There are heaps of nice things to say about the Baltimore Choral Arts Society’s Feb. 28 program at Goucher College. The program—Franz Schubert’s Mass in G Major and Morten Lauridsen’s Lux Aeterna—included two highly beautiful pieces of music that made an interesting counterpoint to one another: one a tidy, symmetrical work of the high classical period, performed with enough focus to bring out its graceful and firm sense of melody; the other a freer, more visceral work of contemporary tonal composition that appealed to the a sense of wonder and awe. And the choir and orchestra were both in top form as always: incredibly responsive to music director Tom Hall’s emphatic and emotional conducting, with talented, songbird soloists on the first piece and a moving, dynamic relationship between instruments and voices on the second.

Lux Aeterna is one of those pieces that could—and ought—to be used to reach out to newer, younger audiences. It’s exciting. It’s beautiful on a very basic level. In the fourth movement, everything stops to let a spindly cello solo be the sole accompaniment to a delicate, sotto voce choral section, and suddenly your mind is filled with a range of cinematic images—such as looking at the late afternoon sun through a spider web in a birch-wood forest on a cloudy, winter day—and then returns with a fuller, more emphatic set of chords from the orchestra, buffeted by the choir’s throaty, forte harmony. Disappointingly, the average age of the audience appeared to bottom out in the mid-40s.

But there were precious few problems with this program. The Schubert—as Hall explained—was not meant to be performed with 105 voices and 30-plus orchestral instruments, and was thus a little heavy-handed in its dynamic changes, but hey, it was very dramatic that way. Leah Shaw, the soprano soloist for the Schubert, sang at times timidly, and the brass section on Lux Aeterna at times played too much in the shadow of the strings. But other than that, a very touching offering of music for a Sunday afternoon.

Aside from the music presented, there was one major problem with this program—music director Hall’s insistence on telling the audience what he thinks each piece is about, and what he thinks the audience ought to take away from it. Hall’s a friendly, verbose guy—understandably so, as he speaks, in his warm leathery radio voice most mornings as culture editor of WYPR’s Maryland Morning with Sheilah Kast—who likes to talk directly to his audience. He seems to be of the Marin Alsop school of classical music presentation—spend 10 minutes talking to the crowd as a way of “reaching out” and “making the music accessible.”

“[This piece] is 30 minutes of creating the conditions under which one can contemplate . . . and meditate on the notion of light,” Hall said before diving into the Lux Aeterna. “Eternal light.”

He then proceeded to tell an obnoxious story that began with a chat he had with some Harvard psychiatrists, name-checked composer David Zinman, author Barbara Erenreich, and repeatedly referred to the composer of Lux Aeterna as a “buddy” and called him by the annoyingly familiar, “Skip” Lauridsen. Hall ended by saying that the “light” in the piece is the same “light” that drove hordes of volunteers to Haiti after the earthquake, and more recently, to Chile, to help out.

Thing is, Lux Aeterna doesn’t need some watered-down interpretation via a tragic current event to make sense. It totally stands on its own as a phenomenally moving work of art. The phrasing of Lauridsen’s composition moves with the same sort of loose, rhythmic gait of much pre-Western folk music, and its melodies probe traditional modes and wide, dramatic intervals that create weary, gorgeous melodies. But Lauridsen’s genius, really, is in the way he layers, repeats, and permutes his melodic figures, one on top of another, to create a sense of refraction and continuance. His “light” is not “eternal” because it is some sort of hopeful, triumphant reference to the religious notion of eternal light. The optimism of Lux Aeterna is a careworn optimism—the kind that comes from reminding people that they are subject to some sort of eternal power, rather than the beneficiary of it.

So an odd thing happened to me Sept. 16: I had my first real-time Twitter-based interface with a performing artist. Maybe that’s not that weird for some critics, but it was new to me.

I was at Sonar for the Baltimore leg of Mos Def’s Ecstatic Tour, and I had been there since about 7:45 p.m., because I’d been told that was when Soul Cannon, the only local act on the bill, would take the stage. Before the show, both keyboard player Jon Birkholz and MC Eze Jackson told me that there was a hold-up: Whosane, one of the Brooklyn MCs slated as an opener, was nowhere to be found, and they weren’t sure if he was going to show up. Soul Cannon got bumped back to 8:30—a fine deal for them, because who shows up to a hip-hop show at a quarter to 8, anyway?

Eze and crew played a super-high-energy show that wasn’t without nerves and a few kinks. It was easily Soul Cannon’s highest-profile gig to date, and certainly the biggest since the departure of bassist Ryan Dorsey. Birkholz now takes up low-end duties with his left hand, but something is definitely missing from the performance. Dorsey, back in the day, used to play hip-hop bass like it was a metal show, head-banging and wincing, and his chemistry with Jackson, who he first met in high school in Baltimore, was palpable. His presence onstage was intense and fun, but Dorsey left the band this spring for personal reasons.

