Follow me on Twitter. Add me as a friend on at Orkut or Facebook . Visit my Flickr photostream.
When I learnt that I will have to shell out 470 USD to attend the fav keynote addresses and listen to some good music, I was literally heartbroken. And understandably so – after all it means almost 24000 Indian Rupees. Couple that with the bad weather in the first weekend of South by South West 2009 at Austin, I sincerely thought I’m in for a serial bad luck (I missed this year’s Mardi Gras despite being in Austin). Next weekend brought good news – luckily, there were plenty of avenues to find good music for ‘free freaks’ like me.
Having wandered through Austin Downtown streets in the last 2 days of SXSW Film and Music Festival, I could honestly say – KatzenJammer girls blew me away. They were the best of all the bands that were ‘free’ (Metallica wasn’t free). But, I actually just ‘bumped’ into them. On friday late night (well, technically it would be saturday), while wandering through the 3rd Street, we (Sankar and me) found four girls playing rather old school musical instruments. In the first song, all I could hear was ‘Oh yeah. All right‘. But the energy was infectious. A couple of songs more and we were hooked. After the little road side show, they said that they would be playing next afternoon at ThreadGill’s. Understandably, it was a must on our to do list for SXSW on Saturday.
Threadgill’s was packed as we entered. On a bright sunny day, people were sitting on chairs and on the grass -donning a cap, holding a beer can/glass/bottle in one hand and a camera on the other. I found a seat nevertheless and started doing what everybody else was doing – enjoying Norwegian Music.
The Norwegian girls played better than the ‘demo’ last night. And it was amplified by the sound system at the bar and made enjoyable by the high energy songs. An interesting thing was that the girls took turns on each instrument. With almost every song, they kept changing who’s playing what. The instrument with a smiley is called Contrabass Balalaika. The instrument on the extreme right is Accordion, and reminds me of the song from Amar Akbar Anthony [here’s the youtube video]. Something really funny struck me. In the movie song too, Vinod Khanna was playing 4 instruments too!
At the end of an hour long show, KatzenJammer did the crowd adieu. The audience gave the girls from Norway a high energy applause. They sure did deserved it. I enquired about a CD, but they haven’t had any with them. And that was a surprise indeed – this is a Music Festival for Christ’s sake!
Please check out KatzenJammer’s videos on youtube, their Myspace profile where you can listen to the songs too, and their website. Trivia: Interestingly, KatzenJammer is also a British Piano Musical Comedy duo.
If you like this post, please consider linking to it or sharing it with others. I’ll love to hear your comments too.
July 2, 2010 at 10:52 pm
[…] SXSW 2009 surprise discovery – KatzenJammer girls « Diary of a Weekend Traveller. […]
July 24, 2009 at 10:42 am
Thank u so much for the tip….
June 12, 2009 at 9:57 am
[…] 2009 surprise discovery – KatzenJammer girls (Travellers Diary) David Byrne has invited the women who are Katzenjammer to play at the 2009 Bonnaroo. Byrne has […]
March 27, 2009 at 4:22 pm
Good going Kalban! Chicks rocking out are always hot 😉
Cheers,
Ankit
March 27, 2009 at 11:40 pm
Thanks for dropping by and commenting Ankit. Well, I disagree. There were plenty of musicians in SXSW 09 who were pretty face but whose music was plain ‘noise’.
March 26, 2009 at 3:30 pm
[…] a reference to its status of origin of many musicians and music scene. Usefull Posts SXSW 2009 surprise discovery – KatzenJammer girls « Diary of a Weekend Traveller…More interesting Austin weather (80 degrees, sunny with snow) – jesse crouch’s log » […]
March 26, 2009 at 11:17 am
[…] search continues to surprise me. Its not even 24 hours since I posted my experience with the live music of KatzenJammer, an all girls band from Norway. I listened to […]
March 26, 2009 at 1:11 am
The same question, how where and when did you reach this place? Questions apart nice post.
March 27, 2009 at 1:26 am
Thanks Sid. The place is Austin (Texas) and I came here a couple of months back. More in email.
March 27, 2009 at 1:27 am
But Sid, you don’t seem to write these days – what happened?
March 26, 2009 at 12:09 am
Hi Kalyan – just saw your posts on Austin. Good to know you’re in town and enjoying it! We did go to one event during SXSW, but didn’t get to attend too many of the concerts.
BTW, there’s the Keep Austin Spicy festival this Saturday (check out: http://www.keepaustinspicy.com/). If you will stop by, do look for our booth (Association for India’s Development). We will have some info on our work in India and some fun displays as well.
March 26, 2009 at 12:16 am
Thanks for the tip Bindu. Would be there for sure – anyways I spend quite some time of my weekend at the Town Lake. Good that there’s some event going on there. Do mail me if you think I can help you in some way.