As you all bandy your drunken, foot-weary selves between the various and endle shows of the international fuckfest of music that is South By, take a sec here and put your Austin eyeballs upon something good and local for (hopefully not) once during this festival. There are few acts that I as an Austin music lover can think of personally that are as appropriate to pump during SXSW than Shmu, who has just released a new music video for track “Diamonds” that’s as candid as it is endearing as it is trippy.
Playing his own brand of wildly psychedelic hyperpop, and as half of the iconic Austin act Zorch, Shmu aka Sam Chown is responsible for both some of the city’s most interesting and weird (while being very structured and thought out) music in the last decade, not to mention having a hand in GTZ Records as well as one of Austin’s best underground venues in the Museum of Human Achievement.
“Diamonds” comes to us from Shmu’s gleeful and bright Shhh!!!! album from late 2015, and it’s a track that embodies the heavily layered guitar and hard matte drums sound that Sam is known for, though it’s actually pretty understated (in a nice way) for a Shmu track. The video is very anti-typical, very anti-SXSW band in fact, being a heavily cut-up and visually warped series of live clips, both from the man’s shows and his wanderings around (mostly in what looks like New Orleans). Zorch SXSW parties have been infamous for years for being where the true blue weirdos and corporate-ditching music fans went to get outright rowdy as a ferret tripping in a ball pit, so to drop this video so close to our city’s most capitalistic of holidays seems quite appropriate.
Take a listen and a look below, and if you can ever make it to any show Shmu or Zorch-related, make sure you do just that with your local-lovin’ ass.