Most of the set was unfamiliar. “Man Power,” a relatively new song that sounds like a song about the bank bailouts or maybe just the recession in general (“The man who has it all takes yours”) was particularly rocking—a hometown crowd enthusiasm at the stage, and it bounced back. Some other tunes were a bit overwrought. “Test Drive Life,” a very new track, needs some cleanup, lyrically, if it’s not meant to sound like an AA testimonial. I wasn’t able to pick out the names of too many other tunes, and Soul Cannon forewent “Dilapidated Buildings,” its main banger off of its debut album Kaboom, and other typical crowd-pleasers such as “What’s Real” and “Alleyways.”

One thing I noticed is how this band has become progressively more experimental, instrumentally. The tone of Eze’s backup tracks has gone from heavy-thumping jazz to incorporating more dissonance, more explosive, irregular drumming from the virtuosic Nathan Elman-Bell, and, shit, guitarist Matt Frazao even took an extended, and honestly kind of weird, guitar solo at one point. It wasn’t just that these guys use live instruments and live-instrument arrangements—it was the notion that a searing, highly technical but in the end, jazz-based guitar solo trucks as much street cred in front of a hip-hop crowd as a good rhyme or an impressive break. The short explanation is that it doesn’t. But then again, Eze was wearing a t-shirt that said destroy popular culture rebuild repeat, which is exactly the kind of indie-rap sentiment that produces thoughtful concept albums that heavily borrow from indie rock—the kind that people like Mos Def make.

Then came the interesting part. The second opener was—turns out he arrived after all—Crown Heights-via-Somalia rapper Whosane. This guy is basically a vocal double for DMX, who lags his rhymes slightly behind the pulse of iPod-produced beats and swaggers like he’s got a business meeting after the show and needs to get his shit done quick. The crowd was not feeling it. He repeatedly big-upped South Africa, saying he’d recorded his most recent album there, and, after introducing a song that he said was about Zimbabwean refugees he’d met in Cape Town, launched into a self-aggrandizing rap about makin’ that paper (call-and-response chants of “Zim-ba-bwe,” “Real hip-hop” and “Who-sane! Who-sane!”).

Then Medina Green, an old school redoubt from the days of Rawkus Records glory, performed another lackluster set. He did only his parts from the 1999 Mos Def hit “Crosstown Beef,” which most of the crowd didn’t appear to recognize, then a godawful love jam called “Okie Dokey” (hook: “Okie dokey, baby, okie ding-dong dokey”). There were even some boos, I think. Then, after all that, a hilarious stand-up comedy meets goofball hip-hop set from J Dilla-devotee and current Erykah Badu baby-daddy Jay Electronica. My legs were getting stiff from standing up straight for nearly three hours. So I twittered the following message:

Jay Electronica was awesome. Wish I didnt have to sit through an hour of bullshit with Whosane and Medina Green

Sometime after the Talib Kweli’s bouncing, but largely inaudible set, and a Mos Def closer that included equal parts flatly received new stuff and crowd-enthralling older material, I logged into my Twitter account again, and clicked on the tab for messages directed at me, which I hardly ever do. I found this, from @Whosane718:

@whelanandealin fag boy! Stay home. . .

I’ve responded to Whosane’s tweet, asking him how, exactly he came across mine, to no avail. So as far as I can figure out, the only way this guy could have seen my message about him would be to search for his own name. My message was not a “direct” or “reply” tweet—the kind where you put an @ symbol before the person’s Twitter handle—so he’d have to actually be searching all of Twitter for the word “Whosane.” Does he do this after every concert?

Merely by sending the message, Whosane admits that he cares what the Twitterverse is saying about him, enough so to take on his critics. The ad hominem is secondary, but still important: He felt that this was the best way to address a hater. You don’t like me? You must be a fag. Stay home. And I’m gonna shout it out to the world.

Hip-hop brought me back to Sonar the following night, Sept. 17, to see Philly-based booty-rapper Amanda Blank open for theater-geek punk band Matt and Kim. I’m of the camp that thinks that based solely on her recordings, Blank is blandly uninteresting. She’s never since reached the apex of raunchiness and titillating quick-tongued speed-rapping that she hit when she guested on Spank Rock’s “Bump,” and the production on her new album is much of the same boilerplate Hollertronix-style, house-influenced dance-hop beats that most of the Mad Decent crowd is using these days.

