[Editor’s Note: Soundcheck Columnist Simone Goldstone took a detour to Austin, Texas earlier this month for the Austin City Limits Music Festival and filed this report.]
The Austin skyline looms in the heavy heat, but nobody seems to mind. The grass is green, the dust not yet windswept, and the sky is impossibly blue.
Austin City Limits Music Festival (October 3-5 and 10-12) is right on the city’s literal limits, where you cross the Colorado River into Zilker Park. The festival’s mascot – a cowboy silhouetted in a bandana – embodies the strange and cinematic spirit of Austin itself: a little lonesome, a little unusual, and very wild…