Sxsw

The South by Southwest Music and Media Conference is an elephantine enterprise, a five-day extravaganza in which the music industry gathers to fret about the future, check out a whole bunch of bands, and stuff itself with barbecue in the Texas sunshine. This year's 14th SXSW, which ended yesterday, came with its share of twists, plus a twister - a tornado touched down north of town Thursday, threatening to blow thousands of mobile phones away. The confab was the biggest yet, with more than 7,000 registrants and 900 acts - including, for the first time, a credible hip-hop slate - playing in clubs, coffee shops, and converted Mexican restaurants.

Inquirer popular music critic Dan DeLuca reports from the SXSW music festival in Austin, Texas. See his dispatches, including photographs and videos, at his blog, "In the Mix," at .

The South by Southwest Music and Media Conference begins in Austin, Texas on Wednesday. It's a big year, the 25th, for the music festival, which is the most important annual showcase event for indie and up-and-coming acts in the constantly reshaping music industry. That's remains true even though SXSW Music is, in some ways, not even the biggest fish in its own pond anymore. SXSW Interactive, the growing techie confab that makes up part of the SXSW troika - along with an influential indie film festival - attracted 33,000 registrants last year, outdrawing the music festival for the first time.

AUSTIN, Texas - The 2012 South by Southwest Music Festival officially got under way Wednesday, with day parties all along the Texas state capital's Sixth Street strip and official showcases for up-and-coming and already-arrived bands banging on at more than 100 venues. There are more big names than ever this year in Austin - rap kingpin Jay-Z played a free show downtown on Monday before the festival began but while the SXSW film and interactive conferences, the latter a must-attend for tech and social-media geeks, were peaking.

Inquirer music critic Dan DeLuca is blogging this week from the South by Southwest music festival in Austin, Texas. This appeared on his blog, "In the Mix," at http://www.philly.com/philly/blogs/inthemix. AUSTIN, Texas - Landed in big-sky Texas on Tuesday afternoon, and headed down past the St. Patty's revelers on Sixth Street to get credentialed at the Austin Convention Center. There, the winding-down SXSW Interactive festival, which is in a growth spurt this year, had many a dude intensely staring into the screen of his MacBook Pro as people tossed around promotional Frisbees handed out by Microsoft to hype its Expression software.

The South by Southwest music conference and festival is an unwieldy beast, a multiheaded hydra that mirrors the Internet - and the culture at large - in the way its fractionalized format caters to nearly every imaginable niche, from Japanese psychedelic to Brazilian hip-hop to regular old American rock-and-roll. It's impossible to get a handle on the whole four-day thing, but you experience as much as you can, as you drift from club to club, pulled this way and that by a text-message recommendation, or the sound of a band on the street, like the Danish ensemble Asteroids Galaxy Tour, which lures you with one song of horn-happy funk before saying "Thank you, good night.

Since Tuesday, Dan DeLuca has been filing his blog "In the Mix" from Austin, Texas, where he's attending the South by Southwest Music and Media Conference. Excerpts: Tuesday, March 15: I didn't feel I had really arrived until I sat myself down at a picnic table outside the Austin Convention Center with my schedule in hand and heard a pair of dueling accordions tooting away on the Clash's "Should I Stay or Should I Go. " Turns out it was a pair of squeezebox squeezers named Joey DeVilla and Jon Grossman, who had only met moments before.