tootoomart : The Late Star State

To hear Explosion in the Sky’s measured, force-of-nature crescendos and tinntinnabulating guitar picking billowing across the crowd and the open parkland might have helped make up for Ms. Badu’s brevity. And Explosions in the Sky looked like they were constructing one of their intricate-to-engulfing buildups, with all the members flailing precisely at their instruments. Maybe that’s what they heard onstage.

But what reached the patient audience was the drumming and one, occasionally two guitar parts. The rest didn’t get past the stage monitors. Maybe it was fixed later in the concert, but I didn’t stay around to find out. I traveled, without incidents.


Thousands of people showed up for the free concert. The Cannabinoids started without Ms. Badu, dispensing drumbeats, chords, samples and brief phrases from small digital keyboards. They announced that all the beats were live — good — and that what they were playing was unrehearsed. Not so good. And they went on and on, for about a half hour, cycling through variations on two downtempo chords and asking if the crowd was ready for Ms. Badu. The answer was increasingly obvious by the time the Cannabinoids tapered off and someone announced that Ms. Badu had had “travel incidents.”

The Cannabinoids left the stage while the audience wondered what was going on, then returned, soon to be joined by Ms. Badu, in a gray T-shirt and a white top hat. Their vamp turned into “The Healer/Hip-Hop,” and Ms. Badu sang it with her tangy, playful coo, followed by an older song, “Danger.” Afterward she teased, “Let’s go into hyperspace and blow up the sky,” which did sound promising. But it meant she was ending her set to make way for Explosions in the Sky.


What could have been a Texan spectacular for the last night of South By Southwest was a near-debacle instead. It was a double bill at the Auditorium Shores riverside amphitheater with Erykah Badu and the Cannabinoids, her digitally oriented producers from Dallas, and Explosions in the tootoomart , Austin’s majestic instrumental rock band.