Live, it’s sort of a different story. Blank hits the stage hard, throwing up vaguely gang-like signs with her non-mic hand, tossing back her long hair, dropping her eyes to the floor and freaking out in the strobe light. She wound through tracks from her new album, I Love You, and didn’t slow down once. “Make It Take It,” a track grounded by a rock-n-roll backbeat, was wild and spastic, with a sort of ’80s bubblegum punk-revival feel. Even slower tracks like “Lemme Get Some” —with its foul-mouthed platitudes about how you, dear listener, just want to get all up in Blank’s pussy, and she’s an independent woman and she’s not listening to what the fuck you’re saying, and “no, I can’t introduce you to M.I.A.”—are heavy and giddy at the same time.

The contrast between the two nights was striking. At Mos Def, a bigger—and frankly, blacker—crowd turn out to see backpacker hip-hop progenitors and their newer imitators perform old favorites and harsher, newfangled hip-hop-rock hybrids. These were seasoned performers, with a line around the block before the show, and hundreds of performances under their belts. On the second, a room was equally packed by skinny, moshing white kids listening to a Philly hottie rap out her dirtiest desires over the new vanguard of indie hip-hop beats. She repeatedly told us she loved us. She waded into the first few rows to touch hands with her adoring fans. Surprisingly, the guys rolling with Mos Def and Talib Kweli, veritable legends to the people who packed the house, were the self-conscious ones, the ones who won’t tolerate a single hatin’ word on Twitter. And it was the green, young performer, promoting her first album, who was totally in her element.

Maybe it was just because it was a Tuesday, or maybe because it wasn’t hyped enough, but all but about 40 people in Baltimore missed a killer set from Nomo, the Michigan-based Afrobeat sextet at the Ottobar. The vibe of the night was doubly odd because the two openers, Small Sur drummer-turned-songwriterAustin Stahl, and the gruff rock band Red Sammy, were both so incongruent with the headlining act, both in genre and energy level, that it made it seem as if Nomo just doesn’t know anyone in Baltimore, and no one in Baltimore knows them, and that’s a damn shame.

Stahl started the night—we arrived about 3 songs in, we’re told—with a set of quiet, almost painfully awkward songs that he sang alone on stage, accompanying himself with a very trebly electric mandolin. It wasn’t that the songs were bad—although Stahl’s delivery only had one mode, which was self-pitying—but rather that they felt too intimate for the setting. The guy was literally singing to an empty room, with the few early arrivals not lured upstairs by a 2-for-1 drinks deal scattered around the sides of the main dance floor area. It was the kind of thing where, if it were at a party, and Stahl was your friend, and he wanted to sing a new song he’d written, you’d probably tell everyone to pipe down and listen and when he was finished everyone would cheer him on no matter how the song sounded or what it was about. But when Stahl, who sort of looks like a character out of a comic book adaptation of The Big Bang Theory, sheepishly announced, “This is a song about fresh fruits and vegetables,” and then proceeded to sing a song full of poetic imagery about a garden in winter, the whole thing just felt terribly weird.

Red Sammy, whose 40-ish minute set followed, showed some promise as a live act, but the band needs to unclutter its sound. Adam Trice’s guttural growl cuts through, and a few lead guitar parts were really impressive, but when one of Trice’s side-men started adding squawking theremin leads to the songs, which are mostly hard driving country-rock numbers, it really mucked things up. A few slower ballads, one of which featured a musical saw, were haunting and gravelly and great, but they slipped by far too quickly.

Nomo, on the other hand, played a set of original tunes from its recently released concept album Invisible Cities that were so high-energy and confident that it was almost disorienting. The band played as if to 200 people, which, after a recently completed European tour, is probably what it’s used to.

Any six white longhairs from the University of Michigan trying to play Afrobeat, the fusion of West African tribal rhythms and James Brown-style funk that rose as an expression of political dissidence in 1970s Nigeria, will hit their fair share of pitfalls. They could easily wander into, say, the kitschy haze of jam-band territory, with long, wanking improvisations from amateur soloists and that watered-down feel of a band that has no qualms about bastardizing someone else’s art form for the sake of the party.

Nomo does neither. Nor, like the incredibly fun dance-fest shows of the Baltimore Afrobeat Society, does the band try to recreate bar-for-bar the songs of Fela Kuti, Afrobeat’s eccentric progenitor. Thankfully, Nomo also doesn’t try to sing. Instead, the band focuses on the severity and heavy psychedelic elements of the genre. Afrobeat is generally a blues rather than jazz-based music, and the harmonies between its horn parts lean heavily on wider intervals, like fifths and octaves, instead of the lighter, more breezy-sounding thirds and sixths that characterize soul’s vocal harmonies. Nomo understands this, and its horn parts are crafted accordingly.

