Mexican, Argentine acts prep for Austin spotlight
By Ayala Ben-Yehuda
LOS ANGELES (Billboard) - A Vans Warped tour franchise in Mexico and an Argentine DJ collective are among the international Latin groups looking for stateside exposure at the South by Southwest (SXSW) music festival, which runs March 7-16 in Austin, Texas.
On March 15, a Warped tour Latin America showcase will feature Mexican bands Allison, Delux and Lipstick Terror. (A lineup for a one-off June 14 rock festival in Mexico City this year under the Vans Warped brand has yet to be set.)
"International bands sometimes come to South by Southwest and get kind of overshadowed," said Warped founder Kevin Lyman, who also throws an unofficial SXSW party for bands from as far away as Japan and Europe.
But "now it's a real conscientious effort to have different types of music from the U.S. as well as from around the world," said Lyman, who has been freshening up his stateside tour by booking such foreign bands as Spain's the Pinker Tones.
In 2007, Allison played several Warped U.S. dates after the band's Warped showcase at SXSW, and Lyman said that this summer Delux will do the same.
Pako Zepeda, co-CEO of Mexico City-based management company Soundguich, is licensing the Warped name, pursuing sponsorships (Vans and Monster Energy are already onboard) and building a database of potential attendees via MySpace and the Warped tour Mexico Web site.
Meanwhile, a collective of Buenos Aires-based DJs has built a five-city U.S. tour around its March 13 SXSW showcase.
Besides Austin, the Zizek tour -- named for a twice-weekly gathering at Buenos Aires' Niceto nightclub -- will stop in Los Angeles, San Francisco, New York and Chicago.
The 18-month-old club's success in the Argentine capital -- co-founder Grant Dull, a Texas-born expatriate, said it packs in as many as 1,000 people on Saturdays -- led to the recent founding of label ZZK and an effort to book the DJs at U.S. and European festivals.
The six Zizek acts blend electronic and breakbeat with cumbia and reggaeton, in a style the tour's MySpace site describes as "electro cumbia," "cumbia crunk" and "cumbia rave." (Traditional cumbia is the music for a dance of short sliding steps that originated among African slaves on Colombia's Atlantic coast.)
"The experimental cumbia scene has been around for six or seven years," said Dull, who along with the talent he manages is self-financing the tour. The Zizek DJs "want to see their careers advance and get more gigs ... everything that happens when one goes from Argentina abroad."
Reuters/Billboard
