Sure, the constant infostream of Twitter or the geo-tour guide of Foursquare are cool but there’s always been a gap between the fabricated reality of social networks and actual real life. The latest apps at SXSW in 2012 addressed this issue. This year’s buzzwords were “social discovery” and “ambient location”. Most people have used social networks have had that awkward moment where “someone they know from the internet” has introduced themselves in the flesh. You know who the person is but they look different to their online picture or avatar.

Highlight is an “ambient location” app for iPhone that will prepare you for such situations. Bridging the gap between networking application and conversation enabler, Highlight sits on the background of your phone and alerts you when you’re in the near vicinity of a friend of yours on Twitter or a person with likeminded interests from Facebook. It’s a conversation starter, an excuse for new genuine, real-life friendships or conversations.

After installing Highlight on my iPhone a few weeks before SXSW, I promptly forgot about it. When I was in Austin, my phone buzzed a few times with a message telling me that a blogger I had long admired was in my immediate vicinity and the shared interests we had. Perfect. We finally said hello after a few years of Twitter talk and it wasn’t weird at all.

Highlight isn’t the only hot new location-aware connection app, there’s also Sonar, Banjo, Gauss, Glancee and of course, Grindr, the geolocating app for gay men that was ahead of the curve in 2009. It looks like 2012 may be the year of “ambient location”, a next generation of apps, ones that are location-aware, people-aware and socially-aware.

A good place to start as ever is the American radio network NPR and their always excellent home for music on the web. Their SXSW microsite (npr.org/sxsw) features a handpicked list of 100 of the best bands playing the festival playing as a continuous 7 hour mix that you can tune into at any time. It features tracks from Alabama Shakes, Cults, Hospitality, The Men, Young Prisms and more. 71 of the songs are available for free download too. Not only that but NPR’s own showcases featuring Sharon Van Etten, Dan Deacon, Magnetic Fields and Andrew Bird are being webcast for a limited time. It’s expected that Fiona Apple’s return to live music as a headliner will be available too, as long as Ms. Apple is happy with it. What a diva.

If volume is what you want SxswTorrent.com is back with BitTorrent files featuring a whopping 1,219 song downloads taken from each official band playing the festival from the SXSW website.

The long standing Stereogum blog keeps it trimmed to 25 songs from bands who they’ve championed in the past including Candy Walls from the Austra side-project TRUST and the Whigfield-sounding I’ll Never Know bounce pop from Londoner Charli XCX.

Highly recommended from the newly formed Portals Music blog collective is their SXSW 2012 sampler available for free from Bandcamp featuring some of the smaller, more underground names at the festival from the skittery dreaminess of Florida’s Hundred Waters to the catchy acoustic folk pop of You Won’t. More from SXSW 2012 next week.

The five-piece band, signed to revered indie label Rough Trade are already doing quite well in the UK thanks to the blessing of NME. They’ve garnered comparisons to The Strokes and have been hailed as the latest saviours of guitar music (snore). Back home however, it’s a different story for Howler and to increase their visibility in the US they have enlisted the services of Mono, an advertising and branding company from their hometown to help them make an impact in the lead up to SXSW. Mono have worked on campaigns for Apple, MSNBC, NBA and Sesame Street. So how are they approaching advertising a rock ‘n’ roll band?

Rather than spending money on one big budget video, the band, or specifically their North American independent label Beggars Group spent the money on a campaign based on the title of the band’s debut album – ‘America Give Up’.

The americagiveup.com campaign features an elderly black man passing commentary on all things that could be attributed to the decline of American civilization from canned cheese to the Kardashians to social networks. The hope is that enough chatter will be created around the campaign that it will work positively for the band going into the festival but it’s hard to see how the an elderly man will appeal to kids looking for some genuine rebellion or energy.

Of course, lots of bands using marketing or branding to stand out these days so this is really nothing new. If anything, authentic indie artists need only look at the reaction to Lana Del Rey to see how manufactured authenticity can backfire. We’ll know post-SXSW, just how successful this campaign was.

Californian musician Merrill Garbus’ previous LP Bird-Brains, was a lo-fi folky gem to many in 2009. Her followup appears to have benefited from proper studio recording if Bizzness, the Afrofunk-influenced lead song from the w h o k i l l album, due in April is anything to go by.

Panda Bear – Last Night At The Jetty


Animal Collective’s Noah Lennox returns to his solo moniker in April with new album Tomboy and the wistful Last Night At The Jetty is the latest harmonious sampler from it.

http://bit.ly/pandajetty

Padraig McCauley & The P Affection

Download the free debut album of indie-rock by Naas-based Padriag McCauley which manages to take in synths, ska and folk in its running time. An impressive first release.
http://thepaffection.bandcamp.com

Download SXSW artist MP3s

If you’ve got 5GB of free hard drive space (with 5GB more for Part 2), then you could do worse than download almost 800 MP3s from bands playing the South By Southwest Festival in March.
http://bit.ly/sxsw11torrent

During the 90-minute talk, the band along with a label and advertising reps outlined their plans to penetrate every aspect of our tech-savvy pop culture over the next year. Of course, being Devo, everything was delivered with a healthy dose of japery. Rubbish Powerpoint slides, “colour studies” and live focus groups run by a Scandinavian ad man called Jacob with his tongue firmly in his cheek. There were venn diagrams, hilarious poll questions – “What color best describes vomit?”, cheeky infographics and use of bullshit bingo-friendly words like “synergy” featured heavily.