But more immediately recognizable are the band’s edgier elements. Elliot Bergman, who also plays sax, tickles out droning, smoky patterns on a pair of Nord Lead synths, which at a basic level don’t sound much different from Fela’s Wurlitzer organ riffs, but which definitely add a distorted headiness to songs such as “Invisible Cities” and the bassy drone of “Brainwave.” Both Bergman, who adds still more spaciness to the mix by playing an electrified version of the West African kalimba thumb piano on tunes such as “My Dear”, and guitarist Erik Hall are talented multi-instrumentalists. Hall’s lithe hippie frame bobbed groovily as he picked out genuine-sounding high life soul riffs, and he seemed equally comfortable behind the drums. His coolest contribution, however, was a hand-held instrument called the Nu-Tones, which I couldn’t really see from where I stood, but added the same sort of tingling, fuzzed-out melodies as the kalimba.

None of that even gets to the horns. The horns, man, were amazing. Brooklyn’s Antibalas, another hipster Afrobeat band, falls short on its original tunes because its playing is just far too tight. That band plays with the sterile precision of commercial big-band jazz orchestra, and occasionally loses sight of the slack, sexy, pot-fueled looseness that was as much of a part of what made Fela’s music subversive as the politically charged lyrics. Nomo, on the other hand, leaves some wiggle room in its sound, but at the same time, its soloists are outstanding. Dan Bennett, in particular, blew out a few absolutely filthy passages on his baritone sax, an instrument so ungainly and difficult to play nimbly that it was hard to believe that the sounds he made came from the instrument in his hands. The language of his playing was more Coltrane than Tower of Power, with lots of partially completed phrases and riffs that would restart a few ticks lower on the scale, then catapult back up into the highest ends of the instrument’s range.

The crowd was not afraid of dancing but, oddly, it appeared to be made up mostly of young, well-dressed, hippie types, a few with dreadlocks. It was weird, then, to think that maybe the only people who know Nomo in this town are the Deadheads. And that’s probably not what the band is going for.

Flanneled weird-beards of Baltimore: Fear not! Americana, with the occasional tinge of indie rock, is alive and well in this town. This past weekend we checked out a total of five acts, at three different venues, all but one of which fell under the general banner of “rootsy” and, curiously, they were some of the best shows we’ve caught in a while.

Friday night Deer Tick, a Brooklyn-via-Rhode Island country-rock band, opened a bill at the G Spot, for the second time. The first show was with Wye Oak headlining, a little over a year ago; Friday it was moody troubadour Matthew Houck, also known as Phosphorescent. Both times, Deer Tick narrowly out shined the headliner. Led by guitarist and singer John Joseph McCauley III, the band sometimes hits high emotional points that you don’t expect out of them. “Little White Lies” and “Art Isn’t Real a.k.a. City of Sin” trickle along with finger-picked guitar parts and chiming lead lines, but McCauley’s voice is brash and mature, and especially suited to lines like “I gotta get drunk, I gotta forget about some things/ I lived in lies all my life/ And I’ve been livin’ here all my life.” The band also played local favorite “Baltimore Blues No. 1.”

Houck, we were told by a neighbor, was pissed about the sound system, but it was difficult to tell because this is the first time we’ve seen him. His brand of psych-drenched country-folk seemed cool enough, though, and his voice is outstanding. And the keyboard player in his touring band did things rarely heard of in relatively straight-laced country music—rolls and riffs straight out of the blues idiom, making a kind of ornate joinery with Houck’s singing. But the songwriting falls a bit short. The best Phosphorescent song played, “Reasons To Quit,” sounds like a tired reworking of the Louvin Brothers’ “Satan Is Real,” both in melody and lyrical tone. An encore version of the Bee Gees’ “To Love Somebody” was good, but not great.

Saturday, J. Roddy Walston and the Business, the ubiquitous Jerry Lee Lewis-meets-Queen bar rock band, returned to the Ottobar after something of a Saturday night residency there a few months ago. Beefed up by openers Egg Babies Orchestra, the rumor was that the bar had its biggest bar tab ever. The Egg Babies are a spectacle worth spectating. Each show they play is different, both in song selection and theme, and Saturday was “Movie Show II” a sequel to an earlier performance in which the band played ’80s movie themes while projecting scenes from the movie behind them. “Neverending Story” was incredible. “Stuck In The Middle With You” over the cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs was fun, and “St. Elmo’s Fire” and “The Glory of Love” over scenes from the Karate Kid Part 2 were transcendent.

J. Roddy’s set was pretty much all old songs. But that doesn’t change the fact that this is probably the best live rock band in Baltimore. The energy is unbelievably high, every song is anthemic, and J. Roddy lurches around, rocks back and forth, and literally dry-humps his keyboard when things get really wild. Not to mention bassist Zach Westphal’s glorious head banging with his elbow-length hair, which honestly is one of the best parts of the show. We were standing behind a hardy crew of frat types, clearly loving the cock rock, who kept hugging each other and nearly kissed during “I’m Going Out,” Roddy’s Thin Lizzy-ish chant about “going out with my friends.” Highlights included an encore version of the delightfully filthy “Full-Grown Man” and and artfully delivered “Nineteen Ought Four,” a slow blues-rock ballad that compares a love affair to the Great Baltimore Fire.

