Future Islands‘ Samuel Herring demonstrates the Buck-Up Bronco.

One of Big Freedia’s dancers gives us a Haters to the Left (or right, depending on your viewpoint).

In which St. Vincent‘s Annie Clark does the Minimalist Marionette.

Lee Spielman’s Dead Weight is not so much a dance move but rather a mosh pit tactic when he’s not terrorizing the Trash Talk crowd.

We don’t really know what Kristina Hanses (of Swedish performance art duo Kristal and Jonny Boy) is doing is here, but let’s call it the Flower Flashdance.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Whatever it was, as the final night of SXSW drew to a close, any attempts by our All Songs Considered hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton to hide their exhaustion and loopiness were unsuccessful. In one club, Robin heard music from 20 years in the future (played by a band called Marijuana Deathsquads). On the dirty floor of another venue, Bob Boilen found a bracelet inscribed with the word “Dream” that convinced him he’s just a brain in a jar being injected with chemicals to make him happy. Take heart Bob, a fellow traveler had the same idea.

Thankfully, NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson and Frannie Kelley helped to keep things tethered to reality, maybe because they finally got to see performers they’d been pursuing all week. Stephen caught a breezy, 12-song, 13 minute set by Tony Molina and Frannie saw Louisiana rapper Kevin Gates, whose energy and aggression were palpable. Robin caught his SXSW white whale in Ages and Ages, who he’s been trying to see without success since the 2011 festival.

Bob caught up with Kishi Bashi and The Kite String Tangle, but his moment of revelation was the U.K. group Melt Yourself Down. One night after seeing the saxophone and drum trio Moon Hooch, this was a group with a similar setup plus a singer, and the effect was “Moon Hooch times ten.” We’re not sure we trust Bob’s brain-in-a-jar to do that kind of high-level math, but we’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for now.

You can hear that whole conversation in the audio player on this page, and read highlights from our staff in Austin below. Listen to our discoveries in a playlist of music by the best bands we heard at SXSW 2014 at the bottom of this page. And you can find a lot more of our SXSW coverage on Twitter, (@nprmusic), Instagram and Facebook.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Among the All Songs Considered crew — Bob Boilen, Robin Hilton, Stephen Thompson and returning guest Katie Presley — the day was won by Moon Hooch, a Brooklyn-based instrumental trio of two saxophonists and a drummer who got a deeply invested crowd dancing in unison.

Stephen gave a portion of his schedule over to recommendations from colleagues — Moon Hooch and the Front Bottoms courtesy of Bob and Denitia and Sene and Lowell as picked by Katie Presley. He also ducked out of the mob on 6th Street to see The Pack A.D., a ferociously loud duo whose set felt “controlled and calm” compared to the cacophany of the crowd outside. Katie had a string of good luck, making it in to see seven straight bands she wanted to see, when and where she wanted to see them, a near-impossible feat at the ever-more crowded SXSW. Then, because the laws of SXSW require balance, she got shut out of six shows in a row.

Bob’s non-Moon Hooch highlight came out of a trip to the Austin Convention Center, a “soulless” venue that he usually tries to avoid. But the Norwegian band Highasakite, which blends pop and chant, made endearing music that was atmospheric and catchy enough to overcome the site’s limitations. Robin saw Perfect Pussy once again — “I’m just absolutely smitten” — and Kishi Bashi, who played new songs with a full band, including electrified banjo, to a packed house.

You can hear that whole conversation in the audio player on this page, and read highlights from our staff in Austin below. Listen to our discoveries in a running playlist of music by the best bands we’ve heard so far, at the bottom of this page. We’ll have more updates throughout the day: You can follow along with all our SXSW coverage in real time via Twitter (@nprmusic), Instagram and Facebook.

