All week long I've been anxiously on the lookout for the magic moment when the
SXSW Music and Media Conference posts its list of artist bios and mp3s for this year's festival, which runs in Austin, Texas, from March 11-16. I've just spent seven hours poring over the list and compiled my own list of the 286 artists I liked best. Some of them don't really fit here, but I've got a hunch you're going to like quite a few. Last year I did a series of posts, beginning with the longish
Big Bloc 4, most of which you can still hear by clicking
here and
here. This year I'm trying something different, posting 10 or so at a time. Hopefully this will be more manageable for you and will also let me attach labels to all the artists, in case visitors want to check them out in the future. Anyway, here's the first post, with others soon to follow. Clicking the
artist names will take you to their SXSW page, which also has links to more information about them. I imagine everybody and his blog is linking to these SXSW pages right about now, and I've noticed that the songs are sometimes slow to load. Patience is advised.