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NEDRY AT SxSW2011

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Tom Robinson Tom Robinson | 03:00 UK time, Thursday, 31 March 2011

The third of our Introducing favourites to make a video report for us from was the London band . Many thanks to Chris Amblin from the group for putting together this video and writing the following guest blog post for us:

"To say that arriving in Austin, Texas this Spring was a relief and a thrill would be underselling it quite a lot, 6 months of anticipation had built up to this moment (since receiving our official invitation) and the stress & large expense of plane tickets, US visas and last minute equipment hire made this feel like an all or nothing type affair!Ìý Luckily we had the strong support of all the way, who part funded this trip along with the wonderful and . Make no mistake, this is a very expensive festival to play at, with just the transport and visas going into the £1000s, very few UK acts could even consider coming to SXSW, so we were very fortunate indeed.

We'd heard stories of endless free beer and bbq food at all-day parties, but that had to wait for the time being. One of our primary reasons for coming to SXSW was to establish contacts with professionals we would not ordinarily have access to and on day one we headed to the huge conference centre for a morning of free panel discussions available for official performers, where we were delighted to find top level music industry types happily discussing the topics of the day with anyone who asked.

Over the week we'd learn from music industry professionals about the future of music delivery, get advice about the advantages of setting up our band as a limited company, hear what steps to take to get our music placed in films and on TV and take part in many discussions about the future of the music industry in general. One of the more surprising things I learnt was the emergence and importance of band 'apps' and how artists were now utilising smart phones in a gig environment to directly interact with the crowd. Sounds fun, but I thought the idea of a gig to interact with an audience by inspiring and entertaining them with your musical performance? We did our best to encourage these important industry types to come along to our showcase, but with their inboxes full of invites and pockets full of flyers it was a tough sell.

Our showcase fell on St. Patrick's day and as we set up in an alleyway outside (the home of the ) there was a whole world of chaos unfolding yards away on 6th Street. An estimated 40,000 people ascended on the festival this year and most of them were contained within 6 blocks of venues, bars, shops and pizza joints, it was bedlam.

We had a fantastic time playing in the US for the first time, we gave it our all, everything had built up to that point it seemed and we were determined to not get lost in the noise of it all. Right before we started a young Texan approached the stage and said in quite a broad southern accent 'Y'all gonna play ?', amazingly he knew one of our songs! We had a bonafide US fan at our show and in truth that meant more to us than any industry professional turning up. We chatted to him afterwards and he was doing his best to get an electronic music scene going in his suburb of Austin, inspired in part by a few of we'd posted up on YouTube when we first started, that meant a lot.

For the remaining few days in Austin we did get around to enjoying some free beer and also a lot of new music. in particular impressed me with their refreshingly free form live performance. We played our 100th ever gig in the rather surreal surroundings of a house party in a squat / hostel in the university district, north of the city. We'd come a long way from playing a small dance tent at in Oxford in the summer of 2008. As we got on the plane home it had all seemingly gone in the blink of an eye, but with any luck we'll return for dates elsewhere in the US soon!"

Chris Amblin of Nedry
March 2011

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