Madison's South By Southwest reality checklist

Getting noticed at South By Southwest (which begins Wednesday in Austin) is a lot tougher than simply showing up and playing. The delusion that any band can burst into Austin wearing sparkling unitards and perform in front of 12,000 drooling A&R hounds, all carrying suitcases overstuffed with contracts, is a tad far-fetched. It's far more likely that the band will have to tough it out through some early-evening sets for a disinterested club staff bracing for a long night ahead, while the flavor-of-the-week bands draw lines that wrap around their venues. Crazy as it sounds, all was not lost for the locally connected musicians who threw themselves into this music-industry stampede in past years. Shane O’Neill of Screamin’ Cyn Cyn And The Pons played SXSW last year as part of local label Crustacean Records’ showcase and is returning this year as an audience member; Nika Danilova headed down last year as part of the band Pink Reason and is making a second try this time with her own band, Zola Jesus; and Thomas Wincek has seen action there as part of Collections Of Colonies Of Bees, but this time leads his instrumental group All Tiny Creatures back to Austin. Decider met up with all three and tried to cull some realistic advice from their recollections about road-tripping, porn parties, and meeting Norwegian black metal musicians.

About those hopes and dreams…
Shane O’Neill: It’s a place to stumble upon music, but it’s not a place to promote yourself. There are literally 1,800 bands there, and among that you’re just not going to get anything. So it’s a really good place to do a victory lap if you are Monotonix or whatever, but if you don’t have that kind of word of mouth already, going to South By Southwest isn’t going to help you. We knew this going into it, and we don’t tour enough or have any sort of publicity machine. All we wanted was to feel proud of our shows, to not feel humiliated, to have a good time, and not throw up on anybody.
Thomas Wincek: I was going [last year, with Collections Of Colonies Of Bees] fully expecting to be disappointed but it was actually really great. Since we were able to play at a showcase that Thurston Moore played, 70 or 80 people were there and we got a write-up in The New York Times. This year, All Tiny Creatures is playing the Hometapes showcase, and there will be a focus. We are relatively unheard-of, so it will be nice to play and actually have people there. Even if there are 50 people or less, everyone there is a writer or a musician. Bees got some of our best write-ups from doing that.

Keep your options diverse.
SO: We played an awkward release show for a Ron Jeremy porn. The reason we got into it was that Ron Jeremy was supposed to be there and pulled out. When he pulled out they were scrambling for more bands, so we ended up getting hooked up. Now when I say hooked up, it actually sounds like we got something good. But no, it was not the best show ever. In fact, it was kind of creepy and horrifying. The venue we were playing was an art space, a place that they rented to bands to play shows. But, it used to be a law office that was a front for a massage parlor. So they have all of these luxurious seven-headed showers that were really huge, and tile everywhere. And they had an entire room devoted to playing the porn they were releasing on a continuous loop. There were some really sketchy dudes there. The trenchcoat crowd was in full effect that night.

Confront the eerie quiet of the road.
Nika Danilova: The thing that I discovered while driving down to South By Southwest is that I have an extreme phobia of Oklahoma. We had to drive through Oklahoma during the night, through all of these podunk towns and there all of these [fruit stands], and I was freaking out. Then we had to stay in a motel in Oklahoma, and oh, God… it was very phobia-filled. This year, Luke [Gasper, the other half of Zola Jesus] is spiting me. He came up to me and asked, “Guess what I found out about South By Southwest?” I was like, “Are we finding a detour so we won’t have to go through Oklahoma?” And he goes, “No, we are actually playing a show there!”

Try to get a Thurston Moore story.
ND: I don’t want to have high expectations. I mean, bands always go down there thinking someone important might see it. Every time I’ve gone to SXSW, everyone had their own Thurston Moore story, and so bands are always expecting that you’ll get their own. [Laughs.] Maybe this could be my year!

Make new friends.
TW: 1349 is a Norwegian black metal band, [whose drummer, Frost,] is supposed to be like the fastest drummer in black metal or whatever. The day after SXSW, we saw them in the airport as I was getting ribs, and they were sitting without their corpse-paint on, drinking beer, and looking almost normal. So I went and asked if I could get my picture taken with them, which I don’t think they liked at all. So I now have this hilarious picture of me smiling like a dork with these four hardcore Satanist, church-burning dudes looking totally angry or aggro. They even had a little bit of leftover black [make-up] around their eyes.