviously had a Los Angeles accent but she nonetheless found it attractive--she seemed cute and cool but I was some combination of very busy, very tired, very shy, and also very uncomfortable with the whole rock star vis-a-vis groupie and/or sophisticated urbanite vis-a-vis local girl power dynamic that I sensed developing (and maybe only existed in my own head, but regardless) and thus I responded with the male equivalent of batting one's eyelashes, which essentially amounted to such a radically uncharming response as "Oh, why thank you." Period. Anyways, I was leaving in two hours.

I'm not sure if I actually fell asleep that night. I made sure to check in to my flight over the internet, and I arrived at the airport with plenty of time to spare. Nevertheless, the unfeeling and humorless and curmudgeonly United Airlines check-in agent nailed me to the tune of $50 for Aidan's synth being 4.5 pounds over the 50-lb limit, which you would think a relaxed Austinite would let fly, especially on the morning after the conclusion of SXSW. One moral of the tour thus far is that one should not fuck with the airline industry, and that if it's not one thing, it's another. Consider yourself warned.