Points to Jaramillo for letting us know about HONK!TX 2014 Festival of Community Street Bands a week ago on Saturday.
I had never heard about it. We made it to watch a few things at Spider House. It was great. Here’s a couple of videos.
D20 Brass Band play music from The Legend of Zelda.
The SXSW (South by Southwest) Music Festival 2013 lineup is up! Very exciting. There are 479 bands listed from all over the world for this amazing Austin, TX event. I got curious about how they are spread out. So I broke out and charted it for your enjoyment. It’s all in Google Drive, so you can click on the charts to get more details or you can see all the data here.
US vs Rest Of The World
As expected, almost two thirds of the bands are from the home country. I don’t know how this compares historically, but I would guess that the US share has been slowly declining as the event grows in size and notoriety.
US bands by state
This one you definitely want to click on so you can see in more detail. To my surprise, there are nearly as many Californian acts as there are Texan!
International
As expected, US-speaking Canada, UK, and Australia are the most represented. Southern neighbor Mexico is next. The biggest surprise in my opinion is that tiny Israel is next, with 10 bands! Good, since I like Israeli music. Saddest surprise: nothing from Colombia. Colombian bands are always a big draw. As circumstantial evidence, an old SXSW photo I posted with Bomba Estereo’s Colombian hottie lead singer Li Saumet is one of the top traffic referrers to The MKX®. Go ahead, look it up on Google Image.
And only because I can and because it’s cool (Google Docs Drive FTW!), here’s a World Map showing the number of bands per country:
Paul Simon performed “The Sound of Silence” during the ceremonies marking the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks. Here’s the mp3 for you, courtesy of NPR but all tagged by me and ready to go.
More as a mental exercise than anything else, I want to compile a list of, say, 30 Rock en Español classics. Not best, not my favorites… but classics.
I am going to get the list started with fifteen sixteen. I have music loving readers who are knowledgeable so please help in the comments. In no particular order:
Please, no Maná crap.
While Christmas posts are unusual on his blog, I couldn’t pass on the opportunity to share this wonderful musical video of a girl jingling her bells. Click here to watch. And do try this at home, by all means.
Straight from the source…. See you in March!
Balmorhea (Austin TX)
The Baseball Project (Portland OR)
The Bears of Blue River (Chicago IL)
Beats Antique (San Francisco CA)
James Blake (London UK-ENGLAND)
Bliss N Eso (Albert Park AUSTRALIA)
British India (Melbourne AUSTRALIA)
Murphy Brown (Santa Cruz CA)
Brownout (Austin TX)
Canteca de Macao (Madrid SPAIN)
The 3-day passes for ACL are in 3-D. How appropriate! I’m not sure if the illusion is captured in video… but hey, at least I tried.
Last weekend I officially started warming up for ACL by attending a different massive music festival, this one in San Francisco and all bluegrass: Hardly Strictly.
Read more for more photos…
This is the official song for the upcoming World Cup, titled “Waka Waka”. It’s not a joke, and it’s not performed by Fozzie Bear. It’s sung by Colombian hottie Shakira. On the video you can see Osvaldo Sánchez, Omar Bravo, David Beckham, and some other players that are not attending the World Cup. This is appropriate, because Colombia is not attending either.
The song didn’t quite do it for me. When I want to get into World Cup mood, this is what I listen to. And this. And this. And this. Wow, now I am in World Cup mood. I wonder if I can still find tickets…
