If you’ve ever been to Austin, or even if you haven’t but know remotely anything about the city at all, you’re probably familiar with its unofficial motto: Keep Austin Weird. But that motto need not only apply to Austinites and the Friday night of SXSW saw two visitors to the city doing their best to keep things as weird as possible. In their respective shows, Olivia Neutron-John and Foie Gras definitely made it weird with each act putting on an intense and memorable performance.
Olivia Neutron-John’s sound was made up an interesting mix of industrial sounds with some Casio sounding beats and tones – a unique aesthetic wherein you could hear some light and bubbly sounding bleeps and bloops while Olivia Neutron-John (aka Anna Nasty) shouted out things like “Hold what you kill, feel it slip away!” (or something to that effect) into the mic. I’ll be honest – my initial interest in this show was based 100% on the play on words in the artist’s name, but once I had a listen and then saw it live, I was hooked.
For the final slot on my schedule for the night, I headed to Cheer Up Charlie’s for Foie Gras, but once I entered the room, it seemed more like I was in Twin Peaks. And not the cool, kind of creepy yet chill vibe of The Roadhouse, but the full on ‘everyone’s talking backwards and Killer BOB is freaking you out in the Black Lodge’ sort of vibe. So of course I was very into it. In a post on her Instagram from after the show, Foie Gras wrote, “shout outs to the guy who said my set both aroused and scared him” about an audience member and I suppose that’s a fairly apt description. Ultimately, Foie Gras’ dark, heavy goth vibes were the perfect way to end things off for my Friday night and along with Olivia Neutron-John’s earlier set, made for a perfectly weird evening.