Amongst the laughs though, were some genuine ideas about how to market a band in modern times. “Why can’t you market a band like you would market Miller Lite?” Devo bass player Casale asked. The band known for their funny red hats (or “energy domes”) revealed they were thinking of changing the colour of the hats to blue as a recent experiment at a Winter Olympics gig suggested the audience preferred them.

Now, the band are putting their crowd-sourcing ideas into global practice beyond a conference room by announcing the Devo Song Study which launched at their website last week.

With the song study, the band and their label Warner Brothers aim “to collect data regarding which of our current roster of recorded material is most appealing to you, the general public.” In other words, the band have posted clips of 16 songs on the site and are asking fans to choose their favourite 12.

It’s the perfect time for an ’80s band such as Devo to take advantage of an uncertain music industry and the social merits of the internet. Their new songs like ‘Fresh’ and ‘Don’t Shoot! I’m a Man!’ sound pretty vital and this process of re-invention (sorry devolution), could see them gain new fans. Especially, if that fan has participated in the song study and feels involved in the outcome of the album, the title of which is also to be decided by a focus group of course.

Following on from OK Go’s recent Youtube/label music video problems which were documented here two weeks ago, the Chicago band have found a way to resolve the issue of non-embeddable Youtube videos for their fans.

The band released a new version of the video for This Too Shall Pass and chances are you’ve already seen it. After a week, this new video had 6.6 million views (compared to 1.1 for the marching band version). The video shows the domino effect in action via a Rube Goldberg machine: an elaborate warehouse setup where marbles, globes, cards, blocks, household objects, cars, pulleys, slides and levers combine to make a thrilling four minutes of viewing.

Crucially, the video can now be placed on any other site other than Youtube thanks to an insurance company from Chicago called State Farm. In a first for music videos, State Farm paid an undisclosed sum to allow embedding of the video on every other site on the internet, as well as a credit at the end of the clip and their logo on two of the domino objects in the video. Everyone wins here. OK Go get mad viral hits and more buzz. Their label EMI get paid by State Farm who get global advertising and fans can do what they want with the video.

Speaking of innovative initiatives in music videos, check out French band Uniform Motion’s unique approach to theirs. They produced an interactive animation that can be customised and sent to friends. You can pick any track from their second album to soundtrack it, you can type a message to appear in the video and the result is an animated performance of the song you chose with the customisation intact. View an example.

Last week, I was at South by South West music convention in Austin, Texas. The event hosts thousands of events over an 8 day period. The visiting clientele are all like-minded people: either interested in film, music and/or technology. One thing you notice about people attending is that almost all of them have an iPhone or Blackberry. Clearly, these savvy Americans are early adopters of new technology and with that comes innovation even beyond what the services were originally intended for. Free Wi-Fi is available almost everywhere or very closeby in Austin so people use Twitter to gauge lots of things. For example, music events vary in popularity so sets from buzz bands will always command a crowd. Using Twitter, you can do a quick search for say – “Glas Vegas” (using http://search.twitter.com) and get real time updates from people who have recently tweeted using those words. Thus, you can find out whether the queue to get in is too long or if the show is running late or if it is any good almost in real-time. This valuable info allows you to then make an informed decision about what you will visit next or not, as the case may be, especially when combined with Sched.org – a vital scheduling tool where you can create a personal schedule of festival events and carry it with you on your phone’s browser or calendar.

I used the very same technique to find out information on rumoured shows from Kanye West (true), Leonard Cohen (not true) and finding a lift out to a Mad Decent after-hours party about 5km out of town. I was also informed via Twitter than Kanye was joined by Common and Erykah Badu during the show thanks to one of the people I’m following; vital information for someone covering the festival to know.

Industry panels and talks also take place at SXSW and here Twitter’s dominance is also apparent. Large screens showing real-time reactions on Twitter to the panel (using an agreed tag) from the audience turn a (usually) pretty boring monologue into a fully interactive debate. You might potentially learn more from the thoughts of the audience than the panelists even if you’re not in the room. These are all fine examples of technology improving experiences and facilitating information and there’s nothing inane about that.

2. The Low Anthem
Utterly gorgeous American folk three-piece from Providence, Rhode Island. Currently supporting Lisa Hannigan in the U.S.
myspace.com/lowanthem

3. The Golden Filter
This promising live electro-dance trio from New York could be a big winner at the summer festivals this year.
myspace.com/thegoldenfilter

4. Flosstradamus
The best in the current crop of American “blog-house” – friendly DJs. Injected some good times and on-stage dance invasions to proceedings. Check out their ‘Big Bills’ track with Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek on vocal duties.
myspace.com/flosstradamus