For all of SXSW’s web-savvy “interactivity,” it’s the gloriously old-school paper and ink of Flatstock that provided some of the week’s greatest artistic thrills, as you’ll see here…

We’ve recounted a number of our experiences from SXSW last month, but we’ve only been able to share a portion of the video until now. There’s far more to the real thing than can be captured here, but you can probably get the essence of what happens to a small town when it explodes in population and decibel levels for a few weeks, rammed with bands, musicians, film and tech enthusiasts from around the globe.

Seemingly randomly, DJ Manny came into our lives on the front of a pedicab, the ubiquitous mode of transportation in Austin, especially while trying to get from end to end of town with the streets blocked off to 4-wheel traffic and filled with revelers. Sometimes the pedicab drivers are just trying to make a buck, and others are more enterprising.

Floating around the internets today is a seemingly genuine story about how a band called Fucked Up is being sued by an energy drink company for talking smack about them. You might even, if you didn’t know better, try to interpolate from the audio of their ’surprise’ tribute to fallen Jay Reatard on the street during SXSW some sort of corporate malignancy.

If you were following a few weeks back, we ventured out to Austin, TX for South by Southwest Music Festival, which is more of an industry confab than a festival but a party nevertheless. We saw tons of music and met loads of folks, and there were a few highlights or as we called them “highlights of hype” which were seen daily through the portals of Twitter, Facebook and many many blogs (including this one). One moment was central to the SXSW experience of late…

The image of so many shivering music fans battling the odds and the elements to see their favorite band demonstrated why the SXSW spirit remains vital: as was made clear throughout the conference, the people here care passionately about their music, and will do almost anything to experience it.

After a few too many mid-morning bourgeois cocktails and discussions of royalty splits, we moved on to other events through the streets of Austin. The ears were assaulted by Fugazi soundalikes and jazzed-out Beatles covers coming out of bars, restaurants, bank lobbies, wherever along the mobbed 6th and Red River strips—and this was just after noon.

Day two of the music portion of South By Southwest (SXSW) started out as it should: with delicious Tex-Mex food – al pastor tacos and beef fajita burritos courtesy beloved taco truck Taqueria Star make for a breakfast of champions. The regional flavor continued at Beauty Bar Annex, where the famous Los Angeles indie club [...]

Going to South By Southwest (SXSW) is an adventure. The best way to do it is to let the U.S. premier music conference happen spontaneously, and just go with the flow. There are too many bands, too many parties, to do otherwise; it’s dizzying, the amount of awesomeness on offer.