Friday SXSW Highlights

• Robin Hilton (@nprobin): The highlight of the entire week didn’t come until a little after one in the morning last night, when the Brooklyn band Moon Hooch erupted on a modest stage accessible only through a smelly back alley. Two guys on saxophones and one killer drummer. They basically play riff rock, taking wildly infectious, groove-heavy lines, repeating them and building on them. So much drama. And so tightly synched it sort of boggled my mind. And they had a large crowd of fans out-of-control dancing for joy like I haven’t seen in many years. Moon Hooch. Seriously, go see them. You won’t believe it.
• Stephen Thompson (@idislikestephen): At some point on Day 4 of SXSW, you’re likely to hit a wall; to want to climb into bed in the hopes that you’ll never again encounter another noise or human being. I hit that wall a couple times on Friday, and found a way through it thanks to big, soul-stirring rackets. Seeing The Front Bottoms perform the anthemic “Twin Size Mattress” — with the crowd screaming virtually every word in unison — gave the evening its first perfect moment. The two women in Pack A.D. bashed out a raucous blast of room-filling noise that still conveyed more calm than the chaos in the street outside. And then the mighty Moon Hooch, with its drums and two saxophones, closed out the night with a wonderfully cacophonous set; the crowd was a throbbing organism throughout. Bring on Day 5.
• Kiana Fitzgerald (@NPRandB): I got my entire life at Solange’s Saint Heron showcase last night, which featured artists from the debut compilation album from her record label. From the colorful venue set-up (pinatas and Christmas lights) against a back drop of a towering stone formation, to the welcoming relaxed environment, the entire showcase was an experience to behold. I have to admit, my favorite moments of the night came in irrepressible spurts of fan-girling. Myself and a small group of long-time supporters of the effervescent Iman Omari wound up singing his songs back to him at the tops of our lungs. I fell in love with a duo, BC Kingdom, whose hip-hop influenced production and unabashed approach to subjects around the outskirts of love threw me back to the days of R. Kelly and Jodeci supremacy. Tweet, the last performer of the night, was light years ahead of her time a decade ago, stylistically. It felt like last night was the moment that all of the pieces locked together and I understood how important her influence was on the sound of current artists like Solange and Kelela.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Of course, it wasn’t just another day. We walked Austin’s streets, found ourselves in familiar venues, ate some tacos and saw plenty of excellent bands, but the day built slowly. By the end of the night, when Bob, Robin Hilton and Stephen Thompson met up to talk about getting back into the SXSW swing, the focus was back on the music. Nearly everyone had moments where the music coming from Austin’s stages echoed emotions they were feeling or provided some relief from those feelings. Bob found some catharsis in the big, emotional rock of Portland’s Typhoon. Robin started his day with a reflective set by The Autumn Defense. Stephen saw wildly different bands back-to-back, moving from lovely guitar/cello/voice combination at Aisha Burns’ set to a short blast of New Orleans Bounce from Big Freedia, then following that up with a set from longtime favorite Haley Bonar at the Central Presbyterian Church.

All three ended up at a set by Future Islands to end the night. The Baltimore band has been making slightly off-kilter dance rock for nearly a decade, but they’ve recently risen to Internet-meme status thanks to a typically bravura performance on The Late Show With David Letterman. “I thought the show was kind of defiant, almost,” Robin said. You could make an entire slide solely out of photos of that band’s lead singer/dancer Samuel Herring, or you could just keep pressing play on this slo-mo video of Herring getting into his own band’s groove forever.

You can listen to the whole conversation at the audio player on this page and read more highlights from Thursday in Austin below. Follow along with our discoveries in a running playlist of music by the best bands we’ve heard so far, at the bottom of this page.

Today’s schedule has a strong start. At 11 a.m. Central, we’ll be presenting live streaming video of this year’s SXSW keynote address by Lady Gaga. Watch it here. We’ll have more updates throughout the day — you can follow along in real time via Twitter (@nprmusic), Instagram and Facebook.

Thursday SXSW Highlights

• Ann Powers (@annkpowers): “The Houston band Wild Moccasins began its showcase set with a moment of silence for the victims of last night’s terrible accident. After the unique experience of standing in a club crowd in total silence for a full minute, the group’s New Wave ecstasies were all the more intense and liberating. Zahira Gutierrez danced and sang as if governed by jolts of electricity, bouncing off the angular grooves her bandmates generated. Pure pleasure on a somber day.”
• Robin Hilton (@nprobin): “Seattle pianist and singer Mike Hadreas of Perfume Genius blindsided me during his late-night set at St. David’s Episcopal church when he sang the sweetly somber song “Lookout, Lookout” from his 2010 debut, Learning. With the previous night’s tragedy hanging over the day, it sparked an unexpected emotional release in me. A beautiful, tear-filled moment of reflection.”
• Bob Boilen (@allsongs): “I loved the songs and the spaciousness of Leif Vollebekk. He had a way with phrasing that was somewhere between Van Morrison and Andrew Bird or Patrick Watson. Poignant, poetic, soulful and thoughtful.”
• Felix Contreras (@felixatjazz): “Chilean rapper Ana Tijoux‘s short but incendiary set featured some tracks from her new album (see this week’s First Listen) as well as some crowd favorites from her earlier albums. The crowd treated her like a returning hero.”
• Kiana Fitzgerald (@NPRandB): “I finally caught up with one of my favorite up-and-coming hip-hop artists, Denzel Curry. It was short, but so sweet and impactful. His energy was sky high. I found out right before the show that he was heading back to his home state, Florida, ASAP for the funeral of his brother, who was murdered last week. You’d have never known by his set.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

At about 12:30 a.m., two people were killed and 23 others injured after a suspected drunken driver, now in police custody, drove a car through barricades on Red River Street and struck pedestrians near The Mohawk. You can read more about the incident at NPR News and at KUT, NPR’s member station in Austin, which is updating the story as it develops.