And Monday night, after missing two opening acts by the pitifully early hour of 10:30, we returned to the Ottobar for six or so cuts from Maryland-based alt-country outfit Cotton Jones. This show was disappointing. Michael Nau seems like he has a really talented singer/songwriter/performer package in him somewhere that is so obscured by the mediocrity of his band it’s almost painful. In fact, listening to the gal who sang, played keyboards, and shook a sleigh bell and could not bring herself to sing on key or in any harmony more interesting than a fifth off of what Jones was singing, was quite literally grating. Add to that the two totally unnecessary electric guitars on stage, and body language from the band that could be mistaken for nothing other than, “I’d rather be anywhere but here right now,” and what you’ve got is a band that sounds like an imitation M. Ward that’s earning only a tiny fraction of what they could be making if they were a trio. Sad to see and say, but tough love seems to be what Cotton Jones needs in order to cut some of the fat out of its live act.

Walking away from the triple bill headlined by Matt and Kim—the Brooklyn, N.Y.-based dance-punk carnival band that was the darling at last year’s South by Southwest festival—at the Ottobar Thursday night, we were wracking our brains trying to think of another band, or any sort of live act, that does as good a job as Matt and Kim do at becoming fast friends with the audience. Much of Wham City acts stage hyper-positive, interactive play-dates at their shows—Dan Deacon has his gauntlet, Blue Leader wants a few games of Nintendo with you—but most of that stuff is parallel play. None of them do what Matt and Kim do, which is to appeal immediately to the most sociable in the audience, to impress upon them how likable and un-rock star they are, to make everyone in the place feel a degree of ownership over the music: These are my buddies. They’ve come over to jam. Isn’t that cool?

That social invitation probably the same reason that a good deal of punk-influenced art-school bands, like occasional Matt and Kim tour-mates Double Dagger and the Death Set, prefer to set up in the mosh pit, or at least do the majority of their performing from there: It’s democratic, intimate, and makes concerts feel like dance parties, without the self-consciousness of a performance. But Matt and Kim don’t play from the floor. She pounds her drums and he sings and does hand-stands on his keyboard rig from the stage, both of them upfront and close to one another, with flickering slides of their album cover projected on screens behind them. The charm is in their intense familiarity and bubbling enthusiasm for what they’re doing. “Kim,” Matt will say before most songs. “Kim, are you ready?”

Thursday night began with a set of Misfits-meet-Siouxsie punk dirges from local band Sick Weapons, which features Blood Baby guitarist Peter O’Connell and Elie Beziat’s moribund yowling of lyrics such as, “I can’t fuck for the fun of it.” Midway through their set, Beziat chugged a few 5-hour energy drinks onstage, offering one to the crowd. (Double Dagger’s Nolen Strals raised his hand and was obliged.) “If these were around when I was your age,” Beziat observed, looking at the small bottle in her hand, “maybe I wouldn’t have done all that cocaine and dope and morning-after pills.”

Following them was Hollywood Holt, a nerdy Chicago rapper whose “Throw a Kit,” a song about souping up mopeds, is really just a more frenetic version of the Cool Kids’ “Black Mags.” Hollywood was a high-octane, slam-dancing showman, though. His voice through a stage mic is on the high side—he sounds a tad like the Digital Underground’s Shock G: nasally and strained—and he frequently raps along with the studio version of his voice from pre-recorded tracks. But, “Hollywood” was a great dance track.

Matt and Kim set their instruments up onstage with some Biggie and T.I. tracks being piped in, and immediately started dancing with the crowd from the stage. Throughout their set, which was moderately long and touched on both their self-titled debut and last month’s Grand, Matt kept gushing about how great it was to be in Baltimore. Shout-outs were made to Double Dagger and local DJ Emily Rabbit; past shows were reminisced. Kim’s infectious and constant smile was impossible not to imitate. At one point she apologized into the mic for “breaking the rule” of not drinking more than two beers. In response, Matt took two song breaks to explain her “three stages” of drunkenness: the first is giggly. In the second, she “tells you all kinds of things that you don’t want to know about feminine hygiene” The third is “Violent Kim.” Did the crowd want to see Violent Kim? They did. Matt handed her another beer.

As for the songs, what they lose when played live in production value and Kim’s vocals they gain in raw energy. “Cinders” and “Lesson Learned,” two of the rowdier tracks from Grand, were great. Matt’s keyboard work is mostly confined to the types of synth and organ work that you’ll hear from Wham City acts, and with limited range he makes a surprisingly robust sound. Older tracks, such as “Good Old-Fashioned Nightmare” and “It’s A Fact” sounded fresh. The crowd of mostly college-aged kids was with the band on every line, and the dancing was wild.

