Levitation Festival 2023: 10 Acts You Have to See

The tradition of Halloweekend is tried and true amongst Halloween lovers and, in Austin, the dawn of Halloweekend comes with the promise of another memorable Levitation Festival. Founded in 2008 and formerly known as Austin Psych Fest, Levitation is a 4-day musical experience spread across the diverse Red River District and East Side venues in a uniquely walkable event that is a far cry from the grassy hills of Zilker you endure during Austin City Limits.

It’s more than just about the music; it’s a chance to explore the vast collection of venues and artistic spaces that Austin has to offer, all while experiencing the variety of alternative acts that deliver psychedelic performances throughout the weekend. This year’s lineup has a wide range of acts across all genres, including Paste favorites Slow Pulp, Bully and more—they might as well have called it Paste Fest. So, get your costumes ready as we walk you through our recommendations from this stacked lineup.

Jockstrap

Jockstrap is the visionary collaboration of Georgia Ellery and Taylor Skye, who are carving out their own sonic niche in the world of experimental pop. It’s hard to imagine that the new faces of electronic music met at the historic Guildhall School of Music and Drama—London’s premiere school for classical music. However, hidden in all the modern flourish of their layered production, Ellery’s string arrangements shine through. The duo brought the best of old school and new school to their truly undefinable sound on last year’s I Love You Jennifer B—easily one of the strongest debuts of 2022. Rather than adhering to a singular musical landscape, I Love You Jennifer B flips through a jukebox of Ellery and Skye’s favorite sounds, from screeching bubblegum disco to subdued acoustic ballads to funky electro-pop. If you are looking for a group to deliver an anthological range of music in a single-stage performance, Jockstrap is the set to see. —Olivia Abercrombie

Slow Pulp

If you’ve ever gotten really stoked on that one School of Rock scene—where Jack Black is instructing the class with a gigantic diagram breaking down every subset of rock ‘n’ roll—then you can definitely see a similar amalgamation in Slow Pulp’s work. I remember copying that chart verbatim into a notebook way back when, and I’ll bet Emily Massey, Alex Leeds, Teddy Mathews and Henry Stoehr might have done the same—because, when you listen to their two albums Moveys and Yard, you can hear the stems of a dozen reference points and a limitless history of DIY, bedroom and alt-rock. The constructional world of the band is like a sponge; from the twang and pedal steel emoticons of “Broadview” to the Y2K stylings of “Doubt” to the sludge and grunge of “Cramps,” there’s finesse and attention and, yet, such a distinctive, original flair. In just three years, Slow Pulp have leveled up to seismic proportions. What once felt like the best-kept secret in indie rock is now a budding phenomenon. Folks are taking notice of Massey, Stoehr, Leeds and Mathews’ chemistry together, and the widespread critical acclaim of Yard is more than earned and deserved. —Matt Mitchell

Salami Rose Joe Louis

Lindsey Olsen, the artist known as Salami Rose Joe Louis, describes herself in the press notes for her new album Akousmatikous as an “introverted producer,” happy to work in solitary as she claims to be “shy to work with others in person.” So far, that’s worked wonderfully, as proven by the strong work she’s released to date but taking advantage of our broadband world to connect with collaborators like Brijean and Miguel Atwood-Ferguson has expanded her sonic world appreciably. There’s something cinematic in the breadth of tracks like “Dimcola Reprise” and “Sugar Coating,” in spite of Olsen’s hushed vocal turn and the minimalism of the electronic pop backdrop. Like a camera slowly craning backward from a close-up to reveal that the person on screen has been sitting in front of the Grand Canyon. On stage, Olsen opens up just enough to offer wide smiles to whomever she’s playing for, and she always brings along the finest players to back her up and help drive her music to greater psych-jazz planes. —Robert Ham

Water From Your Eyes

If you’ve made it through 2023 without hearing about Water From Your Eyes, you’ve been severely missing out. Brooklyn’s finest experimental pop duo, Nate Amos and Rachel Brown have emerged completely out of left field, rather, planted their roots firmly within the ground of left field and finally grown tall enough to garner attention. This is to say: the duo is uncompromising. They arrived on the scene back in 2016, but it was on their 2023 sophomore album Everyone’s Crushed that they were able to hone their singular weirdness. Their sound is choppy, glitchy, and expansive but never quixotic. When their compositions start to veer fully into the unfamiliar, you can count on Brown’s deadpan vocal humor to pull you back into what you came for. They’re too cool for school. They’re not cool enough for the top 40. They’re perfect for Empire Garage. If you’re coming out Thursday night to see Jockstrap, do yourself a favor and get there in time for Water From Your Eyes’s set. You’ll thank me later. —Madelyn Dawson

Girl Ray

Many people are making dance-pop right now, synthesizers haven’t been this popular since 1989. There’s likely no better time to make a disco record than right now. Girl Ray—Poppy Hankin, Iris McConnell and Sophie Moss—make electric, hypnotic music when in company with each other. Since their debut album Earl Grey arrived in 2017, the trio have woven tapestries of indie rock and Top-40-worthy pop with seamless ease. When they made Girl in 2019, destiny made it almost impossible for the band to not break out big. With songs indebted to the Go-Go’s, HAIM and everything in-between, Girl Ray stuck out boldly from the get-go. They’d traded in mellow indie pop of their debut for cheeky mainstream resplendents that pull cues from towering chart figures like Ariana Grande and Drake—employing programmed drums and bass rather than recording together live as a full unit. Given how talented the trio is, it’s no surprise that—despite positioning a focus on electronic layering and not an organic, rawer sound—Girl came out sounding like Hankin, McConnell and Moss each had a hand firmly on every synthesizer they used. Their recent record, Prestige, has certified them as dance-pop auteurs. —MM

