SXSW Day Five: Laneway Unleashes The Perfect Pussy

We are broken. Hit the snooze button a couple of times out of necessity and then a few more times just for the lolz. Meanwhile, the Brooklyn Vegan day party kicks off at Red 7, with performances by buzz acts Wye Oke and Speedy Ortiz, with The Hold Steady in a headline slot. Waterloo Records, an Austin Institution on North Lamar Boulevard, kicks off their daytime schedule with a performance by The 1975, then later Mobb Deep, Talib Kweli and Jake Bugg in the final slot.

We need the gentle, paternal sounds of NPR's Bob Boilen, host of the brilliant All Songs Considered podcast. He's sitting in a panel about intergenerational media use at the Convention Center. The most interesting things we learn is that Bob saw The Front Bottoms for the seventh time the night before (“They just keep getting better and better”) and Millennial kids think a full stop at the end of a text message is a sign of anger. Guess they're easily spooked.

We arrive at the Filter party on 4th street mid-afternoon, just in time to catch Ásgeir, Iceland's hottest new export (both literally and figuratively). The A&R guy from Inertia was singing his praises the other night, ahead of the Australian album release later this month. The twenty-one year old released his debut album just over a year ago in Iceland and out-sold Sigur Ros and Bjork combined – one in ten Icelanders now own it. The English version of the record, translated with the help of Icelandic-speaking John Grant (who apparently speaks Icelandic??) will be triple j's Album Of The Week next week and he just sold the US rights to Columbia for a cool million. The Courtyard sound system isn't doing us any favours, and the set starts slow, with an emo-tinged stadium rock flavour. At first, it's hard to feel it, but as the set progresses it sparks with a few bass-heavy electro breaks and begins to take flight. The vocals, with the sharp, ethereal shifts that are signature to that far north island, work their magic. Ásgeir has a future-star look about him, too, with a beautiful chest tattoo peaking out of his low-slung t-shirt. At the end of his performance, girls line up to have their photo taken by his side. Santa Barbara band Gardens And Villa follow Ásgeir with their electrified flute pop, blissful in its Phoenix/MGMT way.

Got that Icelandic feel

Over at Holy Mountain, the Laneway Festival day party is packed thanks to the finger on the pulse curation of our hometown crew. In the front room, Glass Animals played their lush, spectral pop while the crowd outside the uber-hyped Syracuse noise-punk act Perfect Pussy unleash a sonic juggernaut on their frankly stunned audience. The vocals are inaudible and the volume is incredible, but there is no denying the raw magnetism of frontwoman Meredith Graves, who wears a garland of red flowers in her hair but assaults the microphone like the microphone killed her mother. It's the last Perfect Pussy set at SXSW and it's over in about 15 minutes.

All over the city, music industry megastars are preparing for their final appearances. Gary Numan is wandering around East Ceasar Chavez with a film crew, ahead of his show at the Elysium. Erika Badu will perform at Bungalow on Rainey St, while next door at Clive Bar The Black Angels bring their psych rock headfuck to a home city crowd. Julian Casablancas will do half an hour at the top of the Fader Fort bill, while over on the Starr Building Rooftop, Snoop Dogg closes SXSW in style.

But us, we're headed to the North Door, where LA's Stones Throw Records are hosting the best party in town. An ageing Madlib signs records and hangs at the back of the stage like the elder statesman of underground hip hop while DJs Kota Pop and Knxwledge spin funk-heavy tunes, including Witness The Fitness and Frontier Psychiatrist. We meet two ladies from Lincoln, Nebraska in the toilet queue who are mad for Australian music – Chet Faker and Flume, Panama and Touch Sensitive. "You guys got mad shit happening down there.” Yup.

Around 10pm, a hulking tower of alt hip hop glory takes to the stage, Flying Lotus collaborator Jonwayne. He gets in behind the decks and proceeds to drop fucking demented tunes; twisted organ dirges, crazy minimal dancehall, Randy Newman and sixties torch songs. His comic store look belies magic fingers, and for the first twenty minutes of the set, it's all about Jonwayne the producer. Then he pics up a microphone and blows the roof off the place. The unlikely rapper slings super nerd rhymes – literate, bookish, bitter, brilliant – and breaks into a machine gun rap towards the end that flattens the crowd. They scream him through two encores. The party continues with Madlib, Prince Paul and Peanut Butter Wolf taking turns on the decks and the mic, spinning 45s throughout the night. It's almost too good to leave, but we have somewhere else to be.

Traffic is banked up all around the Downtown area, the streets are heaving and cars are bumper to bumper on the I35, but some miracle gets us into a cab and across the river to Emo's East, the far-flung venue where boilerroom.tv are throwing an epic SXSW after party. Gaslamp Killer and Omar-S have already spun and the crowd is screaming for rapper Future, whose sophomore album drops in April. His crew try to hype the crowd, which is dotted with life-sized cut-outs of the artist, but the set bucks and finally fizzes – tech problems, apparently. Future storms off. Four Tet (aka Keiran Hebden) is sitting casually on the edge of the stage, waiting is his humble and understated way to pull a superman and save the day.

Four Tet soundtracks the end of the world

We sneak into the photo pit where the decks are set up, with a handful of other part-time journalists/full-time fans, and proceed to watch the London producer smash through an hour and a half of twisted, brain-spattering house, including cuts from the glistening Beautiful Rewind, Taraval and Burial collabs, and his brilliant remix of Ellie Goulding's Burn. Possibly for the first time in Boiler Room history, people are actually dancing, the photo scrum transforming (with about 2 grams of pressure) into a frenzy of hips, feet and staggering arms behind the artists while kids hang over the rail and watch the genius at work.

After 2am, people start kicking on the house parties across the city, but we are spent. SXSW has sucked the marrow from our bones; we've got nothing left. Five days of back-to-back gigs from 11am to 2am is enough music for a whole lifetime. We hitch a ride back north of the river with two Austin kids, in a souped-up BMW, ready to keel over into a bed. It's over. It's pretty much over, only the kids are playing a Bay Area electro artist on the car's monstrous sound system, and we just have to know his name…