When the end of the set came, Matt was ebullient—stammering and thanking and telling the crowd “how much it means” to him that this was their biggest ever show in Baltimore. The finale was “Silver Tiles,” a hand-clapper of an anthem with a huge, singable chorus—”And all our hopes and all our friends/ Through parking lots, it’s where we’ve been”—that doesn’t appear on any album. “This song is all about old friends,” Matt said, and it looked like he was near tears. Then he took his mic, got up from his stool, and jumped onto the upturned, waiting hands of the audience.

The theme of Monday night’s Mobtown Modern concert series installment was “Hard as F#@!”–works of modern classical music that are finger-breakingly tough to play, fraught with the kind of quick technical passages, unsteady rhythms, and unfamiliar harmonies that make it near impossible for the audience to identify mistakes. Still, it’s important to know that mistakes can be made in a performance like this one. That even though the music may have some of the spazz-out inflections and grating discordance of what goes on at the High Zero festival, what you’re seeing is prescribed/composed, and the stakes are accordingly higher. And over the course of the 80-or-so-minute show, it was clear that the musicians were aware of those stakes. Most of them, performing solo works, played with a nervous energy that suited the sounds and made for just a really cool evening of music.

Mobtown Modern is a New Music series curated by saxophonist Brian Sacawa and composer/DJ Erik Spangler. (The latter spun an intriguing mash-up of IDM rhythms and ethnic music between sets, which was pleasant.) The series began in January 2008, and Monday night’s concert was the third so far. An ensemble made up largely of wind players who have day jobs with the U.S. Army’s concert band performed seven pieces, all but two of them composed from the late 1980s to early 1990s, accompanied by a pastiche of video art by Guy Werner, projected onto a screen behind the stage on the second floor of the Contemporary Museum. It’s tough to imagine a better way to spend a Monday night than eating free hard pretzels and blow pops (in keeping with the “hard” theme), drinking $1 Natty Bohs, and watching deftly performed modern music.

Katayoon Hodjati started the program with a performance of Brian Ferneyhough’s 1986 composition “Mnemosyne”–named for the titaness from Greek mythology who personifies memory–for bass flute and pre-recorded bass flutes. Hodjati, a petite woman who appeared almost dwarfed by the massive instrument (one almost never played), demonstrated some seriously impressive lung capacity for the piece, which consisted of a number of percussive tongue-fluttering and spasmodic breathing patterns. This was paired with rhythmic finger tapping on the unused keys of the flute during long, open tones, and all was set against dissonant, three-part drones piped in over a sound system. On the screen behind her were images of bushmen hunting and cooking game and painting cave art, interspersed with shots of more modern activities: car-flooded roads, skyscrapers, some sort of parliamentary meeting, all with beefed-up contrast and the pulsating luminescent of unidentifiable digital effects. Hodjati’s playing had no readily discernible melody, but it didn’t particularly affront melodic sensibilities. It was as if the transitions between the long, sustained wind-howling-on-the-moor harmonies of the pre-recorded flutes were geometrical, even if the harmonies themselves were not.

Marimbaist Wojciech Herzyk followed with probably the most visually striking and impassioned performance of the night. His solo work, “Dances of Earth and Fire” by Peter Klatzow, bore a distinctly Russian modernist influence–you could hear snatches of “Petroushka” in its playful high-treble passages, and there were definitely strong dance rhythms veiled by the jagged harmony. Herzyk appeared in a flamboyant red satin tunic, and the physicality of the piece–and of the instrument in general–with its pounding, low-range bell tones and quick technical runs up high, had him sweating by the end. A woman sitting behind me exclaimed, “That was so sexy,” when it was over.

The pace slowed for curator Sacawa’s performance of Jason Eckardt’s 2007 piece “Still”–a long series of carefully constructed polytones, groaned out on a baritone sax–that evoked throat-singing, or perhaps the flailing sound of an fax machine signal. The piece had a clownish, mournful feel to it, which Sacawa conveyed with precision and feeling. Werner’s video images alternated between a Baltimore street scene–a policeman poking through a plastic bag that appears to contain beer or drugs while a drunk lies unconscious nearby–and a morose Little Tramp trying to commit suicide by throwing himself in a lake from the Charlie Chaplin movie In The Park, a very cool effect.