It’s difficult to turn back to music after hearing about awful news like this. You can hear a little bit about how the whole night felt to the All Songs Considered team by listening to the podcast in the audio player on this page. As our own Ann Powers puts it, “In the midst of this joy, you never know what’s going to happen, and that’s why the joy is all that more precious.”

We’ll have more coverage from SXSW all week on NPR Music.

Update: The Austin Police Department held a press conference at 10:30 a.m. CT to review the condition of those injured in the incident and give an update on the progress of the investigation. SXSW managing director Roland Swenson spoke during the press conference and said that organizers would like to go home to recover from the shock of the event, but that the festival feels “some obligation to the people who have traveled here from around the world” to continue events as scheduled.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

So at SXSW yesterday (and on Kickstarter, which I’ll get to in a moment), Young introduced Pono. In Hawaiian, the word means righteous or goodness. For the world of sound it’s an audio player that Young says he’s been working on for 2 1/2 years, one that’s capable of playing music at the same quality at which it was recorded. (You can listen to his speech via the audio player on this page.)

Right now, most portable players are capable of playing music at about the quality of a CD. In his talk at SXSW, Young pointed out again and again that when music is originally captured in studios, the quality of that recording can be better than a CD. Pono is built around the idea that whatever sound the musician records will be played back on the device without any manipulation. It’s not format specific — MP3s will play on the Pono devices Young’s team is selling, just as the superhigh-quality digital files he speaks so lovingly about.

Below, you can read some of the highlights of Young’s speech, but the whole thing is worth listening to. At the end of the address, he played a video full of testimonials about Pono’s sound by musicians including David Crosby, Sting, Jack White, Beck, Eddie Vedder, Arcade Fire, Gillian Welch, Norah Jones and dozens more. You can see that video here, too — it’s the same one that’s on Pono’s Kickstarter page. That Kickstarter drive had an $800,000 goal when it launched last night. At last check, it already had more than $1.5 million pledged.

Neil Young on Pono

What he sees as the limits of digital music: “I’m a fan of listening loud. I love to listen loud. That’s what it’s all about, really, for me. I love to hear rock ‘n’ roll really loud, and I love to hear even acoustic music really loud. Loud for whatever it is it’s being played on. I like to take whatever it is to the limit, and then listen to it right there. When I started doing that with these machines, it started to hurt, and I couldn’t do it for very long, so the part of the record-making experience that I used to enjoy became painful. That was a sign to me that something was wrong. I complained a little, and I might have bitched and moaned a little about that, too. Then time went by, and I got some better machines, but they weren’t really that much better — it didn’t change it. But I noticed when I listened to CDs in my car, the same thing happened — it hurt my ears a little bit. And then the MP3 came along, and that’s when the recording industry really went into duress.”

Why he thinks high-quality reproductions are important: “Whatever you believe about where things come from, the human body is unbelievable. It’s so sensitive. And when you give it something, it loves it. You give it good food, it grows. It’s nourished. And when you give it good input, it loves it. When it sees great art, it feels good. We all are like that. So with our music, we were deprived. And we started getting very little, a minuscule 1/20th of what we [are] capable of getting, what we used to listen to. So then one or two listenings, you’d heard it. Your body was not getting anything new after that. You’ve already figured it out. That’s it. OK, I recognize it. And music even changed a little bit. … Music adapted. It became beat-heavy and it became right for what the media was that was selling it. It became smart, it became clever, tricky.”

One reason he was frustrated by the rise of the MP3: “I love making records. That’s what I do. I love every song on the record, I love every note on every song on every record. They meant something to me. They’re a family of songs that were telling a story of how I was feeling. They weren’t just filler. I’m not the only one who feels this way.”

How Pono was conceived: “You’re all listening to a lot of MP3s. They’re very convenient. So what we decided to do was come out with a new system that was not a format, had no rules, respected the arc, respected what the artist was trying to do and did everything that it could to give you what the artist gave, so that you get to feel not just what the artist intended you to feel, but actually what the artist did. And that is what Pono is. Pono plays back whatever the artist decided to do or the artist’s producer decided to do.”