Fuck Money

Hailing from the Austin DIY punk scene, Fuck Money is one to watch with their raw experimental sound and unpredictable live performances. Like earlier this year, when they opened for the Octopus Project and, five minutes into the set, a swarm of dancers dressed the same as the vocalist descended upon the crowd in a buzz of chaos to mosh and otherwise surprise concertgoers with the display. Often shrouded in obscurity through ghillie suits, space suits or full-coverage body socks, Trébuchet uses his vocal fury as an instrument of its own to lead the industrial raunch of the pummeling band backing him. The art noise rockers—Jeremy Humphries, Bill Kenny, TaSzlin Trébuchet, and Alton Jenkins—dropped their first self-titled EP late last year after spending quarantine sweating it out in a storage space. They come by their grimy sound honestly from those hours, desperate to create, even if it meant grinding it out in a rat-infested warehouse. With only 15 minutes of recorded material to their name, the four-piece has created an allure through their artistic presence in the Austin music scene. In essence, the band is an abstract blaze of heavy distortion and metal riffage—basically, if you want to get your face ripped off this weekend, Fuck Money is a can’t-miss act. —OA

Being Dead

Being Dead—Falcon Bitch, Gumball and Ricky Moto—are a trio of Texas-bred besties who make technicolor punk for folks who think the Beach Boys are pretty groovy—yet their music rebels against any sense of influence that can be so easily pinned down. Their work is maximalist and bubblegum bright; full of heart and absurd landscapes just off the road less traveled. When Horses Would Run, their action-packed debut LP, is, in no short words, the most exciting debut of 2023 so far. Being Dead expel all instances of psych-folk pretentiousness across this baker’s dozen of weirdo-concertos. When Horses Would Run is an authentic, dexterous, impressionable stroke of brilliance from three friends who can’t help but make awing music when in company with each other. In a past life, perhaps Gumball and Falcon Bitch met—as they like to joke—as chimney sweeps, shoemakers or acrobats, and that bond feels as mythical as it is touted to be. 2023 has been a particularly busy year for new music, especially debuts from great, wondrous acts who’ve only just hit the scene. I’m especially pulled into the orbit of Being Dead because of their strange yet urgent take on rock ‘n’ roll. They grab every solo, chord progression and vocalization in the book and twist it into an indecipherable soundscape that makes your eyes roll into the back of your head, your jaw drop to the floor and your legs careen into a boogie. —MM

Armand Hammer

As far as abstract hip-hop is concerned, we are all subjects of the Armand Hammer kingdom. How could anything else be the case, following Billy Woods’s two 2022 releases, April’s Aethiopes, and September’s Church, his 2023 Maps, E L U C I D’s 2022 I Told Bessie, and now the brilliant and atmospheric We Buy Diabetic Test Strips, finally a follow up to Armand Hammer’s 2021 Haram. Armand Hammer is the project of New York rappers Billy Woods and E L U C I D. The two joined forces back in 2013, bringing a biting wit, sonic clarity, and cacophonous heaviness to the genre. Their recent album is as polyphonous as it is singular, featuring guest appearances from Junglepussy, Moor Mother, Pink Siifu, and heaviest-hitter JPEGMAFIA. Through abstraction and specificity, the duo meditates on a world on fire, holding nothing back in defining and describing their current moment. Some say they’re legends in the making; I argue they’ve reached that point already, at least for today’s world. Check them out on Sunday, and find out for yourself. —MD

Amulets

In the world of digitalization, reaching for analog tech might be the most unique way to make music that stands out. Amulets is the solo project of audio and visual artist Randall Taylor, who uses handmade cassette tape loops to create sonic worlds that recreate a vintage sound in a breathtaking modern way. The instrumental artist hails from Portland and found his sound when so many touring musicians were struggling to make sense of the strictly online musical world. Born from YouTube videos of Taylor experimenting with live guitar loops and fiddling with deconstructed cassettes, Amulets is his vast ambient wonderland of droning electronic music. Taylor’s music evokes the energy of a haunting film score, but rather than being a soundtrack to a visual story, it’s the soundtrack to life and the way people interact with sound. —OA

Bully

The poetics of Bully reside in a language crafted by Alicia Bognanno, the 32-year-old Nashville native adored by alt-punks and Pavement disciples far and wide. Since her 2015 debut Feels Like, she has magnified light atop her piercing confessionals. Bognanno’s work gets likened to ‘90s relics often, so much so that Alex Ross Perry tapped her to score the work of a fictional pre-Y2K band in his 2018 film Her Smell. Of course, she did once intern at Steve Albini’s Electrical Audio, but she doesn’t buy into how the aesthetics of Bully get pigeonholed as grunge or pre-nu-metal alt-rock. Bognanno’s voice has been labeled “coarse” and centered in the same conversation as Kurt Cobain’s, but I think music writers struggle to consider the universe of Bully as something modern and original. Rather than plugging in a buzzword that’s had more than enough days in the sun, I’m fine with not having a definitive label for Bognanno’s work—and she’s cool with that, too. —MM