Three pieces by 100-year-old composer Elliott Carter followed, and from where I sat, they probably could have been left off the program. “Gra,” performed on clarinet by Jennifer Everhart, and “Scrivo in Vento,” played by flautist Sarah Eckman McIver, came across flat–simple serialist pieces full of the dryness and emotional distance that is typical of much 12-tone music. The third, a duet between the two called “Esprit Rude/Esprit Duox,” was much more interesting and evocative. I heard an excited argument between a male voice (clarinet) and a female (flute), each perpetually interrupting the other, with bickering, objection, fingers-in-the-ears droning, brief accord and agreement, and finally, a sour, irreconcilable note.

And to close, the ensemble tempered atonal structures to a form that really suits it–bebop. A truncated big band–alto sax, tenor sax, trumpet, trombone, vibes, piano, bass, drums–performed “All Set,” a 1957 piece by Milton Babbitt, a composer known mainly for his highly mathematical serialist compositions and his devotion to the Second Viennese School of Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg. Mobtown Modern’s version had the brass band sounding like a demented, meandering herd, hopelessly lost but resolute in finding its way to the same place in the end. Big new ideas kept springing up in honks and percussive whomps from all corners of the group, and though there were no feats of virtuosity to speak of, it was a collectively impressive performance.

Mobtown Modern next performs Jan. 28, 2009, with works by Jacob ter Veldhuis, Missy Mazzoli, Ken Ueno, Georges Aperghis, and Arnold Schoenberg.

For me, this year’s South by Southwest festival (my first) came with a high risk of terminal illness. Over the course of the two or three days prior to getting on that 5:30 a.m. plane to Austin, every time I looked at the schedule of bands online, I thought I was going to have a heart attack.

Eventually, my girlfriend, with whom I traveled to SXSW, and with whose friendly, boisterous Texan relatives I stayed, sent me this article, which is about how not to go insane when faced with so many really tempting options–for example, choosing your career, what to have for dinner, or whether or not you want to see TechN9ne, No Age, or Gil Mantera’s Party Dream to close out Saturday night. That helped.

What we settled on was a roughly outlined plan to see a handful of bands that I had researched on MySpace, plus a few with legitimate buzz, based on a bunch of podcasts and SXSW survival guides gleaned from blogs, and a handful of bands that my girlfriend described as “pretty music,” by which she meant bands that are less like the noisy punk bands I enjoy, and more like what would appear on the Six Feet Under soundtrack. Our rationale was, if we see enough of the over-hyped shows, but take in a few random ones as well, we’ll be sure to have a good time, not miss out on some good stuff, and not spend our time seeing just one type of music or partying near one particular crew of people.

The plan worked. And I didn’t have a heart attack. At least I was fine until I saw how many effing enchilada places and barbecue pits there were. Jesus Christ, Austin food is good.

THURSDAY: We arrived at 11 a.m. in Austin, picked up at the airport by the first (of many) of my girlfriend’s boisterous Texas relatives. We registered at the Convention Center; got press badges and large bags of useless crap, plus a pocket-sized schedule. We ate ribs and brisket at the Ironworks, which were well-cooked, but not the meatiest of meats I’ve ever had–covered in thick, sweet, deep-South style sauce. That afternoon, we checked into the NPR VIP showcase party at Roux, because–well, because we’re VIPs, of course—but also because Vampire Weekend, those reedy-voiced Columbia grads who love scarves, Afrobeat, and the Ramones, were headlining. The band was, in fact, unremarkable, and beyond a crazed look in the eyes of the bopping, smoking-jacketed bassist, its live show was like watching plants grow: entirely indistinguishable from the record. The openers were more impressive. Bon Iver, a three-man act led by bearded Wisconsinite Justin Vernon, played songs from For Emma, Forever Ago, a record whose story–he recorded the whole thing alone in a cabin in the woods! And got high and rode tractors all day when he wasn’t jamming!–has outgrown the actual music on it, was surprisingly impressive. High vocal harmonies with a clear, icy sheen; strong folky shoegazer stage presence; even some stoner-rock outros that jolted the audience awake after all the prettiness. The ever dorky, ever hipster Swede Jens Lekman, surrounded by three blonde bombshells on cello, violin, and bongos–which added a strange, Warhol garage/ Project Runway type vibe to his show–played a few excellent songs from his upcoming album, Night Falls Over Kortedala. Yeasayer, a Brooklyn band that I don’t quite understand–is it trying to be TV On the Radio with native American music instead of soul?–sucked, and the Shout Out Louds were a little boring. We missed someone called A.A. Bondy because we went out for grilled avocado tacos at Torchy’s on 6^th Street, which were delicious with the hot green salsa.

That night it was Man Man, who played a packed outdoor show at Cedar Street Courtyard, with plenty of people hooting along with their weirdness, My Morning Jacket trying to be epic at the Austin Music Hall, and a guilty pleasure for me, Dallas’s Old 97′s rocking tracks from their forthcoming disk–which isn’t that good–at Stubb’s. Oh, and dinner was at the incomparable Enchiladas y Mas.