How he hopes the audiophile world responds to Pono: “All those big things that you had to give away or put in the garage, they can come back now. All those stereo stores that had to close because there’s no reason for big speakers anymore because people listen to little things that look like lozenges? Because those are the new sound? How cool they could be? You can put it right on the kitchen table next to the toaster and it sounds exactly like an MP3. Now maybe those stores will start to open up again.”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

On Tuesday, we DJ’d a party at SXAmericas, the festival’s Latin music and technology offshoot. We heard Neil Young talk about Pono, his newly unveiled high quality audio player. We ate some pizza. We barely made it into Chance The Rapper’s only SXSW appearance, at the City of Chicago’s official SXSW showcase. We Ubered a pedicab. And yeah, we saw dozens of bands.

The night ended with All Songs hosts Bob Boilen and Robin Hilton, NPR Music’s Stephen Thompson and guest Katie Presley gathering around a microphone to talk about the bands they saw on day one. Bob enjoyed Charli XCX and Cymbals. Stephen loved Jambinai’s Godspeed-style instrumental rock. Everybody who saw Royal Teeth loved them. (“Just as joyful and wonderful as I thought it would be.” –Robin; “A confetti gun of joy with very well-done hair.” –Katie; “I got the sense that that band is about to become really, really massive.” –Stephen)

You can listen to that conversation on this page, see photos of bands from all over Austin and read about highlights below. Follow along with our discoveries in a running playlist of music by the best bands we’ve heard so far, at the bottom of this page.

We’re just getting started. Tonight we’ll be streaming the official NPR Music SXSW showcase, featuring Damon Albarn, St. Vincent, Kelis, Eagulls and Perfect Pussy, live from Austin. That starts at 7:00 p.m. Central time.

Follow along with everything in real time via Twitter (@nprmusic), Instagram and Facebook.

Tuesday SXSW Highlights

• Bob Boilen (@allsongs): “Agnes Obel who, at the Central Presbyterian Church, set her crystal voice against beautiful arrangements of cello, violin and keyboard.”
• Ann Powers (@annkpowers): “Parker Millsap is a 20 year old from Oklahoma gaining a following in the Americana community. I really like his new album, but I wasn’t prepared for the wild, vast power of his voice and his remarkable charisma. This guy can yodel, he can sing a soul song for real, he can preach and he wiggles his leg like Elvis. Also, he looks like Leo DiCaprio in Titanic. A star in the making.”
• Robin Hilton (@nprobin): “The band Pins, four women from England, played at the Presbyterian Church, a space that could not contain them. Super fierce. Powerful drummer. They tore it up … sort of brash, surfer garage punk rock. Hardly anyone there. They needed a mosh pit.”
• Jasmine Garsd (@JasGarsd): “I checked out the Latin hip-hop showcase, including Puerto Rican rapper Alvaro Diaz and Brazilian Emicida. Diaz is one of the most talented live rappers I’ve seen in years and a counter movement to the mindful rappers of Latin America. Hip-hop has traditionally played the role of Latin America’s musical conscience — acts like Calle 13, Ana Tijoux and Mala Rdriguez. Alvaro Diaz is not that. He’s the little devil on your other shoulder. Emicida artfully combines traditional Brazilian instruments like the berimbau and the sounds of samba and batucada with hip-hop beats. As an added bonus, he was hilarious.”
• Felix Contreras (@felixatjazz): “A lovely plate of Mexican food, meeting Alt.Latino fans and seeing the Mexico City rock band Division Miniscula.”
• Katie Presley (@loveismaroon): “When people say ‘Keep Austin Weird,’ they mean, ‘Keep Austin like the crowd at Those Howlings.'”

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Yet after twenty-plus years of on-and-off attendance, I’ve discovered that there is a key to discovering the Hidden Wisdom of South By Southwest. This kind of self-help goes beyond what any herbal remedy, extra phone battery or pair of sensible shoes offers. Those practical survival tools are givens. So is some modicum of misery, born of overabundance. That’s the paradox of choice. But the too-muchness of SXSW can become a route to knowing yourself better, as a music lover, a listener, and a cultural explorer.

Here are some things you can do to make your South By Southwest experience not just a gauntlet to survive, but also a source of renewal. Making these choices can benefit anyone who comes to Austin, badge on lanyard – newcomers and veterans alike – and even those following along remotely, from the comfort of a Wi-Fi enabled home. It turns out that what makes South By Southwest more than bearable is exactly what makes loving music so important. To quote my favorite actual self-help book, it’s all about embracing the full catastrophe.

Copyright 2014 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.