Tuesday SXSW Showcases

Nite Fields

Felte + Part Time Punks Presents

Arriving from Brooklyn, birthplace of the now-Los Angelean Felte label, Public Memory (Robert Toher) kicks things off with some severe, doomtempo EDM (eletronic death music), all shudderscapes and blighted love. Next to the "Helm" is Ritual Howls' lunacy-inducing, post-industrial darkwave, a rough trade mating of early Einstürzende Neubauten with Bauhausian six-feet-undertones. Brooklyn duo James Ardery and Joel Myers are Lushes, whose second LP Service Industry ranks as one of the more sonically spiky releases of 2015, part experimental noise bomb and part electronic freak-out. The video for single "Traffic" is like being stuck on MoPac rush hour during the apocalypse. Adam Curley, frontman for Aussie fourpiece Gold Class, sounds like Morrissey having a breakdown in Ian Curtis' dying room. Los Angeles' Sextile meld something akin to 4AD's finest to a frantic, keening night beat that should segue perfectly into Brisbane-bred closers Nite Fields, whose bootgaze doom-pop jitters its way into your head and sticks there, knifelike.