FRIDAY: I woke up full of meat and cheese. It isn’t the first time, nor would it be the last of the weekend. The Boisterous Texans took us to Cisco’s for some increíble huevos rancheros, and then it was off to Minnesota Public Radio’s “The Current” showcase near Emo’s on Red River Street. There, between annoyingly long sound checks and even more annoying intros by DJs from Public Radio Paradise, we heard a few tunes by M. Ward and Zooey Deschanel, known collectively as She and Him, and I can report that not only is the Elf starlet also extremely cute in person, but her Carol King vocals are like peas and carrots with Him and his lazy, reverbed slide guitar. Darondo–a septuagenarian soul singer from San Francisco who once opened for James Brown–was an absolute highlight of the festival. The rumor about him is that he was once a pimp, and his gross, sex-crazed persona does nothing to dispel it. Toothless and wrinkled, he writhed around stage, his pelvis pumping wildly to grooves by Bay-area funk band Nino Moschella, singing songs such as “That’s How I Got Over,” and “Didn’t I?” from his 2006 reissue collection. By the end of it he was on his knees, his narrow chest heaving, and it was awesome.

Billy Bragg‘s solo show–his ninth of the weekend–with its tiresome anti-war protest songs and platitudes about his self-proclaimed “Johnny Clash” style, was enough to drive us over to a park near the Convention Center for the “Aussie Barbecue,” which was conveniently without barbecue, but had plenty of free dark beer. We caught the Panics, a decent straight-ahead punk-rock band, and browsed the trade show, which was full of recycled air and Guitar Hero displays.

Dinner at Paradise on 6^th Street was awful, but we filled up on cheap Shiner, watched a bit of the Big East Tournament, and went to that same parking garage where music editor Michael Byrne caught Blaq Starr, Diplo, etc. We got there in time to watch two hairy dudes, who were obviously on happy pills, rubbing their necks all over each other in between spastic dancing to Simian Mobile Disco. Then, after some three-piece suit with a list refused to let us into Nylon magazine’s VIP party with the Death Set and Scottie B, we decided that it was time to go see some screamo at La Zona Rosa. Chiodos told the moms in the audience, “I don’t give a fuck who’s here tonight, because music is music“–and then howled into the mic until half the 13-year-olds there were round-housing and smacking each other. Paramore headlined the event, which was sponsored by mallrat rock t-shirt store Hot Topic, and despite the music, which was predictably giddy and fun and loud, impish lead singer Hayley Williams managed to offend me by giving a bunch of stupid stage speeches about how being a rock star “isn’t about acting cool all the time,” and that you have to work really hard on things like, oh, I dunno, dying your hair orange.

SATURDAY: This was a day for kings. After watching Australian folkster Chris Pickering play an excellent set of Dylanesque tunes outside of Whole Foods, the Filter magazine showcase at Cedar Street Courtyard was brilliant. We saw Castledoor, an Arcade Fire knockoff from Los Angeles that was actually a lot of fun, then gypsy punk Devotchka rocked some tubas and indie rockers Sea Wolf played another highlight set. Dinner was a serious burger at Dirty Martin’s, and then onto the DirectTV Live show featuring Carbon/Silicon, the latest venture from Clash guitarist Mick Jones. For some reason, our press badges got us backstage access to this show, but there was no beer–we heard later that Mick doesn’t really party–and we got kicked out of the band’s trailer, where we were playing gin-rummy and watching the live feed of Liam Finn playing some autoharp rock next door. Jones and the boys were great–just a really crunching set of cool garage rock that included “War on Culture,” and ended with an extended version of their fist-pumping single “The News.”

After that, it was all Austin music, all night. Patrice Pike, who we were told is “the next Janis Joplin,” was no such thing at Antone’s, where she played a set of mom-rock straight from the Ally McBeal soundtrack. But over at Habana Calle 6 Patio, however, we made up for it with a three excellent local bands: Lemurs, Brazos and White Denim. The latter was a definite treat. Featured February in Rolling Stone, the trio plays a type of spastic prog-punk with looped, melodic guitar lines, tortured blues vocals, and really charismatic, thunderclap drumming from Josh Block. If it sounds just a tad like I’m describing Baltimore’s own Ponytail, it might be because they reminded me of one another, only White Denim has less chirping from its singers and more Oi band shouting. I couldn’t hear much by the end of it.

Before we left the city, we had burgers at Hut’s, terrible barbecue at County Line, delicious “Elvis Special” enchiladas at Chuy’s, superior ice cream at Amy’s, the best barbecue I’ve ever had at Coopers (in Llano), and misread the schedule for a Wye Oak radio appearance on Sunday. Now if I can just confirm that I don’t have colon cancer.